A Different Approach
They say the best things happen by accident, and in my experience that has mainly been true. I guess you then have to analyse what exactly is an accident, but then everything gets far too intellectual and you lose yourself in theory when it’s only really the practise that’s important. So when I arrived in the studio last week with just a set of lyrics (well two actually), was it an accident that Ali and I ended up six hours later with “Breathe”? Discuss!
To be honest we hadn’t actually discussed what we were going to do. I think I worked out the night before that there were probably about seven different options, including processing audio and video from Skye, my December Attic Live Stream, editing a song we recorded at the end of last year for a new project, looking through some of the immense video archive we’ve amassed, or possibly recording a song called “Big Men” that I’d written a few days before.
So we sat around as usual talking about all kinds of stuff until one of us decided it was time to get on with some work. “What do you want to do?’ led to a swift realisation that we really didn’t want to spend a day looking at screens so all the video options were shelved straight away. As well as having the lyrics to “Big Men” in my folder, I’d also written some lyrics the day before, but had no tune. There’s always a point in any recording day when we look at each other and don’t have to speak. The thought that we could start without any form of a tune or melody felt quite exciting, so we recorded “Breathe”.
It was precisely because we hadn’t taken a decision the day before that I had taken only my cittern along to the studio. There’s an unwritten rule that I must always take my cittern! At the end of the day the only reason I opened its case was to pick out my bottleneck from the accessories compartment, because we’d found a new vibe. Instead we had once again used Ali’s cheap electric guitar, which is a really easy instrument to play, and built the song from there.
“Breathe” came from somewhere deep within, and is a song about the way in which we treat our planet. Rather than focus on what we humans are doing wrong, I switched things around to illustrate through the lyrics the cycle of water and how that process will never change whether we are on the planet or not. We can learn the lesson or not.
The recording of “Breathe” has encouraged us to repeat the process. I have plenty of sets of lyrics with no tune so I set about identifying those that would be relevant to a seven track EP with “Breathe” as its title. Tomorrow, I will take my cittern to the studio together with a set of lyrics. We have decided to use the same instrumentation throughout the EP adding any percussive sounds we might want to use. Tomorrow we will get our heads down and work until we have a song. The single “Breathe” is available now from https://johnreed.bandcamp.com/track/breathe