Let’s see …. how does the barre system go again? Oh, right. It’s freaking impossible. Forgot that part. Back to the banjo chords then. I wonder how good songwriters handle questions like this.
Yes, if you haven’t already guessed, I’m attempting to write some songs this week. Well, I should say one song, but that’s being somewhat generous. I can’t let Matt carry the entire burden of composing for Big Green. What kind of brother would that make me? I’ll tell you what kind. My kind, that’s what. Just STAY OUT OF IT. Anyway … that’s why I’m handling this guitar. Notice I didn’t say “playing”. That’s a bridge too far … and this song of mine doesn’t even have a bridge.
Frankly, I don’t see how Matt does it. He dreams up these songs, harmonizes them in about twenty minutes down in the basement of the Cheney Hammer Mill, then tracks the suckers. Me? I get some lame idea, knock it around in my head for a couple of days, and then either the lyrics come all at once or they drop from the sky in fragments, sometimes six months, sometimes a year apart. In some instances I do songwriting at a glacial pace. You can actually watch me evolve during the course of writing a single song. (When I wrote the first verse, I was an Australopithecus. Now look at me! Definitely Peking man.}
So, if I’m treating every songwriting project like the evolutionary ascent of man, that amounts to a lot of banjo-plucking primates. And that’s where many of my songs start out. I’ll find a chair somewhere in this big old barn of a place, throw my cheap-seat Martin D-1 across my leg and start playing the five chords I know best. If I stumble upon some progression or melody worth repeating, I can’t rely on memory alone. Fortunately, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an audio recording module, and if I can get him to stand still long enough, I can capture whatever the hell it is I’m working on and play it back later. If it happens in the middle of the night, the playback sounds like …. you guessed it …. banjo-plucking primates.
Hey, we all have our process. That’s what makes us human, right? Doing dumb shit, then figuring out how to improve on a bad thing. That’s the Big Green way.
As you may have guessed, I am trying to re-acquaint myself with recording technologies after a summer of copying tapes and taping copies. A few weeks in that garden shed and it all looks like an undifferentiated tangle of wires and metal boxes to me. That’s kind of what our studios always look like, but the fact that I’m taking note of it now tells me that I’ve got some remedial learning ahead of me. Fortunately, with the assistance of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I can reconstruct my keyboard workstation to a point where noise comes out of it and goes into the recorder thingy. Do that until the blue smoke comes out, and then you have a record. Or at least I think you do.
Okay, well the wind is kicking up a bit, and my little shack is swaying from side to side, making the set lists flap like little white flags nailed to the wall. It’s almost as if the place is hoping to surrender to our extreme weather. I’m going to pack up my ripped up duffel and scurry back into the relative safety of the Hammer Mill. Hopefully Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is not running one of those land drone experiments of his. Last week he was running some dog-like autonomous robot around the ground floor, programming it to shoot deadly lasers at anything that moved. Frankly I’m surprised I didn’t have more company out here in the shack.