davidkeeblemusic.com

A songwriting WordPress site

Any Other Man

December 21st, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Dec, 21 2010
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In my last blog I mentioned that I was going back over old work-tapes and digitizing them. One of those work-tapes was part of creating a new song – a writers’ group assignment to find a song from the earliest days of our songwriting and see if it could be made into something new and good.

So Any Other Man is the result. All it was at first was chorus lyrics on a scrap of paper – for which I could remember the tune and chords, which is kind of amazing. I thought there were no verses (though I later found one on the work-tape – no good but musically interesting).

So I wrote new verses – simpler, because the chorus is musically quite active. And then a pre-chorus, to help it all marry, and a bridge, to add the classical sidelight on the thoughts of the song.

It’s a song about a couple in the last throes of their relationship, but who seem to be unable to end it – for reasons of pride, perhaps. I made a demo version in my studio – the whole thing, plus an excerpt from the work-tape, can be found on the site.

Hope you like.Any Other Man

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Big Enough?

December 17th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Dec, 17 2010
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So, I did finish the song I was talking about on October 22 – Any Other Man – but I haven’t posted it or blogged about it since I’m still finishing the demo.

Meantime I polished another song, because of a deadline. This is “Big Enough”, which is a song about a junior hockey player that I wrote in 2006. I won’t tell the story of the song – it’s on the site at http://www.davidkeeblemusic.com/Songs/Big%20Enough.html as is a link to the new version, with full band. The deadline was a song contest – Radiostar – which I saw the finals of at Canada Music Week last year. Not sure why I went to the trouble of entering – typically I don’t do well in contests – but I just felt like getting it out there. It’s a good song.

Also I was having a wonderful time putting the demo together and needed a reason to finish it. Playing lead, mixing, all that stuff. Not wonderfully engineered but with good energy all round, I think. So it’s been sent in to Virgin Radio Ottawa and we’ll see what happens.

Also in the meantime I have been spending a lot of time with old worktapes. I’ve made worktapes my whole songwriting career, practically, because I like to write by recording. Notes on paper are only good if I’m going to do a score, which interrupts the process somehow. Editing on the PC is ok when I’ve done the heavy lifting and refining is okay, but I can’t stay open enough to receive new stuff if I’m typing or writing. Recording what I come up with as I come up with it lets me feel secure that I have it down so I can move on fast to the next bit, save different versions, and besides it preserves the feel of the tune and is a good way to ensure that what I write is singable.

So I wanted to find the chorus that made the beginning of Any Other Man – which dates from 1973 – so the tape had to be baked and dubbed over to digital. No point in dubbing only one tape so I did 4 or 5, all from that period. Very interesting glimpse into the past. I remembered most of the songs, even the ones that never got finished, but there were some surprises. And a couple of observations.

First, that there are a lot of tunes to be recreated from those days. Some are not with the trouble, and the lyrics are all dated and dull, but the tunes are good. So I’ll be doing more of that. Second, I could actually play guitar in those days! There’s stuff on those tapes I can’t even figure out, much less play nowadays. Something about practising – or at least playing all the time, which I don’t do anymore …. but should. There will be more from that source …

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Readings part 1

November 15th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Nov, 15 2010
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Minor news today is that I have posted a piece – an archival one called “Readings in Praise of Winter”.

It’s a very simple piano piece that dates from around Christmas, 1973, which is when I presented it as a present to my musical friend Susan Evans. Too simple, perhaps, as Sue, a pianist with considerable technique, found its simplicity and lack of technical demands puzzling. On the other hand, my friend Heather, who has taken up the piano later in life, finds it very much to her taste. She visited recently, and since she spent an hour or so a day playing, I dug it up, entered the music in Sibelius, and produced a score she could take home to her piano teacher in BC, where she is now happily playing it. Musically, it descends from a guitar piece I wrote in 1970 or 71 called Readings. The theme of the first movement is the same, but translated to 3/4 from 4/4 and therefore with a different set of consequential phrases. I later used it, with some elaboration, in the relaxation piece, “Windborne”.

As for the other movements, memory fails me, but the piece is clearly an “homage a Satie” so it may have been written as a composition exercise – it was my first term at UBC music school – but then again it may have been simply a Christmas present ….

What’s posted today is a score and a recording, linked from the song page on the site.

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Relaunch – boat doesn’t quite sink

November 5th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Nov, 05 2010
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Today I finally managed to revise enough of the davidkeeblemusic website to post the new pages. A humbling experience. Some of it is cool and I like it, but I am not a brilliant HTML coder or designer (in case you didn’t know that) and there are plenty of bugs, design flaws, tpyos, and general “things needing fixing” to keep me going for a while.

Least impressive is that all I have managed after much effort is essentially to redesign and supplement the material that was already there from years ago, but hopefully now I can manage to load up some new stuff in between debugging sessions. The plan is;

- complete a new song, make a quick demo, and load it up with a song page
- do the same thing with a recent piece that people like so there’s a place where they can listen to it. They won;t be fully produced recordings, but that’s not what the site is about.
- do the same thing with archival material from long ago, using digitized baked tapes … and then …

repeat this cycle until, after two years, perhaps everything I think worth exposing will be up there. Hope so anyway. I’m looking forward to that process. And when uninspired, it’ll be bug-stomping time …

In the meantime there’s a few new things – some stories about songs, some links to songwriters and people who write about songwriting that are cool ,,,,

Next week I’ll be posting about some new material. A complete version of the song I blogged about and an old piano piece that got revived recently for a friend …

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No words, just music

October 22nd, 2010 Posted in songwriting
Oct, 22 2010
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I can”t cope with having music and no words. I don’t know how many times I’ve started with a tune, thinking – I know how to do this, this is a great tune,  and it’ll be easy besides the tune sounds exactly like it needs words about … about … about … hmm.

So this week it happened again, and I still have a lovely slow tune with no lyrics.

I was going to take it to my little songwriters meeting, but I didn’t have it.  So the night before (always the last minute) I looked back over our “assignments” – one of them was to find a tune from our earliest days as a songwriter, play it for the group (I think I suggested this – was I crazy?) and then see about making it work for today.

Actually that turned out ok. I didn’t go back to the very beginning – even I object to some forms of humiliation. But I found a song from about 1973 where i had a chorus but no verses. I still liked the chorus and its words were okay, so I started in on the verses on the “morning of” and actually it went quite well. Wrote two – could still use a bridge and an ending, and I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. Specially since I am often the one who comes to the meeting with nothing, while others (muttering) have two good songs finished.

So, of course, everybody bailed on the meeting. Double-booked by accident, coming late because of a dog, surgery … Surgery, I ask you – what kind of excuse is that?

Anyway no meeting, but I have most of the song, and maybe I’ll get it done by next time.

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Hi

October 14th, 2010 Posted in archiving, songwriting
Oct, 14 2010
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A stunningly beautiful day in the Lanark Highlands, where autumn is the best … I am editing song pages in a complete update of my site www.davidkeeblemusic.com. Nothing new posted there for years so it will be a complete renovation when I post it all in a few weeks.

And that’s mostly what this slog will be about. (“songlog = slog”) Today I write the “how it came about” stories for Angels in the Snow and Big Enough and added the lyrics. I’d better writte these stories down while I can still remember them!

At the moment the plan is to get a Lot of material on the site. Recordings, lyrics, scores, a complete record of what I’ve written. That will be the work of years, I think, but it doesn’t worry me.  It takes what it takes, and I enjoy it.

The only issue is balances: making $, writing new stuff and also recording the old stuff. But they can fit together.  Last night I cam across a really beautiful tune I wrote sometime in the past but didn’t make into a song at the time – I think I was into fast songs at that moment – and I think i will write the lyrics for it this week. Let you know how it goes.

Also today is a memorial service for my old friend and colleague Fred Thompson. Active and energetic right to the end – 96 – last Thursday.  Fred was an amazing man – a futurist for most of his life, and one of the inheritors of a music publishing form, Gordon V. Thompson. I was sorry that I wasn’t able to set some lyrics that he sent me about 18 months ago. And I’m sorry to see him gone – he made life interesting for a lot of people, I think, and certainly for me.

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