Note #26: New Songs, Three Pauls
New songs and recordings, Three Pauls
I went through a bout of self doubt a week or so ago, and then magically, it switched. I recorded a new song, Width of a Room, and though I scrambled through the recording, getting the tracks down probably within an hour or maybe an hour and a half–it was all the time I had to work on it, and I didn’t want to feel completely defeated if I came up empty — it came out well. The raw material was solid, and I’ve added and tweaked since then, and the results are somewhat mesmerizing to me. What happened differently with this recording than others?
Well, for one thing, I have learned from messing around with all my previous recordings. The three months of back and forth on five or six separate songs has taught me a bit. And thus I went straight into this one and tried things that I hadn’t been able to do before. For one, I added a bass track that sounds surprisingly like a bass. (I’m probably most proud of this). There is also a keyboard semi-arpeggio thing that I have going on, and this adds some great texture. In fact, when I have listened back to this recording a few times now in the car, I notice that: texture. There is space, and in some of the space, the surprise of textures which can actually feel emotional, if that is possible. It reminded me that there is a beauty to the quiet parts of a song.
So, what of what I wrote last week? “Feeling strangely uninspired with the songs I’ve written lately…” I was lamenting, however ridiculous it might seem, that I could never be Paul McCartney, or Paul Simon, even Paul Westerberg.
Jesus. Get over it!
These are temporary roadblocks. But they don’t ultimately hold me back after all. I did write a new song to pull me out of this funk, something I thought of as my Leonard Cohen by way of Father John Misty song (Last Stand). Or to state it more accurately, I let the song that was pulling me into a funk ultimately inspire me. I was messing around with several chord sequences and landed on one that became a bridge, or maybe a double bridge (if there is such a thing). I like this sequence so much that I’ve let it stand without any vocal-ese or words to mar it. (And I include it here for anyone who wants to play it: D Bbaug D7 G) And the other three sequences of chords have a flow and lift to them that ties the whole thing together. It’s not the easiest song of mine to perform, nor does it necessarily come together in the most songwriterly way, but I think so far I am enjoying it, and though I played it live last week (on the day of the morning that I finally put it all together), that performance was pretty near disastrous. But I walked away without beating myself up too much. And it allowed me to go into the weekend to record Width of a Room which has now turned out so much better than what I could have imagined.
What is interesting to me is that Width of a Room, as I play it, doesn’t really move me as a song. Same with The End of the Beginning. When I play these songs live, they sort of seem like, okay, hey, you wrote a song. But they don’t excite me the way Unbroken or The Kingdom seems to. Or the way You Say used to. So what’s going on? The recordings bring something out in the song that pushes it over that hump. I really believe a recording can make a song come to life. And some songs are simply better as recordings, and some are better played live. I don’t know why this is the case, but I can accept it.
And, I’m rounding the corner on having another album of songs. Who could have imagined this a year or two ago? (Not me.)
