Entries from the blog quebecois tagged with 'my music'
Amy (2)
This was about a girl named Amy that I knew in Africa. A lovely girl, well worth a song or three thousand. But more importantly from a songwriter's perspective, "Amy" is much like "June" -- it rhymes with everything....
Style Over Substance
I have no idea what this one's about, as evidenced by my doubling up on every single lyric, waiting for inspiration (it never does arrive). Musically, though, I like it, especially the bouncy bass line I came up with for...
Building A Wall
I wanted a quieter sound for this. Even with our crappy one pickup electrics, there were techniques -- varying the pick attack, chord arpeggiations, playing fingerstyle -- that could create the softer textures we were after. Or you could just...
Meth (2)
Another one with just bass and guitar -- I must have overdubbed the vocals later. I improvised most of the chorus. In retrospect, my inability to come up with the names of weapons, drugs and "men's magazines" (not the Playboy...
Just So You Know
A rewrite (the original doesn't seem to be available). I came up with entirely new lyrics, though I probably should have quit before the bridge. I can't make out what I was singing, apart from the words "telephone" and "heartless,"...
Money, Guns and Blood (2)
One of my last (thank God) songs about politics, at least from a leftist perspective (yes, I was once young and stupid -- not as stupid as, say, an Occupy demonstrator -- but pretty dumb all the same). I was...
Truth (2)
I didn't have a proper footswitch for the drum machine, so turning it on or off mid-song could be a tricky proposition. (Changing beats was even trickier.) You would sort of stab at it with your foot or hand...
The Troubles (2)
We finally got around (I had several hundred numbered chips, each corresponding to a song, that we picked from a hat most days to figure out what to record. We probably would have been better off concentrating on the handful...
Just Like A Woman (3)
We get off to a false start on this, recording over an aborted backing track. There was some dispute, too, about who was on the bloody "rock in the middle of the sea." I think I screwed up the whole...
Come A Day (3)
Question: You have a song, 3/4ths of which is kinda good; but 1/4 of the lyrics are poisonously bad. Do you: a) Stop all other work until you can hammer the offending couplets into shape; or, b) Add new lyrics,...
Untitled In F Sharp
Nobody would have mistaken me for an actual musician; but I was becoming a competent rhythm guitarist, at least. This came from a couple of riffs I'd been fooling around with -- I recorded it with two guitars (no bass...
Walkaway (3)
I don't remember exactly why - one or maybe both of us were out of town for awhile -- but we were on hiatus for a few months. I spent the time writing some (pretty good, I think) new songs...
Con Game (2)
Just an average song, but we were by this time paying more attention to internal rhythms and accents -- the little things that take an average song and turn it into an average song with more attention paid to internal...
Head For The Hills
My cousin said after hearing this, "Aren't you exaggerating this a bit?" I laughed and said, "Probably, but it's only rock and roll." What "it" was was a local political matter that in retropect has faded into the obscurity that...
Terrorist In The Kitchen
Not an obscure comment on somebody's culinary talents (or lack of same) -- these were just some nonsense verses that I had kicking around until one day we decided to turn them into a song. Not too bad, if you...
Rich Girl
Not having a girlfriend of any description -- let alone rich -- at the time, I was forced to use my powerful narrative skills to conjure one out of whole cloth, as it were. And I threw in a drug...
Tell Me The Time (2)
My cousin's song. We were a bit too close to the situation to appreciate it, but we were steadily getting better by this point. There were still some issues with the rhythm and the occasional misplaced emphasis; but for the...
The In Crowd
A song about cults and the psychology driving people into them, inspired by the1978 Jonestown Massacre. At the time I -- we generally -- had no idea about cults, save for a vague awareness about groups like the Hare Krishnas...
I Loved Only You (2)
This was our first attempt at playing this together. It had metamorphed (or possibly metastasized) from quasi-funk instrumental breaks into quasi-classical instrumental breaks with one of the guitars (probably mine) just a wee bit out of tune (I can hear...
Fire In The Waxworks (2)
What this desperately needed was another verse, or at least a bridge of some sort. I couldn't puzzle out what the heck it should be though; so I contented myself with adding short bass runs to the end of the...
Rock Justice (2)
The main lyrics were still a mess, but we had a better idea for what we wanted the guitars to do. And the chorus was pretty well locked in. Now, I just have to figure out exactly what I meant...
