THIRD SONG POSTED

I've been doing bad at keeping this thing up. I think in part because I have virtually no readership. That makes sense, mind you, as this blog is RIDICULOUSLY self indulgent. Still, this blog has been helpful to my process, and I should work harder at keeping it current. The more lax I am on updating, the more lax I am at making good music. Case in point, I offer my most recent FAWM song. This one is called "Covered Bridges, Lighthouses and Landscapes" and it is posted here on the FAWM site.

In short, I hate this song. There are a few reasons.

1. Dynamically, it's flat. Now, a lot of this is in the way I chose to play the song, but some of it is built in. Some of me thinks that's not necessarily a bad thing. I increasingly regret my decision to put the song in the key of F. While I can sing a comfortable highish mid range in F, it doesn't allow me much else. The low octave of F that I can sing is strained, and my options for going higher are essentially out the window. So the song starts out in the same place it stays, vocally. This completely undercuts the bridge, for example, which basically sounds exactly like the chorus, but with different chords.

2. The lyrics are garbage. I should be above this sort of hokey crap by now. This whole, "one big metaphor" thing has not worked for me in the past, and it's probably not going to work for me in the future. I always feel transparent when I do things like this. That is not to say I can't take this metaphor and use it somewhere, but it should not be the entire lyrical content. I think in my last song, "Skull Mansion", I made good use of the line about snowflakes, which was a good multi-layered line. So I should be able to use this whole "puzzle" bullshit somewhere, but I need to balance it out with something.

UNRELATED

I need to figure out what this change is and rip it off. It's like a minor to major shift, and it might be a simple parallel change or it might be something else, but it sounds pretty awesome. I'll have to sit down with a guitar and work it out at some point.