In the blink of an eye, it’s suddenly the fifth anniversary of my first Bikini Test Failure post-music-industry, post-everything single release, “Uncomplimentary”, in March 2020, about a week before You-Know-What arrived and the world shut down for a couple of years.
Five years gone, five-eighths of The Beatles’ entire recording career, in which time I’ve managed to scrape together just eight half-singles (when a single was traditionally TWO songs), three of which are actually remakes of oldies. So, FIVE new songs, in five fast years. (A sixth may appear on a phone near you before Christmas). It’s an improvement on the zero songs I released in the previous decade, but still pitiful.
I’d do well to remember that, next time I’m bemoaning the difficulty I feel in covering all bases in my otherwise pretty splendid, artistic lifestyle, spinning-up all plates to similar RPMs, yet less satisfied or rewarded by said lifestyle than I’d imagined I would be and that fundamentally, I still “Must Try Harder”.
In the same way that those ripped abs won’t just appear by themselves, I mustn’t lament the lack of a folderful of new songs, eagerly queuing up to be recorded (as I once always seemed to have), without first noting that I haven’t done a single sofa-based songwriting session in the last six-months.
It’s possible, as with my music-listening habit and even watching films or reading, I may have just “lost the bug”. Whenever I do make the effort, my usual, lazy, can’t-be-bothered-ness seems fortified by the more worrying feeling that I’ve heard, seen and read everything I want to, often too many times, so, nothing old please and as for “new”… I’ve no idea where to start.
I’ve played every chord sequence 100,000 times over the past 45 years, forwards, backwards and sideways. Lately, I’ve sprinkled in a handful of new-to-me jazz chords – which themselves have now solidified into a few hackneyed phrases. Lyrics, forget it. What I want to say is “Jesus! I never saw THIS part of life coming!” but that seems a bit self-indulgent.
A Beatles podcast once replied to a critique of solo McCartney’s awful lyric-writing, that it wasn’t “authentic” or “truthful”, by saying that if he wrote about what he actually got up to in real life, his songs would be exclusively about touring, vacations and his family.
But I can’t start making things up now. I never have. Sure, once you need a rhyme for “plethora”, the rulebook is out the window, but I’ve always had to inject that spark of reality into the beginning of a song. For years I kicked around a couplet about a (once-young) partner’s tiny but incredibly heavy head, near-crushing my shoulder each night until I’d awake in a panic with a dead-arm. Years later, I found another lover whose similarly-propertied head did the same thing! I put it down to clearly denser-than-average brains, given the small head-sizes.
I’m pleased to say, that resurrected-lyric idea eventually made it into my previous “new song” release, “But I Still Love You” in November 2022 (I skipped 2023 entirely!) By then it had morphed into “Leave you there asleep until my arm goes dead, ‘cos you’re probably out of your tiny head” alongside zingers like “I’ve wished you under a bus by now” in what I’d like to think is one of my finest Love You/Hate You songs. Sometimes these things just need to take as long as they take. But once cast in digital vinyl, every time I’ll hear it or even sing it, such flashes of “reality” will resonate and elevate my feeling about the finished song from “satisfied” to “utterly delighted”.
My published-author-pal Mark once told me, art, his art, my art, all art, is our way of explaining our experience of life to ourselves. Without really trying to, I’ve currently neglected all my usual ways of sneaking-up on creativity, ignoring the “craft”. By simply waiting for lightning to strike, I’ve clearly missed a trick.
Maybe I’ll just go and strum a Cmaj7-chord for an hour or so and see what happens.
