“Abandon” is one of those terms we use to describe the behaviour of children. They’re that way inclined: uninhibited and prone to instinctual response. The highs and lows of their experiences from one moment to the next are exactly that on an emotional level – exceptionally high and desperately low.
Today I let the music guide the words. Normally I work the other way around… that is, write some lyrics and then put a tune to it. Less child-like, essentially. But today was an endeavour of singing whatever words and feelings the music conjured up.
Time will tell what calibre of songs will be produced from days like today… but from a production and a personal point of view, I found it all quite liberating.
To stand up and just belt out whatever first springs to mind allows some extraordinary things to surface. I imagine it to be like therapy… is there some kind of therapy like this in some obscure psychologist’s lounge?
Anyway, it really is interesting to discover what comes out of the depths of your psyche and soul when you just sing with child-like abandon whatever it is that you’re feeling.
I’ll leave the lyrical content for the release of the songs. From a musical perspective, my background is rooted in both the religious and the secular, and so the melodies waver between major scales (obviously from the majority of church music) and, as one of my musician friends calls them, the “dirty” chords and melodies.
What he means is that the chords are unusual. When it comes to music theory, I’m pretty much clueless. I’d hate to write down sheet music to my songs – I’m not sure it would even follow coherent musical sense. But thankfully, that is not the purpose of the exercise here. I like the way another fellow musician put it: “I don’t play by eye… I play by ear.”
I was watching a documentary on a guy who socialised himself into a pack of wild wolves. He managed to mimic their behaviours so that they eventually accepted him, and he was able to explore new meaning into the life of wolves. One of the commentators noted, “Science is advanced further through the likes of mavericks like this guy, than by controlled clinical experiments”.
In a similar way, I’m going about songwriting and putting new songs together… pretending to be a musician, going about making music with glorious abandon.
