Happy Late Saturday Night, Sweet Baby,
Today was my day off for this month, so I am writing from home. We are still experiencing Gale Force Winds, so I didn't do much but go to the store for some supplies. I learned the chords to "Space Oddity" by David Bowie, so that was fun. On days off, for the past year or so, I have been learning songs (Beatles mostly but others too) and having a blast because I finally developed the dualistic timing to be able to sing and play. That is a direct result of becoming a choir member in 2014, and because my voice has developed through choir singing, it has been a motivating factor in wanting to learn songs. Now that I know I can sing 'em, I wanted to learn to play and sing at the same time, which I only ever did 25 years ago, as a member of a friend's band, and then I was only singing a few backing vocals. Now it's a whole lot more fun. :)
The other thing is - and I have to go on a brief tirade about this, lol - is that I am noticing, as I see the chord patterns for these songs, just how expert some of these guys are (or were) at songwriting. The first thing I notice is the simplicity. There are only so many melodic chord changes to work with in the rock format, and people like Bowie and The Beatles used many of the same changes more than once. On a side note, I also learned Mike Oldfield's "Moonlight Shadow", a song so catchy you can't get it out of your head for days, and it is as simple a progression as you can get. But - and I have been harping on this - what I notice is that the vocal line takes the lead in forming the song. The chord changes form the background, the basic structure, but in all these great pop songs it is the vocal line which really gives a song it's melodic vibrance and fluency. In a song like "Space Oddity", which has some minor 7ths and other compound chords, you can see that Bowie added these slight changes to go with his vocal, and either : a) he really knew his music theory and chord patterns, or b) he wrote the song on piano, where the notes are all in a row. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know The Beatles did it that way often, and that when you see a lot of melodic "stepping stones" in a song, like majors into minor 7ths, then into a combination chord, etc., that it often means the song was written on a piano. A piano has all the notes in a row, and so the chording is structurally more intuitive to follow. In the same way, with the human voice, the notes are once again "all in a row". And so the "stepping stones" of melodic ascent and descent are naturally intuitive to follow.
Tonight's movie was another Western, "The Kentuckian" starring Burt Lancaster, or if you are spelling it in the phonetics of his own voice, as if you were imitating him (which I do, haha) : "Burt Lahn-cass-tah"!
So Burt Lahn-cass-tah it is, and he was great in this movie, the Technicolor and Cinemascope story of a Davey Crockett-type Frontiersman who lives off the land with his young son and their dog. But of course Civilisation comes calling, in the form of Burt's successful and more worldly brother, who wants to clean him up and settle him down. It works for a while, because Burt is a quick learner, but his heart is in the countryside, to which he yearns to return. All kinds of plot and storyline play through, including a stint on a Mississippi Riverboat, and I love all the Western landscape and cultural nostalgia which was probably instilled in me by going to Disneyland and watching Disney movies as a small boy. I have said I should have been born in the 1930s or 40s, but on the other hand I should have been born in the 1870s so I could've lived through Western times..... :)
Anyhow, that was all the news for today. I saw a couple of post by you, one was a photography project by your longtime photographer friend Sarah - which had a beautiful message as to it's meaning - and the other was of one of the guys from Stitched Up Heart, so maybe you are working on something for those guys, given that you were just in Florida with them?
At any rate, I hope all projects are coming along well.
Tomorrow after church I am gonna drive to Burbank to take my sister Sophie shopping, but I will be around in the early morning (8am) and then again in the afternoon by 4:30.
See you then. I Love You. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment