G-C-D-Em.
E-A-B-E.
A-D-E-D-F#m-D-E-A.
Ebdim7-G9-F6-Am7.
Which of these four just doesn’t belong?
I was raised on classical music, specifically Baroque composers. My mother kept the radio in the kitchen tuned to WCRB (“You’re listening to Classical Radio Boston!”) and left it on nearly 24/7. The Baroque composers found beauty in coloring within the lines, using interplay of themes and counterpoints to drive the “action” in their music. In Western music, there are twelve pitches in the chromatic scale. There are only seven in any diatonic scale…it’s like having twelve crayons in your box and only getting to color with seven of them on any one page. The Baroque composers, he over-generalized, kept themselves to seven crayons at a time.
The classical music I was raised on, then, was beautiful and intelligent but not terribly adventurous. The rest of my childhood musical education came from “oldies,” mostly Beatles and Beach Boys and Napoleon XIV. Later, I got into Christian rock and worship music, and this as well is rooted in the framework. Color inside the lines. Don’t touch the other five crayons.
By the time I got around to writing music, composers had long since been “there and back again” in terms of breaking the shackles of the major and minor scales. My music composition professor was a guy steeped in the methods of 20th- and 21st-century composers. Under his tutelage, I completed a number of exercises in writing music using these methods, creating compositions which contained little or no reference to a particular musical key or a “tonal center.” While I was writing pieces for course credit, in my spare time I was writing songs and performing them on and off campus. Gradually, there was a leaking effect as these composition methods began to affect my songwriting.
Realizing that music consumers — and not the musical intelligentsia — would be the primary audience for any music I created, I decided to write accessible music within the standard musical forms, but to attempt to color and spice my songwriting with the tasteful use of modern composition techniques. Realizing that I don’t have the raw material to shred like Yngwie, I decided to write music that is primarily rhythmic. Realizing that I want my tone dictated by trees and not tubes, I decided to stick primarily to the acoustic guitar. And this is what led to terming my musical output “intelligent rhythmic acoustic alt-folk rock.”
The other afternoon, at the end of a long and chaotic workday, I wandered into the living room and grabbed the guitar. I wanted to paint an instrumental picture of a “day in the life”: the plodding along, the moments of barely-contained chaos, and the winding down at the end. I tried not to think in terms of chords or songwriting and to just play what came to mind as I relived the events of the workday in my head.
This is what came out. I like how dirty the refrain sounds, how the plodding work-a-day portion gradually increases in intensity throughout the song, and the way we end the way we started, plodding along and getting things done. In the end, I think this is a decent fantasia on my day. I could also see opening concerts with this as a way to warm up the band and the audience.
What do you think?
The clip
Recorded
December 18, 2008, 10:33:20 PM
Progressions
