Big Texas Sky, my new CD, is done and ready to be distributed to listeners. I love getting new music from artists I follow and from new ones I haven’t heard before. I like listening to full albums because I like albums that have an arch to them. CDs that tell a story are so much more than just the individual songs could ever be on their own.
But being a songwriter, I know that more often than not the songs on a CD were not written exclusively to be on a specific CD. At least with me, I write and write and at the end of a given time period I have this collection of songs which I then sift through to see if there is a thread holding some of them together. These will be the songs that go on an album of mine and the others will be used for live performance. I guess that I need to put together and album called ‘Unrelated Singles’ for all those songs tossed overboard at the time of selection.
The other thing I like about albums is knowing the history or story behind each song. Why did it end up o the CD? What’s the story behind the writing and production of the song? I love watching the DVD series Classic Albums where they deconstruct famous albums like ‘Dark Side of the Moon” and “Night at the Opera”, just to name a few. How and why did they do that to get that sound and emotional response? What were the tricks they used in the studio to get that guitar sound or that vocal sound? What is the true meaning behind the lyrics? Now that’s stuff that I want to know and they are not always in the liner notes (do liner notes even exist anymore?).
So starting this week I will deconstruct and fill in the background on each song. I hope you follow along get caught up in the story because that’s what artists are trying to do: tell and engaging story.
Peace
Some recent life shaking events have got me thinking about the song “Turn, Turn, Turn”, by the Byrds. This past month seems to have been the season for things to turn, to change, to grow and to die. It seems that it is our family’s turn to see close friends and family members pass away. We will miss them immensely. Yet in the same turn of the wheel we see new arrivals into our life as family members move to our area and new friends appear in our lives to fill the gaps left by others’ passing. God closes and opens these doors at His will and it’s up to us to either leap through to the next room or sit still.
I attended a talk about crowd-funding recently with a songwriter’s group. I noticed that except for the presenter and the host, I was the only one that knew what crowd-funding was. I was also the only one in the audience that raised a hand when asked if they might be using crowd-funding in the near future. I was one of the few who asked the presenter any in-depth questions about the nature of crowd-funding (I even asked some leading questions because the presenter was leaving important facts out of his presentation). What was going on here? This was a relevant and interesting topic. Why weren’t more of the attendees participating and asking questions?