How does Kal come up with Lyrics?

December 10th, 2009 | By Kal

I was speaking to a friend who I had not seen for a while.  She’d been on the site, as most of my friends have been coerced to, but as I hadn’t seen her, I hadn’t introduced it to her like I would most people I know.  For me, this is a nightmare, because it leaves me unable to ‘help them shape their view’ shall I say!  What happened though was really useful, because it got me thinking.

Anita said, “OK, so you’ve got these song ideas and you develop those, but how did you get to that stage?”  And she’s right of course, because we haven’t covered that have we? So from now on I’m going to endeavour to describe it to you. What happens first?

Lyrics

Anita actually mentioned lyrics when she asked me about how I came up with songs.  What did I think up first – lyrics or the music?  Good question.  The answer is, I don’t know.  Both come to me at different times, and when I come up with one it doesn’t come neatly packaged with the other.

Let’s take lyrics, hey, I’ve titled this lyrics already so I’m kinda duty bound.  Lyrics can come at any time.  Generally something really really good or really really bad happens and when I have some time to myself (generally when I’m travelling), I get my phone out and write a text about it. Save, drafts, come back to it later. I don’t try and make it rhyme – if that happens, it comes later.  I just write whatever comes to me to get it out and ‘bottle it up’ in words.  A lot of the time it’s more for healing than for anything I’ll actually use, but I find that trying to force words onto a page, sitting a piano, and making them rhyme always sounds emotionless.

Maybe I haven’t been to Brit school and don’t understand, but for me, lyrics are about what you feel at a particular time, not what you can brainstorm!  With that said, my lyrics aren’t particularly abundant on the songs we have so far.  In fact, they only appear in one chorus – I Wanna Know.

I wanna know if she knows,
I wanna know if she cares,
I wanna know if she’s playing,
I wanna know if she’s there.

I first came up with these lyrics over a year ago.  I wrote them because I’d recently met someone and I couldn’t figure them out.  They seemed to have a certain way about them, that I didn’t particularly like.  The question was, did they know that they were doing it? And if they did, did they care?  Obviously it annoyed me at the time.  I can still feel that, everytime Rob or I sing those lines. It’s almost like having a picture, documenting a particular feeling I had.

Testimant to this, I feel, is the fact that in recording 1 and even in recording 2 of I Wanna Know, when Rob sings these lyrics in the chorus, it changes the feel of the song completely.  From a verse that is a little eerie and fairly contained, emerges a much more aggressive feeling.  Someone shouting for answers, which is exactly what I felt at the time.

On what I think is definitely a related note, and to definitely muddy the waters of what comes first, the music or the lyrics, I had already worked out the tune for the chorus along with the chords before Rob and I started to work together on it.  If I’d written those lyrics down, showed them to Rob and he’d thought, I know I’ll put them in a song, here, they might have lost their original meaning in the swapping of ideas.  But with me writing the music and already singing the chorus, the original feeling stayed intact.

I tell you what!  I’ve got a few ideas for lyrics on the go at the moment.  Let me get back to you with them very soon and we can see where they go and it will really demonstrate the whole process I’ve tried to describe above. Stay tuned, Lyrics II coming soon!

New Bass Lines – Part 1

November 16th, 2009 | By Rob

Last weekend Kal came round to work out some bass lines. With a cd playing of the recordings as they are now he started playing and this is the first video showing what he came up with – even I was impressed! We’ll be putting a few more videos like this up over the next few days showing possible future parts so keep checking back! Feel free to comment. Enjoy.

Musical Heroes with Kal – Eric Clapton

November 13th, 2009 | By Kal

The long awaited fifth episode in the series of Kal’s Music Heroes.  So far, I’ve counted Scott Joplin, John Legend, Bill Withers and Chas ‘n’ Dave among my musical heroes – who next in this somewhat random list?  Yep, you guessed it, Eric Clapton

You may not know, but I didn’t pick up a guitar properly until I was 17,  but before then, I was very much into downloading music and at some stage I stumbled upon a site that let you download midi* versions of songs.  Somehow among the popular TV themes and poor quality hip hop samples, I managed to accidentally download ‘Eric Clapton – Layla Unplugged’.  Don’t ask me why I spent so much time on that site, to the extent where I was accidentally downloading tracks, but I’ve always felt that midi versions of songs have a jovial feel to them - they always make me laugh.  On a slight tangent, listen to a decent midi of Rocking All Over The World and tell me you don’t at least smile when you hear the first note.

With “Layla Unplugged” firmly planted at the back of  my mind, once I’d mastered the basics of playing chords terribly on a cheap school acoustic guitar, I happened to stumble upon a video of “Slow Hand” (clapton’s nickname) himself playing a picked version of the song on Windows Media Player.  I feel like a Grandad explaining this, but this all happened during the dark ages, BS**, after the original version of Napster had been halted, but before a one stop shop for downloadable music or even Youtube existed.  Windows Media Player let you search for an artist or song you liked and play audio/video for free without downloading them to keep, and this is how I rediscovered the song.

I set about learning this version of Layla, by which point I had found a decent audio of Eric performing it, before which he would say “See if you can spot this one” to rapturous applause.  For me, the things that stood out about the song, and still do, were his solos and after hours of practice, I could play something that sounded a bit like Clapton’s MTV performance.  This was the first ever solo I learnt, and I think the the lessons I learnt from that solo taught me more than any other piece of music I’ve ever played.

I’ve never had any formal training on any musical instrument.  Mr Norris used to come in once a week when we were seven and teach us the recorder, but apart from that, it’s been more about what I’ve learnt along the way.  Eric Clapton and “Layla Unplugged” taught me more about soloing, scales and rhythm than any book that I could have looked at, and have influenced how I play Guitar, Bass and even Piano.

When Rob and I had our first gig just before we left school for uni, in the legendary one night only band Next Edition, this was the first song that I chose for us to play.  And having played rhythm guitar most of the night, I got to play the lead!

I also went through a long phase, (from which I am only just starting to recover?), of songs centred around the chord D minor – the same key as Layla unplugged.  In fact, have a listen to I Wanna Know, as this is a song that I came up with the initial idea for during this obsession!  It doesn’t sound too bad.

Such has been the competitive nature of our friendship, when I heard Rob playing “Change The World”, another of Clapton’s classics, I made sure I learnt it, and could play it quicker than he could (even if that took away from the song itself)!  I also recall pre-empting Rob and learning Tears in Heaven in one night, a song I still enjoy hearing Clapton sing.

On the subject of Eric Clapton himself, his personal life is well documented, and if you’d like an in depth account of this, then just google his name and you’ll find more information than you can read.  To me however, the reason I like Eric Clapton (enough to write a blog about him) and the reason I like most musicians is simply for their music, and I think Eric might just feel the same judging by his founding of the legendary Crossroads guitar festival.

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* midi, as far as any one really cares, is a way of storing/composing music electronically.  A lot of synthesisers, keyboards, old computer games and so on, use it. In fact, if you’ve ever sung to a backing track at t’Karaoke, the chances are, it was a Midi file.  If you’re interested, check this out.

**Before Spotify