Come A Day (2)
So I had this song with one terrible lyric. Being too lazy to sit down and fix it, I tried the familiar tactic of appending on fragments from other (also kinda iffy in the lyrics department) songs. Trouble with that...
Video Ace (2)
There wasn't much of a melody to this one -- instead it was atonal and harsh. But then I intended it to sound mechanical and thudding from the outset. So, then . . . Mission Accomplished! Yay me! Previous: Video...
You (2)
This was the second iteration of You, a collaboration. Notable for my cheesy "harpsichord" playing and my cousin's truly unfortunate lyric; yet, there was a third claim to infamy, albeit one I didn't spot for a few decades. I started...
She Ain't No Human (New World)
I had written a song about a year previous titled "She Ain't No Human." There was one teensy problem with it, in that I came across as some obsessed weirdo. Though that much is true, I didn't see much upside...
Stories
This was one of my cousin's. He wasn't the best at writing lyrics (and I should know, being responsible for some real stinkers of my own) but musically he was quite clever, ending this with a lovely minor-chord coda that...
Telephone Sex (2)
This one was the first that gave me some faint hope that we might be able to make a go of it. The song was good, with coherent lyrics. We played it well (you'll have to excuse the minute of...
The Chase
I never considered myself much of a musician (stop that unseemly cheering in the back, thank you). A songwriter -- even occasionally a good one -- yes. But I wasn't sure about my musical chops. Apart from our jam sessions,...
I Am The Leopard
Our "rock opera," Sylvie The Water-Sprite started as a jokey excuse to get me over the hump of singing in public (well, semi-public). As it turned out, though, we started to write some good songs for it. "I Am The...
I Loved Only You
One of my rare forays into funk (or something very like it -- an abundance of minor-seventh barre chords, so I guess that qualifies.) As a skinny white boy, it was technically illegal to play this (cultural appropriation or...
Walkaway(2)
Another one with me alone. This was at a time when conflicting schedules/commitments meant that we couldn't get together for weeks, even months at a time. I'd keep in touch by sending tapes of what I was working on. That...
H.U.A.C.
My demo of what would become one of our better -- musically, at least -- songs. I wasn't concerned about adding lead guitar, as I knew that my cousin could easily come up with better ideas than anything I could...
Fight
One of my cousin's songs. We played keyboards about the same -- poorly -- but the way the recording process usually shook out, the duty largely fell to me. I had a secret advantage, though. In my misbegotten youth, I...
Caught By Computer
To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, if you like laws and sausages and rock music, you should never watch them being made. This was an older song that we'd never recorded, maybe because it had one glaring flaw. That would have...
Dirty Little Secret (2)
One of the benefits of writing new songs, I found, was that they tended to be more complete. Previously I would concentrate on the lyrics of the first verses and chorus -- anything beyond that was usually just filler to...
Fire In The Waxworks
I roughly divide our recording "career" into three parts. The first, as I've mentioned before, was mainly jam sessions. We started adding vocals near the end of this period, but mostly on jokey material like our "rock opera" and the...
You
My cousin wrote the lyrics to this and as far as I can remember, we collaborated on the music. It was kind of new territory for us both -- we didn't know anything about jazz, but when I pointed out...
Con Game
A simple little tune, as befits the simpletons scrambling to plug in a vital cable at the beginning. It actually turned out well, with my cousin's swirling guitar and some nice touches on the "cymbals."...
Tell Me The Time
This was my cousin's first (well, the first I heard) song, for the contest as well. Still waiting to hear from Foster -- he probably just misplaced our numbers. Yeah, that must be it. I didn't really like the song...
By The Lake (3)
For reasons detailed below, I really wanted this to be a good take, to the extent that we actually rehearsed it two or three times before recording. And that certainly paid off, in that we didn't flub a note, nor...
Me & J.B.
As you might guess from the sobriquet I gave to my cousin's girlfriend, I subtly resented her influence on the band. But being the true professional, I was able to put all that aside for the sake of the song....
Things We Said Today
Why I picked this particular song to cover is pretty much a mystery. It was never (as far as I know) a hit in Canada, although I'm thinking I must have heard it somewhere because I had nothing but the...
Video Ace
In the early eighties, the computer revolution was in its infancy. Video games, previously only found in arcades and bars, started appearing in home consoles like the Colecovision and Atari game systems. Computers were still on the horizon for most...
Rock Justice
No, I have no idea what "Rock Justice" means, unless it was some allusion to the ironic lack of recording contract offers. In any event, the song has the common enough folk/blues theme of the wrongly condemned man. (In fact,...
