First, some news: Last year was rough on drummers, from the Foo Fighters on down to us tiny indie acts. Charlie called it a drummerpocalypse, and I have no better term. The two acts I play with the most both had their drummers go on indefinite hiatus. Zach will still be contributing to Baguettes work as he is able, and he'll appear on the new record on both drums and mandolin, but for our upcoming live shows, Molly Walburn will be behind the kit. Any such transition is inevitably bittersweet; a creative ensemble is more than the sum of its parts. Considering that a global pandemic intervened, we were pretty damn lucky to get twelve years with the founding band members.
As we discussed set lists in one of the first rehearsals with Molly, someone (Charlie? probably Charlie) came up with the idea of a sadness index, plotting a song's lyrical content against its musical content. I attempted a rough graph. It's hard. Minor/slow and major/uptempo often correlate, but they don't always, and as it turns out, a lot of my minor songs are on the fast side. I also don't tend to write purely happy yay-for-love, it's-a-sunny-day lyrics. So I had to consider whether the words are sad but funny (a favorite landing spot), or whether the song describes something tragic but responds with catharsis or constructive anger (another one).
These things are subjective, of course, so rendering them as quantitative data is a little silly. But it's interesting as a songwriting and set-building exercise. I don't think it's a coincidence that the bottom left quadrant (slow/minor/sad) contains the most songs we've never performed; we've played "White Flag," "Ghostlight" (once), "Teflon" (once), and a swamped-up version of "Negative," but that's it. The main thing I learned (and I sort of knew it anyway) was that I lean into paradoxes—songs whose music suggests some meaning beyond the lyrics, perhaps operating against them.
As we discussed set lists in one of the first rehearsals with Molly, someone (Charlie? probably Charlie) came up with the idea of a sadness index, plotting a song's lyrical content against its musical content. I attempted a rough graph. It's hard. Minor/slow and major/uptempo often correlate, but they don't always, and as it turns out, a lot of my minor songs are on the fast side. I also don't tend to write purely happy yay-for-love, it's-a-sunny-day lyrics. So I had to consider whether the words are sad but funny (a favorite landing spot), or whether the song describes something tragic but responds with catharsis or constructive anger (another one).
These things are subjective, of course, so rendering them as quantitative data is a little silly. But it's interesting as a songwriting and set-building exercise. I don't think it's a coincidence that the bottom left quadrant (slow/minor/sad) contains the most songs we've never performed; we've played "White Flag," "Ghostlight" (once), "Teflon" (once), and a swamped-up version of "Negative," but that's it. The main thing I learned (and I sort of knew it anyway) was that I lean into paradoxes—songs whose music suggests some meaning beyond the lyrics, perhaps operating against them.
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