Over the past two days I've inadvertently been drawn back to working on half-finished songs for my next album. After recording the first two new songs ('Bet on Me' and 'My Sweet Armageddon') I've found my own style. On my first album I had a lot of ideas that now sound to me as a listener like I was dabbling between 80's pop, country rock, blues/jazz and very current indie-pop in terms of identity. I was finding my style and own sound so it was all a big experiment of sorts and I was just euphoric about actually making it and playing music again after so long away.
Everything I do now is more choosey and I have just scrapped a few songs I was writing because they don't fit my sound, or I am not inspired by them. However, I started writing a song yesterday called 'Scratch' which was completely out of the blue when I was cooking in the kitchen, but it is totally a 'Marcie' song and is definitely going to be on the album. I grabbed my voice recorder and hummed down the melody and sketchy words and couldn't tear myself away from it for an hour afterwards so dinner had to wait!
Today I went back to working on a ballad called 'I Grew up today' but it now has my own style and I sang it differently to how I did when I first thought of it three months ago. I have 8 songs now for the 10 song album and am months ahead of schedule so that's progress and I feel I'm making some in my work now.
I am concious of practising my live set though so after I've finished recording 'Collateral Damage' this weekend (which I am not putting online until my album is ready early next year), next week I am going to practice every day on the set again and limit the time I drag myself away to work on my new songs. The problem I am having is that my new songs are all sounding better than my old ones and I want to immediately record them all so I can add them to my live set with a backing track! It's great being spoilt for choice by my own standards but I'm conscious of making sure I don't spend too long looking for perfection too early on and to just get out there playing, which I will when I know I am gig ready myself :)
Everything I do now is more choosey and I have just scrapped a few songs I was writing because they don't fit my sound, or I am not inspired by them. However, I started writing a song yesterday called 'Scratch' which was completely out of the blue when I was cooking in the kitchen, but it is totally a 'Marcie' song and is definitely going to be on the album. I grabbed my voice recorder and hummed down the melody and sketchy words and couldn't tear myself away from it for an hour afterwards so dinner had to wait!
Today I went back to working on a ballad called 'I Grew up today' but it now has my own style and I sang it differently to how I did when I first thought of it three months ago. I have 8 songs now for the 10 song album and am months ahead of schedule so that's progress and I feel I'm making some in my work now.
I am concious of practising my live set though so after I've finished recording 'Collateral Damage' this weekend (which I am not putting online until my album is ready early next year), next week I am going to practice every day on the set again and limit the time I drag myself away to work on my new songs. The problem I am having is that my new songs are all sounding better than my old ones and I want to immediately record them all so I can add them to my live set with a backing track! It's great being spoilt for choice by my own standards but I'm conscious of making sure I don't spend too long looking for perfection too early on and to just get out there playing, which I will when I know I am gig ready myself :)