Musical Rambles

Though my brother's ear is determinedly tuned to the baseball stadium's cheer, upon hearing my most recent songs played to him he said to me, "Jeanne, do something!" Encouragement having come from an honest and unexpected source, I decided to put an end to my lethargy in regard to my songwriting, and took heed of his advice. I sacrificed sleep and 'being social' time, but at three o'clock, on the morning of the day I was to fly back to England, I concluded my mission. With a growing distaste for microphones, bags under my eyes and calloused fingers, I was ready to reap the fruit of my labour: I held my four track demo in my hands. I entitled it "Imperfect and raw, but myself".

The first song is called "Fine By Me" and is the penult...penultimate... (I never know how to say this word, and only found out about its existence this year - shockifying, I know! I used to simply slip it into the conversation in French, ah the curse of Frenglish) song I've written. It's about someone I met who, said cliché-like, stood out and awoke my curiosity, someone I hoped to befriend.

The second is actually a cheat: I recorded this one last Easter, but we can pretend I laboured over it during the holidays too. It's called "The Luxury Of Time" and evokes, mainly, the frustration of a situation being interrupted by my coming and going from and to home.

The third is a semi-spontaneous song, "Twilight". Over my last week at home I unceasingly played a picking pattern to which I then put the words that flowed from my pen, after coming home from my last day out snowboarding. The lyrics are up, on a few posts previous to this one.

The last song is "Here", which I wrote over the summer, when trapped in my lawyer's office with nothing to do, but having to pretend to. It was a particularly spiritually dry summer, in contrast to the heavy rain we were 'blessed' with - the grass and trees liked it, I'm sure.

The two most recent ones need a lot of refining, but that will come with time. The next step is to now pluck up the courage to ask someone who goes to my church if he's willing and has the time to properly record my songs, on the basis of my "demo cd". I sent my sister a copy all the way to Thailand, and she got it today - she said I sounded like one of our favourite bands. My next aim in life will be to write songs à la Paul Simon... Before that, though, I need to act upon these words while these elements are still fresh in the air, as I know my tendency to withdraw only too well; giving in to that not so pleasant contradicting voice in my head.

All of this interesting and lovely information to build up a climax to the fact that today, a friend indeterminately lent me her four-track. It's what I use to record my songs back home, but I now have a similar recording device here! How exciting! That means I get to record all that I want without having to wait to be back home to do it! I happen to be cello-friendless in Geneva, but here I'll even have the chance to add a zest of cello into my songs.

Right, I must stop getting distracted and return to my essay writing on "the pure relationship", which defines itself as "a situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another, and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it." Why it is called the pure relationship still leaves me perplexed, and the fact that it is predominant in our western societies is somewhat worrying, but I now must flee to tackle these issues.

Cheerio!