Finished

Check out my song! It's called "Screens"!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhuphn0tl8k&feature=youtu.be

Day 32: Screw Blog Titles, I Have a Song!

Earlier this week, the unthinkable happened; I finished writing a song. The song does not have a title yet (As you can tell, I'm not the best title brainstormer), but it has a lot of heart and a lot of potential to be great. The rest of my process will be adding a melody to the lyrics and recording myself singing the song. Writing this song has been one of the most difficult and time consuming processes I've ever been through, but it has not been a waste of time.

This song writing process has been mostly tough because of frequent writer's block. I believe the frequency came from my need to write in chronological order, which in this case was tough because that meant writing about the Aurora Theatre Shooting first. The Aurora shooting was tough to write about because it was the least recent of the tragedies and while generating pieces of metaphor, I had written about it the least. If I had started with the Boston Bombing first, the most recent and resonant tragedy, I might have been able to snowball more writing and ideas. 

Now that I know this is an issue, I've taken it upon myself to correct it. I'm currently working on a big, secret film project, and I've been working on it piece by piece. The first clip I finished was the easiest to make and set the tone of the project. My work has been much more focused and frequent, and I've dealt with much less block. I'm glad that I suffered through this song writing process so my future creative processes can benefit.

Day 25: Storytelling

As many people know, I am a story teller. More specifically, I'm an actor/director/filmmaker/writer/photographer, but I tell stories through those mediums. That's why I decided to write a folk song; folk music is the music of storytellers passing down stories to their families and communities. Well to my delight, after plenty of reading in the Bob Dylan biography, I've come to learn that Bob Dylan was also a big storyteller, and I'm not talking about just his music. First of all, Bob Dylan had a fascination with fabricating his backstory. In college he would tell his friends about secretly being a rock and roll piano player named Bobby Vee, who would disappear occasionally for gigs. He would also spin tales of where he came from and how he was raised. He told some people that he was orphaned and grew up on a carnival. He would also like to entertain his friends with big elaborate stories, which to me explains why his music is so great; he knows how to tell a really good story.

Now that I've conquered my writer's block (for now), the writing has been going a lot smoother. I'm still behind in terms of my schedule, but I'm confident I can finish the song (lyrics and melody) next week, and can then use the last week for recording and editing a simple music video. Though I don't think the song will be as good as anything by Bob Dylan, I sure hope that I can at least entertain some folks with a nice song and a good story.

Day 23: Blocking Writer's Block

Today goes down in history as the day I kicked writer's block in the teeth. For the past couple of days I have been stuck on one line. One single line before the second chorus and verse, and I could not figure it out for the life of me. And so I've been absorbing more folk and reading more about Bob Dylan (fun fact: Bob Dylan's music was influenced by a wide variety of music. I may want to try branching out my music to influence my work). However I haven't had much luck.

Now I know what you're thinking. I should probably just move past the one line and come back to it later. Well I'm sorry to say that that's not how I function. I have to write in chronological order. That's how I write papers, poems, and scripts, and that's how I write music. I'm trying my best to overcome this, but for now I will have to live with my own writing style.

There were two things that made today successful. First of all I took my headphones out. I usually listen to a playlist of folk music while I write, however today the music was more distracting than helpful. Second I went back to previous lines and changed them around to generate more possibilities for the one line. Lo and behold, I wrote that one line. It's a pretty good line too, if I do say so myself.

I'm behind schedule at this point because I had hoped to finish a draft of the lyrics by last week. Hopefully now that I've cleared one major writer's block, I'll be able to clear any future blocks pretty quickly.

Friends, what do we say to writer's block? Not today.

Day 18: Reading

To settle my writer's block, I've decided to do some reading. It has helped influence my writing process, while letting me take a step back from my note pad. I've been reading two books, Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents by Bruno Nettl and Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto.

I first started reading Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents, which helped me understand what folk music is as a genre, how it is generated, and how it travels. The thing that separates folk music from any other genre is instead of being written down on sheet music and shared exactly how it was written, it is shared by word of mouth and changes each time it is shared. One example given was that if a father came up with a song and shared it with his three sons, the three sons could leave home with the one song, and come back with three different versions based on where they went. I also learned that folk music "is normally created by untrained, non professional musicians, and performed by singers and players with little or no theoretical background," which I found interesting because I am untrained and have little theoretical background. After a while I had to stop reading because the book started going into complex music theory, which I just couldn't understand.

And so I switched over to Bob Dylan, which so far has been a very fascinating book on Bob Dylan's life. I've read a lot about his younger life and his early songwriting process. An interesting thing is, he started writing poetry, which later turned into songs, much like how I started with simple poetry and then converted the text into song lyrics. I plan on continuing to reading this book so I can learn more about Bob Dylan's influences, that way I can gain some influence for my own song writing.

Day 11: My Head Hurts

Hey guys, do you remember that thing I said about gathering puzzle pieces and putting the puzzle again? Well, I honestly thought the rest of the songwriting process would just be taking the writing I generated and arranging it into a song. Turns out things just aren't that simple. The writing I generated is great and helped me create a lot of ideas and set the theme, but I'm finding myself with more writer's block now than I ever had when starting this process. It's getting hard to be optimistic all the time, but that might just be a byproduct of the dark imagery of the piece. Oh well, I'm still putting the song together one piece at a time, it's just a moving along a little slower than I first thought.

I picked up some new books from the Library today. Hopefully they can give me some inspiration and help me with my writing. I'm going to start with Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents, a cool little book that details the kind of folk music that I'm interested in, as well as the general structure of different varieties of folk music. Maybe I'll make some connections to some of the folk music I've been listening.

Well, folks, I don't know about you, but I'm just gonna keep on folkin'.

Day 8: Progress!

Today marks an important point in the songwriting process; today I wrote the chorus. Not only that, but I have figured out the structure of the song. It follows a general pattern of chorus, verse, bridge, repeat x3. The chorus as it stands goes:

Oh, we gather 'round screens like a moth drawn to the flame,
While news of destruction travels faster than a plague
And while bloodshed and heartbreak spreads throughout the land,
We'll sit around screens and hold each other's hands.

The thing I love about this chorus is that it sets up the theme for the rest of the song. The song contrasts light and dark (happy vs sad), and the chorus embodies just that. I think it's also quite catchy and has potential to be very anthemic.

The overall story of the song is starting to develop as well. The song follows a couple who's relationship correlates with the shootings and bombings of the past year. At the same time, the couple has an overwhelming fascination with the media coverage of said events. For instance, they have their first date on the night of the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre shooting, which marks the beginning of their relationship, then they wake up in bed together to see breaking news on the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting, and finally they spend all of patriot's day together on their couch watching the report on the Boston bombing.

The song takes my initial idea of contrasting light and dark, while at the same time includes inspiration from various events from the past year or so. I'm really excited to see what comes next.