Toy

I've written a new song! I'm quite chuffed with it actually. I finished it last night, did a quick recording and then had it going round in my head all night - which, I think, is a good sign.

I quite like the recording (it's on my MySpace). It's very rough and I get a lot of it wrong but you can hear my girlfriend getting ready for bed in the background and it's a nice record of about the second time I played it all the way through.

It's called Junior Architect and I got the idea from the songwriting class that I'm going to. We had to think of an everyday saying that is a metaphor, then write a letter to someone using imagery from that metaphor without using the actual words it. It had to be about a relationship and it had to be in the first person. We were asked to write it in a verse/chorus structure and to write at least 2 verses. Quite a specific brief, but I found it's actually easier to have something to work to like this.

What I found most useful was writing lots in the letter before I started to write the actual song. I wrote pages and pages of thoughts and phrases, sometimes repeating sentences - just writing them out again - before song lines started to pop out. I'll definitely use this technique again.

I used the metaphor "back to the drawing board" as it made me think of a lowly architect, working away, getting things wrong and always having his plans rejected. I thought there were some good meanings to be gleaned from that.

I still managed to torture myself over the writing of this song though. The day before yesterday I was trying really hard to write the song and it just wouldn't come and everything I wrote sounded contrived and meaningless and I thought I wouldn't be able to do it and I went to bed in a foul mood.

But last night I just calmly sat down with my guitar and my notes and wrote it.

I feel very pleased to have written something I'm happy with again. It's like having a new toy. I was excited all night to go and listen to it again.

Now I just need to keep this momentum up!