In which I talk about the some times confusing song writing process I have.

Music and Me

840 words about creative — 19:35 · 27th Dec 2010

Am I writing music, or is music writing me? Nah, never mind, that makes no sense. I’m trying to take a creative break from things, or more accurately, I’m taking a break from board game creating to well… create other things. Funny thing with being creative, there’s never really any break from it. I’m never actually having a break from being creative.. never. All I’m ever doing is shifting my focus from one area of creativeness (actually a word according to Firefox spell check) to another. I’m not complaining in any way, I don’t mind working like this. But it’s interesting that what I consider a break isn’t actually a break at all. And even if I’m not doing anything at any particular moment in time, my mind is still creating. It just never stops getting ideas from different things in life. I suppose that’s the penalty one pays for having a hyperactive brain. I’ve had several different ideas whilst writing this so far.

Anyways, back to the point or one of the points I suppose. I’m back to writing some more music at the moment, or maybe it’s called composing, I’m not quite sure. It’s going quite nicely at the moment even though I’m not actually writing anything right now obviously since I’m writing here, but I wrote some earlier. And I liked it, so now I have at least two songs that I really should finish writing. I’m calling them “Rest in Peace” and “Her Soul Consumes Mine” right now, but I’m open to changing the titles as I see fit later on. They’re more of some sort of placeholder or project titles anyway. I like having project titles, it helps me stay focused on the primary goal. And whenever I really, really change my mind regarding the goal I can always just change the title. Side note; Now I’ve finished updating OpenOffice. And I’m going on a celebratory smoke in honour of this most awesome-est occasion.

Sheet music that I didn't write but am pretending that I did.
Not even close.

And I’m back, not that you have any awareness of the passage of time in this context, since you’re reading all of at once. Hmm, sort of makes this whole paragraph moot doesn’t it? So, I’m really excited about writing a little music again since I’ve had quite a long break from it. I’ve still picked up the guitar every now and then but I haven’t really written anything in a while. But today I think I managed to nail the verse part of “Rest in Peace”.. bare in mind though that I’ve thought so a number of times before, and been wrong. But this time feels right, so I’m hopeful and I like being that occasionally. I thought about taking a picture of one of my notebooks for music, but I was struck by sudden case of “Fuck it!”. So I googled a picture of sheet music, just pretend that my notes look like that. Of course they don’t as I don’t even know how to write in notes. When I was younger I used to take piano lessons (short story, got bored) and then I was able to read notes.. alas that ability has been forgotten for now, so it might as well be in Arabic. I wouldn’t understand anything anyways.

But I do understand music, or at least I’d like to think so. Yiruma’s River Flows In You is beautiful but so is a lot of other things, like Negative’s live performance of Jealous Sky at Keskustori, skip to 4:10 and onwards if you just can’t be bothered with the whole thing. And Pain of Salvation’s live rendition of Hallelujah is different. But the good kind of different, not the “smelly weirdo next to you in the checkout aisle” -different. Eva Cassidy singing Time After Time is eerily fragile, but then again her version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow is better than Judy Garland’s.. at least in my opinion. So yeah, these are all a bit more towards the softer end of the spectrum I suppose, but then again I also really, really like this.

Watch the whole thing.. trust me, you’ll thank me later. Or you’ll hate me, either is fine.

Video removed.

15th Dec 2020: The original owner James Gunn (yes, Guardians of the Galaxy James Gunn) has removed his video, “PG PORN: Squeal Happy Whores”. I could find a Russian syndicated version of the video but ten years later I don’t think this is particularly funny anymore, and a bit homophobic so I won’t embed it.

EDIT: I just realized that I might’ve posted this video before, but in case I haven’t I’m keeping it here. So yeah, enjoy!

You’ve just read Music and Me.

In which, 13 years ago, I wrote 840 words about creative and I covered topics, such as: song writing , behind the scenes , videos , and music .