If you've been checking out Mark Thirlwell's music blog you'll have heard a short piece he recorded a little while back called "The Cruelty Man". I think it's a splendid piece of music and so I decided to have a go at reworking it. That's probably completely wrong-headed - since I think it's already excellent, what exactly am I attempting to add?
Fair point, and because of that I haven't really added much at all. I've slightly re-ordered it and added my melodica and a recording of some geese at Swanswell park. I might try to add a little more, but I'm scared of ruining it by smothering it in cheesy effects in a misguided attempt to justify my intervention.
A couple of weeks back I suddenly got the urge to do a song using the melody from If It Wasn't For Dickie by Leadbelly. No real reason, except I find the song (which I only discovered about a year ago) haunting and compelling. It's not so much the lyrics, which I can only half make out, as the way the melody keeps taking unconventional twists and turns.
Anyway, I worked out the tune on my melodica, put some chords under it, and let it rest while I got on with Bourgeoisie. Then yesterday and today (while recovering from a mercifully short bout of flu) I started working on it seriously and it quite quickly became Follow Me Down. As usual it's not finished, but I quite like what's there so far. I hope it doesn't trample too much on the original.
By the way, the line "follow me down" isn't in Dickie, but I took it from another Leadbelly song:
I've been working on the opening section of A Message From the Bourgeoisie - shortening it by about 12 bars and making it busier. Still not quite sure what to make of it. Really it's a bit of a musical folly and my fear is that I've just thrown production and fx at it to hide its slightness.
I've been working on what is something like the fourth version of A Message From The Bourgeoisie, and it's gotten a bit out of hand. As always, it's far from finished. In fact (a) I'm starting to get a bit fuzzy about how a recording can ever be called "finished" these days - the concept is losing all meaning for me; and (b) the more I work on the track the more work I create for myself in terms of polishing and tweaking what I've just done (and then polishing the polish, and so on ad inf).
Lots of violin in the first two sections. I'm really enjoying learning to play the thing; it's such a delicate, graceful instrument. Who'd have thought it could produce the horrible sounds I manage to wrench from it?
