Just to keep you posted, progress on the new album is going very well indeed - five songs have kind of coalesced into being ready to perform live, so with those five the real work starts now. Playing them over and over again in different ways - with a guitar and singing, playing them to an audience and singing (which is absolutely different), singing them out loud to a recorded guitar demo at home, singing them in my head with an MP3 player on the bus - helps me to figure out where the vocal melody eventually needs to end up. Playing songs so much before eventually going into the studio to record also starts to highlight where there's room for ad lib improvisation in guitar parts or vocal melodies, or even lyrics; it's much better to start to hear that stuff before recording and let some of it make it onto the record, rather than kicking yourself a week after mastering for only just noticing how a final chorus could have worked much better.
I think I promised you in an earlier post that I'd start naming the songs I'd written for ease of reference, so here goes: Big Enough & Ugly Enough is the song that Joe and I worked on before; Those Aren't Ants, Those Are Elephants is a kind of more subdued song at the moment (but who knows how it'll end up); In Remembrance of Fun is the result of a couple of different musical and lyrical ideas that I had floating around that work well when kind of mashed together; Nothing Wasted, Nothing Gained is going to be the album-closer, I think - it's a bit nostalgic, but in a totally awesome way; I'm Uneasy, Eleanor came together in about two days and is the newest of the songs - one of those tunes that practically wrote itself and I think it did a good job (you can see a very rough video of it here, if you like).
All of those titles are subject to change, I guess - and I might get a bit more secretive about album details now that I'm starting to move into the second half of the songwriting process, but who knows - I might get drunk and post naked performances of all of them one night - you can never be sure.
Anyhows, I'm looking forward to taking these five new songs for a test drive live - let's see how they go down.
YOU ARE UPDATE!
- Ben