By The Lake (2)
My initial take on this received, shall we say, less than rapturous reviews, such as this, from "Frank": Sometimes when you listen to something that you personally record dozens and dozens of times, it does actually start sounding pretty good...
Meth
No, I've never even tried the stuff (though I've heard nothing but good things). This came out of a jam session with my cousin. Later I wrote and added lyrics. It was probably late at night because I was definitely...
Walkaway
I think that is supposed to be two words; but if Pete Townshend can get away with "The Kids Are Alright (sic)" then I guess anything goes. This was my first take on what became one of my best songs,...
Dirty Little Secret
This was one of my better ones from this period. I had written others that were stronger musically and lyrically, but they wouldn't start to show promise until the next round of recording. This, if I recall, wasn't written all...
By The Lake
You thought you were rid of me? No such luck! I was incredibly busy for most of last week and probably will be through the rest of the month and much of the next. Late in '83 I started writing...
Flatfoot
A quirky little piece. I was starting to get the knack of recording -- the sound is pretty good. Although I'll win no prizes for my guitar playing, it actually hangs together better than I thought on first listen, with...
Save It For Later
Not content with wrecking my own songs, I was determined to destroy others'. The Beat (or as they were named in North America, The English Beat, due to an agreement with an American band that previously had The Beat as...
Lech!
The first semi-serious song we tackled. The Lech! in question refers not to a lech(er), but to Lech Walesa, the Solidarity union leader, future President of Poland, and Nobel Peace Prize winner (when it still meant something). I really wasn't...
Who Do You Know?
Just a short little song that didn't go too far, at least lyrically. More intriguing, at least for me, is the guitar riff I played on it. I think it's a slowed down variant of the "Call To The Post,"...
Warning Shots
Some of you might recall me posting some of this stuff about three years ago (this second onslaught was prompted by the discovery of many more tapes). At the time I wrote fairly extensively on the songs and quoted the...
Money, Guns And Blood
Not bad, musically. Pay no attention to the lyrics -- they're juvenile Marxism at best. Which makes sense, given that I was a juvenile Marxist at the time. I would soon outgrow this phase when I looked up one day...
Telephone Sex
The lyrics to this were still in a state of flux, which occasionally led to the singer (me) and his erstwhile backup singer (also me) singing different lyrics at the same time. I have no evidence to support this, but...
Problems
The Sex Pistols somewhat predated my interest in playing music; they had crashed and burned by the late '70s. They had little, if any radio play in Canada -- I probably hadn't heard anything off their one and only album...
Glide Path
This was a song about sudden death, natural catastrophe, pestilence, nuclear war and drug abuse. I then decided it was too depressing. so I turned it into a pop song. There's more to a pop song than random beeps, bops...
Come A Day
Having the bass led to a greater sense of structure. I could let it and the rhythm guitar carry the song, dropping in brief splashes (with me, the briefer the better) of lead/tonally distinct guitar. This song is somewhat schizophrenic...
Sylvie Pts. 3&4
As I mentioned a few entries ago, my cousin and I were jamming fairly regularly by now. We were doing standard stuff like 12-bar blues, etc., just to see if we had any chemistry. We did, but I wasn't going...
Thicker Than Water
I don't recall what particular existential crisis brought this on. Maybe it was something so traumatic that I've blocked all memories of it. Or maybe I was just making stuff up again. It's kind of in my DNA. Guitar playing...
Bitter Soup
Upon listening to this, the reader will be obsessed with (shut up, I'll tell you what you should be obsessed with) the question: How did you get that groovy guitar sound? A '65 Fender Princeton Reverb? A digital delay fed...
The Alcoholic
I just had the one verse and the chorus for this but decided to record it anyway. That's not a bad idea if you're stuck on something -- it gets the basic idea down on tape, and repeating the parts...
Won't Get Fooled Again
Time to put on my big boy pants and aim for the Top of the Pops. I'd eventually puzzled out the chords to this, but this was my first attempt at playing it through, on acoustic guitar. And all...
Teacher, Teacher
I'm a totally self-taught guitarist. I've never had a lesson; everything I'd learned was from books and trial and error. In retrospect, that's a lousy way to try and learn to play rock and roll music. Rock, like folk or...
