But I'm way ahead of myself there. I should start at the beginning.
I started taking guitar lessons around age 10 or 11. I know this because I remember that I was given the choice between getting a guitar and starting lessons or continuing my minor hockey career, moving from Atom to Peewee. I remember being frightened of the body-checking that would be introduced in Peewee, so I went with the guitar and lessons. In retrospect, that was definitely a good choice! I wasn't very good at hockey anyway. Not that I'm great with a guitar, either, but I digress.
I liked my guitar teacher, and he taught me everything I needed to know, from notes, to chords, to pentatonic scales. There was as much music theory as there was guitar technique in his lessons, which was very valuable. To this day, I still rely on the pentatonic scale for improvising solos, and I still play most chords the way he taught me. Unfortunately, I have long forgotten how to note-read, relying entirely on tablatures instead. I can't remember how long these guitar lessons continued, but it was probably a couple of years at least.
Somewhere around 12 or 13, I started writing songs, and naturally I wanted to record them for others to hear. I don't remember how I convinced my parents to buy me a $500 Tascam 4-track tape recorder, but I believe that giving up the guitar lessons was part of it. There is no question that I got their money's worth out of that 4-track.
I don't know how many songs I recorded on that 4-track, but it was likely around 100. I have three cassette tapes full of songs from that time, and those are only the songs that I finished to the point that I wanted to share with a musician friend. There are twice as many songs that were left unfinished on my master tapes and are now inaccessible to me. That well-used 4-track sadly kicked the bucket during my second or third year of university.
Discography, Song-writing Era 1, Cassette:
Fantasms in Conjure-gation (1994)
Elsewhere Not Here (1995)
A Learning Experience (1996)
I can't help but shake my head and laugh when listening to the awesomely titled "Fantasms in Conjure-gation," which is basically my greatest hits album from most of my teen years. As you can imagine, there is a huge variety of songs and song quality to be found on this cassette. The highlight is the "awesome" AD&D-influenced suite, "Conjure," "Dispel," and "Rituals."
"Elsewhere Not Here" was my first attempt at a theme album and was entirely recorded in late 1994 and early 1995. It is also much more consistent in quality than Fantasms. In fact, some of these songs have aged surprisingly well, despite a lot of lyrical immaturity.
"A Learning Experience" was written and recorded during my first year of university and is a much more mature and interesting collection of songs. My first two cassettes were only ever shared with a musician friend, but ALE reached a wider audience among my few university friends. The song "CHEM 111.3" was a particular favourite of my friends, to the point where they almost wore out the tape rewinding and replaying it. The standout track for me will always be the mysteriously titled "Z."
After the death of the 4-track, I stopped recording music for a few years. I didn't stop writing new songs, but they were never committed to tape. Because of this, most of the songs I wrote during that period (approx. 1998 to 2000), have long ago faded from my memory, and all I am left with is a sheet of lyrics with possibly a few chords or tabs scrawled in the margins.
My songwriting process has always been the same. For me, a song starts with the lyrics and a melody in my head. Often that is where the songwriting ends, and I am just left with mediocre poetry. But sometimes I will sit down with my guitar and this new set of lyrics, and I will work hard to find the notes and chords that work with the melodies. If I really like a set of lyrics, I will often settle with music that at least doesn't ruin the song.
When I started working my first full-time job in May of 2000, I found myself sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours a day with often half to three quarters of that 8 hours as spare time. I would spend hours each day writing new lyrics in Microsoft Word, often two or three a day, and then take those lyrics home to try to make songs. I have a binder full of these songs at home. The quality varies a lot, as you would expect, but many of the best songs I have ever written came from this time period (2000 to 2002). I needed a way to record and share some of these songs.
At first, I resorted to recording songs live using my DV camcorder, just me and my acoustic guitar. I sacrificed sound quality, but gained a spontaneity and rawness that few of my 4-tracked songs had ever had. I recorded approximately 30 songs this way, sharing 24 of them on two CDs that I handed out to friends and family. This was actually the first time that most people had ever heard any of my music.
But, now that I had a decent paying job, I knew it was time to take my music recording to the next level. So, I invested in a home computer with music studio capabilities, and began recording full-band songs using acoustic and electric guitars, keyboards, vocals, samples, and drum loops. This was obviously a learning experience, and I spent hours mixing songs to try to bring out the best in them. The end result was "Strangers from Distant Lands," my second theme album, and my third and final (to date) album on CD.
