Back to it.After too many flights and turnpikes tolls and exit ramps and just in general a month of constant displacement, I made it home. And I'm home for a while. And so I should be posting more consistently.
(Should be.)
Hadn't done a Woodbine Willie in a while, so I'm going back to that well. Twice. I'm also tapping another old well. But first things first...
I had one poem of G.A. Studdert Kennendy's that I had come up with a vocal melody for, his "Prayer Before an Attack." However, it morphed as I messed with the guitar melody. I did a different tuning with my gee-tar. (One I stole from Alan Sparhawk, which he uses for Low's song "Starfire.") I tend to try different tunings or my capo or my e-bow whenever I'm experiencing some sort of songwriting block. Subsequently, the tuning was so inspiring that this song has a lot of guitar. In fact it's just guitar, vox and the above pictured GarageBand "Hip Hop Kit." That's right. This song is chalk-full of hip hop.
(No. Not really.)
However, it does tap the part of the brain that must be chalk-full with remnants of "emo past." The second section of the song, which uses a different yet similarly themed Kennedy poem called "A Scrap of Paper", sort of came out of nowhere. Even though the two halves of the song have a stark contrast, they also seem to blend pretty well via the build section. But still I haven't come up with something this thrashy since my college days. It was a surprise. Haven't decided yet if it's of the pleasant variety of not. But the deeply buried angry white kid part of me sort of digs it. You can take the distorted guitar out of a boy's hands, but you can't take the distorted guitar out of his heart.
(Side note: As a nod to this emo-related breakthrough, my "Up and to the Right" section is an emo salute to Cursive, whose Domestica record will find its way on my favorite albums of the decade.)
As always, let me know what you think...
Download file here:
The FMTana-"Prayer Before an Attack/A Scrap of Paper"
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