I’ve got a show coming up on Monday the 29th. My first solo show in two years.

The last time around, I had some trouble. I couldn’t figure out how to give the songs the groove they needed by myself, so I assumed the answer was more stuff. I brought in Ableton Live. I had a set of MIDI footpedals, programmed to do different things for each song. I layered keyboard tracks live, I looped harmony vocals, I wrote a nonsense song onstage… I even beatboxed. I had a binder on stage to help me keep track of all the details. It was a disaster. I spent far too much of the show hunched over the laptop, trying not to panic.

Here are some parts that worked.

But I still felt that I needed more oomph to the groove, so I started again, this time with a band. Arthur and the Geniuses. The first gig was just vocals, bass, keys, and a drum machine. We were the house band for a comedy variety show. No stage really. No monitors. It was quiet and beautiful. Soulful and spacious.

Low-fi recording, but it helps me tell the story.

But the dynamics never felt quite right. I wanted drama, and we couldn’t get past gentle. So I added more stuff.

Drums and guitar.

Horns.

It started getting big. Powerful. Thick. The album release show, with our 8-piece band, knocked people’s socks off, and rightly so. The band was funky and strong. We zigged when it was time to zig, and zagged when it was time to zag. But I can hear my little voice struggling against all those elements. I’m losing that gentle sense of space.

How did this happen? Well, I’ve been lazy. I always tell myself to keep it simple. To do the best I can, with as little as I can. But in this case, every time I couldn’t make something work, I’d say, “Well, if I only had…” What a copout. The right way would have been to put in the time. To make it work with one piece, so I had a solid foundation for three. To make that work, so I’d know what I was doing when I hit four. Five. Seven. Eight!

So this Monday at LIC Bar at 8 PM, I’m going back to one. Just me singing and playing the piano. And I’m excited, because I’ve been putting in the time. I’m making it work. I hope to see you there.

I think I don’t actually like arranging my songs. I just love new ideas; when I work, I get excited about coming up with countermelodies and stringing them together, and somehow it all comes together. So tonight, when I sat down with La Da Da Dee, and tried to change the feel of one of the sections from swung to straight, I started to get really tense. I knew the general feel I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get there. I just wanted a part that you wouldn’t notice (which is something I often want in a rhythm section – if you don’t notice the instruments, it means they’re really playing the song), but I couldn’t make it happen. So I just looped a couple bars and played over them again and again.

Until, of course, I had an idea. And once I have an idea, lights start to turn on, and my hands move by themselves, and soon enough I’m nodding my head, yes, this is how it should be.

But I’m a little worried. I’m worried that I’ll end up not with 9 coherent songs, but with 9 collections of ideas, stuck together with chewing gum and common key signatures. My high school composition teacher once told me, after listening to one of my disjointed pieces, that I should write music for cartoons. I hope that Waiting doesn’t get the same reaction.

Now how do I get that big sound out of my little voice in my little room? Tip #1: If you want to make a small number of voices sound like a chorus, a Chorus plugin does not help. Not even if you throw a big choir-sized reverb after it. Neither does singing as many different parts as you can come up with.

I haven’t got it yet, and I’m hanging up my headphones for the night. But sometimes it’s much clearer what to do when you’re not actually there to do it. When I get home tomorrow, I’ll write out some 4-part harmony and triple-track it. If I can’t make a bunch of people singing sound like a bunch of people singing, I might as well turn in my Logic Pro dongle and call it a day.

I am smarter than machines.

So once I got that out of the way, I got back to work on Perfect Moment. Another listen to the new bridge section, and I realized it’s actually pretty hip! I added in a Dilla-style bassline and hi-hats, a nice little 16th-note-anticipatory thwap before the snare on 4 (kind of like a really big flam), and started building up my airy choral harmonies.

I have no idea how I’m gonna fit this new idea into the song proper, but that’s for one of my more lucid moments. This was a night for zombie creativity. Don’t think, don’t look back. Just eat the brains and move on.

So I got down to business. I took a look at Perfect Moment; some great ideas have been coming up in rehearsal, so tonight I was gonna try to integrate some of them into the recording. Success was limited; the recording is at 96 bpm, and the live version is at 85. So some things don’t translate too well. It’s too bad though; we’ve got this really awesome bridge section developing, with shades of “Chicken Grease” meets Radiohead. Perhaps it will just have to be a special surprise for people who come to see us.

Songwriting is so interesting sometimes. I’m relatively new to it, and there are many ways in which I still have no idea what I’m doing. I’ll write a song from a certain angle (e.g. Perfect Moment was born from a lyric about having dinner with someone who’s too shy to make eye contact), add in other layers (the sort of hip-hop soul feel), and then start building off the new layers, without regard for the original. So I end up with this really hip jam section in the middle of a song about inaction and waiting for things to happen. And then I have to rejigger everything to make it all make sense. Fun with incongruity!

I’m digging this idea of daily status reports. I know they’re a lot less interesting than my epic posts of the past, but even if no one’s reading them, at least they keep me honest.