I’ve been focusing maybe 90% of my musical energy the last couple weeks to one song. It was the last song I wrote during my challenge, I’ve Been Scared. And I wish I could say I’ve made progress.
The main problem with this song is I can’t sing it. Rather, I sing it badly. I know what the notes are in the melody–more or less. The melody, along with the chords, came to me almost instantaneously. (Thankfully, I was primed by a week of forced song-writing to catch it, to borrow a phrase from Arlo Guthrie.) My voice just won’t go there. I am not that good a singer. Which is why most my songs up to this point have had an almost childish melody, which follows nicely from a three or four chord progression. Every once and a while a melody comes to me that is too complicated, or too precise. I can’t just hit notes in the general vicinity of where they are written. I have to hit them more or less right on.
Like I said, I’ve been trying to learn it. I’ve also tried to farm it out. I made a rough recording for my friend Beth, but a couple weeks have gone by without word, so I’m guessing she didn’t feel it worth the trouble. And she might be right. This song could suck, for all I know. But I believe in it, and I’ll struggle with it for a few more years–if not decades–before I give up. Not working on it exclusively, of course. But some songs I just can’t let go of. Sometimes it pays off. (A song that comes to mind is I Stole this Song which I think I worked on for 15 years. In then end it came off pretty good.) Other times, I’m probably just spinning my wheels. There’s a song called Too Good to be True I drag out every once in a while. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve frittered away working on that one, but I never make any progress on it.
For now I strongly believe in I’ve Been Scared, so I toil on. Since I don’t seem to be making progress with the singing of it, I’ve played around with other aspects of the song. I’ve written the melody out in standard music notation (you know, notes on a five line graph) using Tux Guitar, a free program from the web. Then I recorded an instrumental version of the song, with guitar and violin. The hope was that I could follow the melody line with my voice, using the violin part as guide. Mostly, though, I’ve been playing around with the song because I like it. And like I said, I believe in it. I don’t want it to languish alongside a thousand other songs I’ve discarded over the years: because I couldn’t finish them, or because they just plain sucked. Seriously, part of writing, I find, is truly writing through the shit. How’s that for a final piece of advice to chew on today?