Creativity tip no.756 -Sometimes you have to wear stupid hats

The more serious the song the more stupid me and Turlough become. Bill and Ted. Stupid hats are good during breaks…we drank the last of the Cuban coffee and this is what happened. He took the song “A fire to scare the sun” I had written on piano and added some awesome flavour to it. We finished the song he wrote the piano part for last week. It sounds deadly. I have a million ideas floating around my head for beats and loops underneath…we will see.

I played him some new ones on guitar and he liked them and suggested some good reversals of chord progressions and so on. It was nice to get an outside opinion on them.

Mary Barnecutt my long suffering cellist and road warrior won the National Oxfam poetry competition today. Fair fucks…she is damn talented with the ould words…

The desire to burn offices

Yesterday was one that started out with me wanting to turn an office and it’s inhabitants upside down before burning and ended with three troublesome songs “unlocking”.

I have been having trouble with my left hand so it has been taped up for a few days. After a truly shitty day trying to unsuccessfully sort someone else’s mess (long story short: My film distributor fucked up and I lost out on potentially about a years wages) I returned home and fumed before deciding there was nothing more i can do so leave it fucking go.

Sitting there i had a wave of “Just pick up the fucking guitar and see if you can still play”. I untaped my hand and next thing i know four hours have past and i have finished two songs and almost finished another. These were songs i had been having trouble with and didn’t know where to go. So I’m up and rearing to get going on the next ones.

Turlough comes over tomorrow to work on the piano part he wrote and and some sauce to the piano part i wrote. I have managed to save some Cuban coffee for him.

Here are some additions to the art section.

And now for the sauce…

I have 22 songs which are album contenders. There are 6 that are finished. All the rest are 95% there. They are at the meat and potatoes stage and now they require the sauce. I’m great at the sketching, But fine tuning takes me forever and keeps me awake thinking bout melodies, rhythms, patterns.

This should help…

blaahhhhh

sick as a dog…picked up the guitar and a song came out. just like that. sometimes its easy. here is a pic of a wild puck goat i came across while surfing.

Painting

Right now i have two rooms set up and i’m working between the two. Writing music until i come to a brick wall, go next door and paint untill i hit a brick wall…go next door… This is what i’m working on at the moment, it’s about 1.5m by 2.5 m. It’s called wexford st.

Kila

Me friends Kila have a great new album out, all their albums are great but this one is a fav of mine. Rónan from Kila will hopefully feature on me next album and i may try to get some of the other Kila legends on there too. Brilliant musos and great people. Have a listen and see what ye think…http://www.kila.ie/

notebooks

I have lots of notebooks that i trawl through when i have a melody and an idea for a song. Usually i will find lyrics to match the subject in one of the notebooks. I always carry one with me except in the shower which is when i often have brilliant ideas. Writing is like my voice. If i don’t use it , it gets weak and it takes weeks of writing to get the flow going again. Yesterday i sat at the piano and started to write a song with a firm idea of what i wanted, i went to the notebooks and read as far back as three years ago. Nothing fit. Well nothing “new” fit. I could easily have matched lyrics and melody to it that would have matched what i had done before. But it became very clear to me that i didn’t want to do that. I don’t want the album to sound the same as the last. What would be the point? I treat each album as if it is the last thing i will ever make so it should represent me exactly where i am to the best of my abilities. The piano has been great (even if it takes me a long time) because i’m coming up with different types of melodies. Lyrically i hope it will be a progression too. ok enough on here…i have to finish this song. Hope everyone is well.

Piano

Have been writing with Turlough playing piano and me singing to see what we come up with. Just listened back to the Jams and there are some really nice melodies in there. I hook up with him again next week for some more work together. I would like to have at least two piano and vocal tracks on the next album. Would love to do an entire album that way, Hopefully can afford to take a pianist on the road with me next year.

don’t blame the coffee

5.18 no sleep. sailing sea of chaos. cuban coffee fucked me up…no i fucked me up. I drank it.

flickr account

i opened a flickr account to so i can update photos on the road as the photpage on the website takes forever…time for an update.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/declandebarra/

I will try and get some more photos up soon and add to the art set