The following four tracks were never meant to be a consistent body of work. They just happened to be the only four tracks that I completed post finishing the album project. Then I started to go into all sorts of directions, go out more, and I didn’t keep the focus on making music. See the demos page. I was just never good at working on parallel projects and also the going out took all of my energy, and once I had already proven my point (or so I thought) with music, there was less motivation for it. Anyway, these tracks I was very happy with, they are simpler than the albums one mostly, and the drum machine (for two of them) makes them a little tighter. I was under less pressure (own pressure that is), so I think the singing also comes out easier. In many ways, these are overall better than most of the album, as less laboured, and I could write about other things. No artwork attached or planned either.
Anyway, here are the songs.
1.Lia
2. Girl Sitting on a Beach
3. Unhelpful Friend
4. Twilight Dream
And the waffle.
Having finished ‘the album’. I got an electroacoustic Ovation guitar, a rhythm box and also a new better keyboard (later, not used on these four songs actually). That proved to be a stumbling block. I still wanted to make music, but the keyboard was too complicated, and I didn’t quite have the patience for it because of all the other stuff in life.
The Ovation was good for strumming, the ER-1 I really only used for rhythm structure, not using its sound abilities.
Lia
Holidays in Crete 2003 (thanks to Thierry – RIP – encouraging me and giving me the name of a travel agency). So this is a bit of a small vignette of a short conversation with the barmaid at the resort (also proof I was getting better at going out of my shell again), called Lia and when I said I was from Paris she said she’d love to go there. I mean the lyrics are exactly what happened I don’t have to detail, her answers and my (interiorised) reaction were what they were and even the strike and grey Paris were exactly how it was when I flew back. To be honest, my best lyrics (and my best jokes in life) have always been rooted in what happened in reality, often by decontextualising.
Musically that was my first with the rhythm box so all is much more in place, and I kind of let the guitar play…yeah, sure using an effect pedal to pretend to have a female voice is shit, but I didn’t have a guest star. I quite like the rhythm in that though, and like some of these songs unlike the album, I started to get more minimalistic on the guitar, which I think suits me best.
Girl Sitting On A Beach
Another ‘vignette’ really, same year during my then usual trip to the Pyrénées, one day I decided to drive down to the coast and ended up in St Cyprien. Just ambling around the beach. At some pont a girl came and just sat there on the beach trying to read her book, until she realised the wind made it impossible. It was a Saturday afternoon so I was just checking the football scores waiting for Arsenal updates. But sure I couldn’t check the score in the lyrics is meant both ways, so…‘what is this about?’. This is about encounters that don’t truly happen, possibility you don’t or won’t explore for a reason or another, shyness, circumstances, timing (in my case maybe about so many lost opportunities to do so).
Very happy with the chords on this one, first time I really used the Ovation, and I also think my singing was improving and I liked doing multiple backing vocal tracks (totally inspired by Robert Smith for that). The end doesn’t quite work musically, feels a bit tagged on, but its singing was inspired by BSP’s Carrion.
Unhelpful Friend
Very simple, music, I didn’t want this one to be overwrought. Think the keyboard sound may be inspired by White Town’s Your Woman though not consciously. Another one where I am actually fairly happy with the singing. Lyrically again it was imagined rather than real. I mean it may have been about L, but really practically completely off in that sense. So nearly 20 years later I think it was prescient, because apart from some of the words, it could practically have been about another person from 10 years later. Meaning I might have had an inkling that I was setting myself for that sort of fucked-up relationship as real and not just imagined as it was in 2003, so again maybe that song said more about me…not in as good a way as I thought. But again, I like the music there.
Twilight Dream.
First song I ever wrote really (must have been about 1992 or 1993), I mean the music as all these years later I tried to reproduce it. It didn’t have lyrics originally, just its title. I remember Jean-Noël G told me he liked it, it was a bit ‘spacey’. Shame I never had the courage/patience to redo the keyboard sound that annoys me, as a guitar part. Might be easier now with digital recorder if the timing is tight, to just copy/paste that. Anyway, I still like it in spite of that, and I kept the original title that was in my head (of course clearly named because of This Twilight Garden from The Cure).
The lyrics are a bit about floating around and daydreaming, with a reminder that I must keep my feet on the ground. I tried to sing differently and in a way, the paradox of that conclusion voiced in the most ethereal/disincarnated way is typical of me so I like that. Someone told me they liked it, even the keyboard, in a way it’s also one of my favourites because of its atmosphere, and its dreaminess. Which I think may be why that person liked it, it’s still a dreamer’s song.