Discography, Song-writing Era 2, CD
Everything is Good (2001)
Time & Dreams Fade (2001)
Strangers from Distance Lands (2002)
When I look back at my three CDs, I actually find that, on the whole, I prefer the first two that were recorded live on my camcorder. "Everything is Good," so titled because that was the first song I recorded, is marginally the better of the two, mostly because of personal favourite songs like "Resonance," "Step One?" "The Curl," and "Je Souhaite." Not that "Time & Dreams Fade" doesn't also have some of my favourite songs: "Perpetually Single," "Embryonethics," and "Damaged Divinity."
The creation of "Strangers from Distant Lands" was an excellent experience, but I lost a little something in the songs with the approach I took. My biggest gripe is that I didn't deliver on the vocals for some of the songs as well as I know I could have. The main reason for this, and it's something I haven't mentioned yet, is that all of these CDs were recorded in a far-from-soundproof apartment suite.
When playing the guitar and singing at the same time, I worried less about the racket I was making, because my neighbours were hearing the complete song. When recording my third CD track by track, I had to sing the vocal parts loudly with the background music only in the headphones I was wearing. I'm sure my neighbours wondered why I was strangling so many cats every day. And feeling guilty about this, I held myself back in many places where I needed to let loose. I hold no illusions that I am a great singer, but I am a better singer than some of these songs show. To try to hide the weaknesses in the vocal master tracks, I overused vocal layering in some songs, which also does not help.
The songs that hold up the best on Strangers are my re-recorded versions of "Everything is Good" tracks "Je Souhaite," which features mostly whispered vocals, and "Everything is Good" itself, which was actually recorded live and then slightly overdubbed. I also love my two instrumental only tracks, the title track and "Ageless Refrain."
My fourth CD would have been (and may still be) titled "The Trouble with Time Travel." This album was written between 2003 and 2004, and would have included songs about moving into my new condo and meeting a certain special someone. I recorded a demo of one of the songs live on my camcorder in 2003 (for old times' sake) and created a quick multi-track demo of a second song in early 2005, but none of the other songs were ever committed to tape.
And then I effectively stopped being a singer-songwriter for approximately 5 years. I'm not going to try to explain this gap. I don't know if I understand it myself. It just happened. I didn't completely stop writing songs, but my output was way down to one or two songs a year, and I hardly played my guitar anymore. I once told a musician friend that most of my lyrics came from a dark, lonely place; from 2004 to 2009, this place no longer existed.
But I'm not back in that same place now, either. I have found some inspiration and spare time to write and record again, but I am not nearly as "dark" and/or lonely now as I was then. My life has improved in almost all ways, other than the one. I am not writing two to three songs a day. I have only written two songs in the past month. Maybe if I didn't have this blog as a time waster and a place to vent, I would waste time and vent by writing more songs.
I bought a new guitar on September 1st and my first task with the new guitar was to write a new song basically on the spot. Some of my favourite songs were written this way, with music and lyrics created spontaneously.
"Redefinition" was the song I wrote on September 1st to break in my new guitar. This was my first full day alone in my now much bigger feeling house, and I was obviously grappling with some intense emotions. As I mentioned above, the lyrics and music were created together and spontaneously, and the end result is pretty good, I think.
Today I am doing something that I have never done before. And I am hiding it behind the jump.
I decided a couple days ago when I started writing this post that it would be neat to end it with a video of me playing one of my songs, and "Redefinition" was the obvious choice, being the newest song I've written. So today I dug my camcorder out of storage. It's been a long time since I recorded anything on my camcorder: June 1, 2007, specifically.
When I sat down to record this video, I was intending this first take to just be an experiment to see where I needed to make adjustments in sound levels and camera placement. After uploading it to my computer, I realized it was already pretty good, despite my this-was-never-meant-to-end-up-on-the-internet mannerisms throughout, so here it is:
For those of you that have read this entire post, I have another "treat" for you. The following links are to MP3s of some of my favourite songs from all eras. You'll have to forgive the awful quality of the ALE tracks, as the cassettes are in rough, rough shape, and the audio capture was done sloppily.
"A Learning Experience" (1996)
CHEM 111.3
Z
"Everything is Good" (2001)
Step One?
Resonance
"Time & Dreams Fade" (2001)
Damaged Divinity
Embryonethics
"Strangers from Distance Lands" (2002)
Je Souhaite
Everything is Good
Ageless Refrain
"The Trouble With Time Travel" (2010?)
Zero Sequence (2005 Demo)
Stumble (2003 Demo)
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