After listening to an early mix of a bunch of my recent tracks in my mate's car, I've decided not to bother finishing a solo album for the sake of it. It was just a bit too shit. I've been listening to a lot of good music recently, which is a demoralising experience for a songwriter. I tend to oscillate between two approaches to songwriting. The first is to focus on the song, with the lyrics, melody and chords taking centre-stage. The second is to fiddle about with buttons and pedals and computers until something sounds cool, then shoehorn in some half-arsed lyrics with no discernible melody. The first approach seems to produce far better results, but the second is so much easier, and countless years of deadline-centric education has shown that self-discipline is not a strength of mine.
Luckily, I'm soon heading off on a carbon-spewing-hence-guilt-inducing trip around the world, during which my only songwriting tools will be a notebook, a pencil and a ukelele (at least until I decide it's taking up valuable rucksack volume and it's sacrificed for firewood). The great thing about ukeleles is that they sound shite, so the making-cool-noises approach to songwriting is ruled out from the start. Anyway, here's one of the tracks that made me realise I need to change my methods:
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