April 30ths

 

Short (Side 1)

 
Short (Side 2)

 

As April comes to a close, so does my experiment for April generating a song idea per day. What has been most interesting is that working from the music of language, as opposed to the language of music (with music coming first in the form of a chord change or riff,) results in a wider range of musical styles. It also creates perhaps too many ideas, and they have to be triaged or converged and need to enter the full writing stage. Or they can be done live, where one player creates a riff based on it and the other players follow it as a form of improv. This of course is nothing new, but my spin is that it's a remix based on what happens on a particular day, regardless of year, and is an abstraction of it, not a literal storyline based on any one event.

The 4/30 song idea:

4/30/1870 (William James Correspondence)

"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will, "The sustaining of a thought because I chose to when I might have other thoughts', need be the definition of an illusion."

4/30/2002  

Planetary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars,  Venus, and Mercury in the western sky at sunset. (First time in 80 years)  It's been cloudy, so no one's been able to see it.   

4/30/2009

Lyric line: My regret is better than your regret.

[4/2025: An AI generation. If you write lyrics, AI is a perfect way to prototype them. Not all lyrics work with AI. Sometimes it just doesn't "get" them rhythmically. But it is great for a cheesy blues that can work in some kind of ironic context. If we all have regrets, some might be better than others, and we can take comfort in that.]

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4/30/2010

Virga released. 

4/30/2021

Segovia complained that composers didn’t know how to write for guitar, because many passages would be unplayable as written. The problem is that we’re writing it down too much. Jazz had made the best heuristic by writing down only the melody and chord changes. I still like to do this whenever I can because then I feel the work is complete enough.

[4/30/2025: 4 years later I’m writing everything down. For the Songdays series, it’s one of the first things I do when I wake up. Writing for any instrument you don’t play is difficult, so you’re always groping around in a dimly-lit room].

4/30/2022

Frontiers released. 

4/30/2025

A "curio" based om the 2009 lyric.

3 Basses (4/30/2009) by meta4s

Curio No. __ by meta4s_ 

4/30/2046, Berlin

Neone and the band are back in the studio to write and record a song precisely at the hour of her immortality. They will attempt to create a decisive moment at the stroke of midnight while the band is jamming. An fMRI scanner is wheeled into the studio. She wants to record her brain activity at the time of the switch, and feed the data back into the recording console.

What was involved in the recording of Computational Resurrection?