My second album came together far too slowly for the reason I explained My Story 18, click here to read that chapter, but eventually it got released.
The album was topped and tailed by two songs, the opening song Like Lovers Do and the final song I wrote for the album Kiss Me Goodnight. Where Like Lovers Do was quick, easy and a real pleasure to write and record Kiss Me Goodnight was an angst ridden slog.
I love both songs and I’m really proud of them but how and why they came together sort of sums up the album as a whole. I wrote Like Lovers Do quite quickly. The chord sequence and then the lyrics both happened almost spontaneously. I usually strum away on the guitar until I find something that interests me and maybe then I’ll work it up into a song. With Like Lovers Do the chords almost found themselves.
It’s amazing when that happens, it’s like the gods have decided you can have this song and call it your own. It happens all too rarely, especially for someone like me who lacks any sort of musical knowledge. Usually I have two, three or even four chords that fit together and then I spend an age searching for the other chords to complete the song. With Like Lovers Do they all just tumbled out.
The lyrics also seemed to just suggest themselves and once I started writing them down the arrived very quickly and needed very little revision.
Even the recording process was joyful. I loved putting the song together. I handed over the finished tracks to Jermaine to produce and we went back and forth a bit about the length of the song and we cut it down a bit and there it was, a finished song. If only my musical journey could be that simple, and that much fun. Yes, I struggled with recoding the vocals but that was because my voice was shot to hell, but other than that Like Lovers Do was a breeze.
Not so Kiss Me Goodnight. In fact it wasn’t even supposed to be on the album. My niece contacted me and asked me to write a song for her forthcoming wedding. I’d previously never written anything ‘to order’ as it were. We met and I asked her what she wanted, something fast, something slow, what? She didn’t have any clues or pointers, other than something that would be played at some time during the day’s festivities. Thanks Anna, that was a great help.
A bit of background here, she was marrying an American who I’d never met and their relationship had been largely conducted with the Atlantic ocean in the way.
I have never struggled with something musical as much as I struggled with Kiss Me Goodnight. The only idea I had was that because their romance was long distance the thing they couldn’t do was kiss each other goodnight, well not until they were married and Anna had moved to the States. Other than that I had nothing, no music, no lyrics and no ideas. I went round and round dumping idea after idea until finally I came up with the opening three chords. Once I had those the music side of the song started to come together but then there was the problem of the lyrics.
Again I went round and round. I now write lyrics direct into Word on my computer and I filled several pages with half baked idea after half baked idea and nothing, literally nothing was working.
When I map out the recording of a song on the computer I usually mumble random lyrics just to get a feel for timing and melody and in amongst all of those mumblings was what became the opening lines “It’s not complicated, despite all the evidence”. I have no idea where the words came from but they resonated with me and they were the starting point I needed. Like everything with the song it took an age for the rest of the lyrics to come together but eventually they did and finally I handed over the track for Jermaine to produce.
Jermaine actually produced the hell out of the song. In my opinion he did an amazing job. When he sent me the first draft I was stunned by how good it sounded. We batted some ideas around and made a few tweaks here and there but it was superficial, we had the song nailed down.
The best thing was that the bride and groom loved it and I got a very special thank you video from them which made all the hard work and anxiety of putting the song together worthwhile. Kiss Me Goodnight went on to be my most played song on Spotify, but please, please, don’t ask me to ever write a song to order again – unless you’re going to pay me a lot of money.
The rest of Collateral benefitted from my increasing confidence with using the DAW software and my increasing confidence that I was more in control of what I was doing. The whole process was easier and didn’t have the same learning curve that Present Tense required. I also started to be more demanding of what I wanted the finished tracks to sound like which put increased pressure on Jermaine to produce the songs to my specifications and not allow him the leeway I had done with Present Tense.
In the end I think Collateral is a more ‘immediate’ album than Present Tense. The subject matter of most of the songs is lighter, the songs are generally shorter and it’s a more confidently recorded album. Whether it’s better than Present Tense is in the ear of the listener but at the very least I hope I made some musical progress from the first album. I don’t mean that in terms of musical complexity though, I mean it in terms of the immediacy of the songs, whether they catch your ear and make you want to listen to them again. And hopefully again. After all I’m creating pop music, music that I want people to listen to.
By the end of Collateral I had written, recorded and released twenty songs, twenty songs I’m immensely proud of. It’s a complete buzz to have these songs available on streaming services throughout the world, to have hundreds and then thousands of people listen to them. I cannot begin to tell you how exciting it is to know that people locally and people on the other side of the planet have listened to something that I wrote and performed. I still love vinyl records and CDs and I wish people consumed the physical product of music, but apart from a relative few we don’t consume music like we used to. Streaming is what we do and at least I get to offer my music worldwide.
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to listen to any of my songs, it is immensely kind of you and I really do appreciate it.