So this week, since it's on my mind at it's kind of smack dab at the 10 year anniversary mark of that band called Singe, I decided I'll make a concerted effort to pay tribute in the blog this week and next when I have the chance by making a few notes about that time.
Today I'll start with, but I don't promise to finish, with a look back at some of the songs we wrote, and possibly the order in which we wrote them.
The first Singe song was called "closed mind". It was horrid. Vile. I had some impression in my mind that since my god on earth at the time Trent Reznor wrote all the parts in all of his songs that I would/should do the same. I forgot to take into account that Trent had a lifetime of musical training, where I didn't really even posses a define sense of pitch or rhythm. I started by selecting an appropriately annoying patch on the Alesis DM5, and went from there. The songs was really about as basic as could be. Luckily when I presented it to the band they were able to round it off a bit, to leave it just a tiny bit less annoying then it actually was. For the sake of sport, I'll give you the lyrics to the chorus.
"close you mind to the world outside, it's so much better when you don't have to try"
I'll stop , because it gets ridiculously worse from there.
I'm pretty certain the next song was "Something to Know about Edith". This time I had learned that I wasn't, at least musically, Trent Reznor, though lyrically I don't know that I ever figured that out during the years of Singe, I may have at one time mistakenly thought I was Maynard James Keenan from Tool. Anyway, "Something to Know about Edith" began A heavy palm muted verse from Joe, and then he and Devin worked out the Chorus progression together. For my part I just went along, and later playing what Joe was playing on the chorus and then learning a version of the verse riff so I could play rhythm while he hit his wah pedal solo.
The chorus began with the disaffected youth gibbel of "The way you live your life, I cannot understand..." wow... ew.
Next song up was what at the time we believed was our "big hit single", but in looking back it maybe wasn't, or it just didn't age well or something... The song was called cellophane, and I was pretty convinced it needed a good disco beat. I wrote up a really basic progression for the chorus and wrote some bad lyrics that seemed to be in the verses about a girl at school and in the chorus some plea for possibly that same girl at school to see the deeper me. OH MY GOD. I am gagging on my own teenage self here! What goes through the mind of a child? So I brought the verse chords and the lyrical idea, if you can call and abortion an idea, to rehearsal and I showed Joe and Devin and Mike, making sure to stress the disco beat to Devin, who for his part understood that beat all to well. Joe was fancy enough to add his recently purchased Wah Pedal to the chords in the song in a very nice way, thus reall elevating the accomplishment, then he went so far as to write the chorus progression, and thus "Cellophane" was began. Devin then insisted on adding a steal drum line in the verse. This was a battle. Joe and I found it aweful, Devin of course loved to play it. It took weeks to convince him not to play it, in the end Joe and I finally won that battle and he didn't play it. He would occasionally play it in rehearsal to get our goats, which it did rather well.
I start to get less certain at this point in the process which songs came next, we had by this point jelled to the point where we were pretty collaborative and comfortable with the idea of, how you go about writing Singe songs, so they stick less in my mind then those awkward first attempts at creation listed above. I can say I'm almost certain that the next song was "Microscope". Up to this point there is scant reference to Mike, that's because there was scant contribution from Mike. Mike had never played before, he was a friend of Devin's, I think from their jobs at McDonald's. He was struggling to even play what the rest of us were struggling to write. I had even been playing my instrument longer than Mike. With "Microscope" it was decided it was time for Mike to feel really involved, we insisted that he write a riff, and the rest of us would write a song around it... After some chiding he had a riff, but not one Joe felt he could play over top of, so rather than lower his personal riff standard he would let Mike play his little, Bomp bomp bom bomp bomp bomp bom part, then he would do the kind of echo the riff thing so popular it banjo duels. Eventually the two riffs would work themselves into one, and Devin would play on the old Casio sound module Ronnie had given Devin, then I would come in, with some no doubt profound lyrics about something or other. I will now reveal the secret that it was Mike's first song he had some writing in and it was called "Microscope"... get it? Mike-ro-scope!! Ha! I was sooooooo ahead of my time.
I think next was a song called "Anna 217", which was about nothing I had any first hand knowledge of. It was fun none the same. Joe wrote a neat riff, then I was thrilled to death with myself for writing a part that goes over the top of that riff in the intro, sort of even like a lead guitar part... except Joe was such a more accomplished guitar played that his normal verse riff had the authority of a lead part anyway. The chorus was taken from my "lead part" played in a lower octave, with Joe using Wah Wah as a filter and Devin adding really neatly dramatic Drum Hits. We were all pretty damn proud of ourselves when we finished that song.
I'll leave you for the day with the a bit of the lyrics, because I like to punish my self publicly for not working harder at writing lyrics as a teen.
"she'll take you places that you've never been, until you never want to come back again"
I might write more later, but as the song goes, I'm not sure, I never want to come back again for the time being.
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