Just Like A Woman (2)
Oh, no, you're thinking. He's going to make us listen to all the takes of this bloody stuff! Relax, dear reader (and grudging listener). Just the more "successful" tracks. Though keep in mind that I have a rather elastic view...
Just You And Me
I was improving at guitar, at least the rhythm aspect of it. It also helped that I'd bought a new guitar, a very nice Yamaha steel-string for around $600. With inflation I'd probably be paying over a thousand for it...
She Ain't No Human
This was a strange piece I wrote, almost from a stalker's perspective. There was something about it that I liked, though, and I extensively reworked it later, keeping this as one of the verses and adding a new chorus....
Centre Of The Storm
From October of 1982, this was about the death of Bill Haley, who had the 1954 hit "Rock Around The Clock." (It is often referred to as the first rock record, though most musicologists credit Ike -- later to find...
Have You, Hold You
I suspect that every songwriter to some extent has one or more of these types of files. I refer to them as sketchbooks, not unlike what an artist keeps to make studies of interesting people, buildings and landscapes. A musician...
Just Like A Woman
Another very early version of a song. Apart from a couple of minor lyric changes, it's pretty much the same as the "finished" version a couple of years later. I don't know where I recorded this, but judging by the...
I Got A Girl
I was kind of surprised to find the first version of this. It was recorded on May 2 of 1982, about a year before I thought I'd written it. I do regard it as one of my better songs, if...
Truth
I bought my first drum machine a Panasonic something-or-other. It was pretty basic, with only three instruments -- the snare, bass drum and cymbal and four or six preset rhythms. You could also play it manually by tapping on three...
Singing Into A Silver Bowl
I gave my cousin his first guitar. At least I hope I didn't charge any money for it. When he was fourteen or fifteen or thereabouts his mother asked me if I'd sell her one of my old guitars, to...
Haunted House
I was really quite pleased with the turn of phrase I came up with for the end of the first verse. It goes: A ratty bag of ideas Bounces behind his eyes But then the rats do Chew the fabric...
Bored
Too-low vocals on most of this, which some might consider a plus. I was primarily concerned with the sound of the guitars, which were clipping the red zone of the VU meters throughout. Later on, we re-recorded this with legible...
I'm Getting Tired
So I now had a new instrument to throw into the mix, and this was my first try at writing a song with it. It didn't turn out too badly, and I was pleased with the overall sound, though a...
Come Together
In October of 1981 I bought my first electric guitar from a friend for the grand sum of $25. I can't quite recall the name of it -- I would later call it "a piece of crap," but I don't...
The Troubles
You'd never guess it from my name, but I'm 1/4 Scots and 1/4 Irish, from my mother's side. Indeed, my very nom de blog, "gnotalex," is a slight reworking of her maiden name, "O'Gnotalex," the famous Irish clan, or tribe,...
Pets
From March of 1981: This was -- believe it or not -- something of a breakthrough for my songwriting, at least as far as lyrics went. I was trying to narrow the focus, if only to prevent my too-often habit...
No One Will Ever Know
A melancholic little piece about . . . melancholy, I guess. It hangs together fairly well, save for the accidental overdub of 15 seconds of drums near the end. That certainly is a mood-breaker....
Backs Of Heads
There is a shocking lack of songs dedicated to the romance and mystery that is public transit. I've been through the discographies of several bands -- Ted Nugent, Bruce Springsteen and AC/DC most recently -- and I can find no...
Building A Wall
In this (recorded in the spring of 1980) I introduced a shocking new concept, melody. That's somewhat of a Catch-22 for rookies -- melody in rock is usually driven by the vocal, so you have to be able to...
Amy
This was written in the spring of 1978 and recorded on my way back to Canada; more specifically, at the Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal, where I spent a few days. I don't remember much of my room, but it...
Poor Boy
This is an old folk/blues song called variously "Poor Boy," "Po' Boy Blues," and "For God's Sakes, Will You Stop Playing That It's 3 O'Clock In The Morning For Crying Out Loud!" In fact, it's the earliest recording I have,...
Macavity, The Mystery Cat
I was reading a poetry compilation in 1977 and I came across this, which I immediately thought would make a great song. It was by T.S. Eliot, and according to the editor's notes, was one of several poems written for...
My Music
090. Building A Wall 089. Meth (2) 088. Just So You Know 087. Money, Guns, and Blood(2) 086. Truth (2) 085. Who Do You Know (2) 084. The Troubles (2) 083. just like a woman(3 082. Come A Day (3)...
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