[Originally posted to the Camberwell Carrot blog]
Songwriting’s a funny thing. And no, I’m not going to get all confessional and twee on you. I’ll let my bandmates Tim, Jason and Ping write about their own creative processes as the spirit moves them. For me, it usually starts with a line or phrase (“Jacky with a Y”), something that suggests something else, and you follow along as best you can, like driving a car at night with malfunctioning headlights, and you think you’re doing all right even as the cliff looms.
And then sometimes you get a little dash of inspiration, maybe a riff or a chord — make that a simple chord, because those are the only ones I can play. So I had this line in my head for a long time — “Baby buggy, built like a tank” — and it festered there for quite a while. And then finally one night, looking through my guitar chord encyclopedia, there it was, a D6 chord, and before you can say Paul and John, the opening chords for “Two of Us” were being strummed on my guitar, and just to make the allusion complete, the first words out of my mouth were “Cry, baby, cry.” From there I took a few endless hours of playing a tinny demo on loop, scratching lyrics and chord changes in and out, until I had something of my own. Maybe it coheres, maybe it doesn’t, depending on whether you want it to or not.
So then you coddle your little creation, style your demo, get a few positive comments from friends who aren’t going to say anything negative anyway, and all proud of yourself, you bring “Baby Buggy” to the party when you get together with your band to record music. And the band promptly takes what you’ve got and blasts off in a new direction. Not different, just a branch-off, as you leave the smooth artificial highway of simple strums and drum machines and barrel down the dusty back roads of fuzzy guitar, keyboard interjections, and snappy snare beats. It isn’t a glamorous ride, it’s not tidy, in fact it’s downright shaggy-dog. But it’s real.
That’s just the story behind one of the songs we put together at our Shasta sessions. More to follow.
