Western Sky

 

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.   

In The Western Sky by meta4s

 

5/1/2024

Just about everything needs to be replayed. I've somehow forgotten how to produce. It's interesting that if you've had to wear many hats in your life you start to be fine with just one. At some point, you surrender to basic black or a wardrobe of just black T-shirts and jeans. It's a strategy but I'm wary of it. It's like deciding on one brain hemisphere over the other. This is why I'm always adding atmosphere as a way for it to be like putting paint on a canvas. As a writer though, you're the architect who sometimes is just getting the building to stand up. Since I've had the Jazz Bass tuned to Drop 31 tuning for months, I just used it as-is. Ironically, it's very root-fifth-octave. You'd think it would have a more "sour" quality as all alternate tunings stuff does. The lyrics are still provisional and sketchy. They're still looking for meaning. I'm thinking "western sky" could be a metaphor for something on the horizon for the West as if it were a rare cosmic alignment or a total eclipse.