IronBark – song by song – Steamlife

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Steamlife

What’s it about?

I started writing a short story (Yes, one of my hobbies is creative writing. No, you can’t read any. It ain’t good enough. Maybe three decades in the future I might but some proper effort into it, but not yet. No. Don’t ask again) about a man who tried to introduce elements of selection (natural he hoped, artificial in practice, sexual eventually) into his designs for steam engines. These led to designs for machines that designed their descendants and the whole thing got out of hand and led to tiny feral steam powered creatures living under his floorboards.

Or so he thought.

And then the Pinnochio, Data-from-Star-Trek story ensued where the half-mad designer was forced to defend them as being life forms worthy of respect (Doesn’t anyone know what the heart is for? he pleads).

Yes, this is the sort of thing I write songs about. Sod that love stuff, balls to sex drugs and rock’n’roll. Self aware steam-powered insects is where it’s at.

The Writing Process:

I wrote the following for my old songwriting website that no longer exists:

A Brand New Old Song and Why You Should Never Throw Away Songwriting Ideas

One of the most important things you can do as a songwriter is keep track of your unfinished ideas.

Many years ago…

About two years ago I started writing a song. It was a heavy metal song sort of in the phrygian mode with crunchy stoccato riffs and a chorus that I couldn’t sing very well and probably wasn’t very good.

I recorded part of it, but I don’t have a heavy metal band and never finished it.

Ten years previously I half wrote another song. It had slightly embarrasing juvenile lyrics and the verses weren’t up to much but the chorus was good. I needed to use that chorus in a decent song.

For at least 10 years I did nothing with that chorus.

SteamLife!

At about Christmas time 2010 I started work on my second solo album, IronBark. I went back to that heavy metal song, made it more rock than heavy metal, replaced electric guitars with acoustic.

But the song still didn’t work because it didn’t have the hooky chorus that I felt it needed.

After several months nudging at it that hooky chorus from ten years ago came back to me – I had to dig through some old cupboards to find the piece of paper I’d written it down on, but even through three house moves I’d kept hold of it.

I changed the key, did some cutting and pasting and made it fit.

Two songs I didn’t know how to finish and thought were dead ends turned into one song that I’m proud of. It’s madcap and silly and the lyrics are absurd, but tis become one of my favourite new songs.

The Recording Process:

This was recorded over a very long space of time. The original heavy metal version was recorded in 2009, left on a hard-drive then revived almost as an after-thought when I started on IronBark in late 2010.

It was recorded with the original chorus, which I cut out and replaced. The distorted metal guitars were replaced with acoustics, weird noises added at beginning and end.

The guitar solos in the middle took forever to get right. Listen carefully and you’ll actually still hear mistakes (I shouldn’t point this out should I?) but I’ve never liked perfect recordings.

Inspired by/Blatantly steals from:

Not sure. Perhaps slightly from the bands ‘Unexpect’ and ‘Frameshift’. But only a little. This one is almost original.

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If you enjoyed this post, why not support an independent artist by grabbing some music here. 

You can download a free ep here.

You can also join the mailing list for instant access to a free song and a to get regular updates about releases and gigs. Click here for the mailing list!

IronBark song by song – The Beast of the Air

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The Beast of the Air is about hunting Sky Kraken from an airship. It’s about the difficulties of defending one’s livestock from such creatures, particularly in light of their bewitching tentacles and hallucinatory scent.

Yes, like all the songs on IronBark, The Beast of the Air is a narrative affair. I can’t help it – I grew up listening to heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth all of whom wrote narrative songs about various sci-fi and fantasy topics which has led me to writing my own story-based songs.

Musically the album is a mixture of my folk, prog and indie influences, with a bit of metal here and there but lyrically it’s all narrative, and all set in a steampunk world.

You can stream the song over on bandcamp along with all my other songs (bandcamp let’s you stream for free and has a great mobile app. It also isn’t dodgy like spotify).

The Writing Process:

Here’s the first recording of Beast of the Air. It’s an acoustic version, but as you can hear it didn’t change very much between the intial idea and the recording:

Here’s something I wrote about on my songwriting blog in 2011, back when I used to have a songwriting blog. I think it gives a fair account of the songwriting process:


Here’s a little story of how I wrote a song about hunting Sky-kraken

Sitting down with my acoustic guitar, I just started playing. I didn’t know what I was going to play except that I wanted to write something new.

Lately my fingers have been finding E lydian rather too easily, so I started with an E major 7 chord and a few twiddlings with the scale – not enough to be called a melody, just a bit of noodling.

I carried on playing, entirely aimlessly…

Alun Vaughun a fantastic solo bass player had recently turned me onto the music of Mike Kineally. His songs use lots of complicated chords, I decided I wanted something harmonically lush – so some 9th chords worked their way into my guitar part. Nothing like Kineally really, but that memory triggered the chords.

A few more moments noodling…

The last big gig I went to was Opeth at the Royal Albert hall – some Opeth-like chords appeared under my fingers – but I remembered Kineally and for some reason that meant I had to play a little melodic run that didn’t sound like Opeth at all.

I had been reading PZ Myers’s blog – he’s a biologist who likes Cephalopods. This combined with my recent obsession with Steampunk and suddenly the song was about hunting Sky-kraken in an Airship.

Steampunk led to memories of Radiohead’s video for There There, which led to a chorus ripping that off – and now the Kraken was winning because the chorus melody was about the bewitching power of it’s ink and tentacles.

All of this occurred at a far less conscious level than I’m making it appear, and it resulted in this song

The structure of this is pretty standard: intro, a couple of verses, a chorus, a middle bit, back to the chorus. What makes it stand out I think is the instrumental arpeggios and the slightly dreamy atmosphere. I think the chord choices I made help create a slightly sweet, slightly odd mood. Also of note is the structure of the melody in the intro. You get the first part of a line, then the line again a little bit longer, then a third time with the full melodic line. That’s something i do quite often, for example in the intro to Watermen’s Square, or the title track from Spinning the Compass.

The Recording Process:

The album was recorded in my spare room with two cheap mics, a cheap and simple version of Cubase and a few free plug-ins. At the time I considered myself a novice when it came to recording – I still do!- but I was certainly getting better at it with Ironbark, and this album was a step up from the original version of Spinning the Compass, my first album. I know it doesn’t sound pro yet, but I’m proud of it.

Of particular note in the Beast of the Air is the wailing ‘Kraken’ sounds – these were recorded with my guitar by playing through a Sonuus G2M midi converter – something I used to play a lot of the synth sounds on the album.

Inspired by/Blatantly steals from:
As well as ripping off Radiohead (a little), some of the arpeggios are very similar to a couple of Opeth tunes. Sssssh, don’t tell anyone

This song got a live airing at the Asylum, one of the biggest steampunk events – here’s a blog post about that – but I haven’t played it that often. Maybe that’s something the band and I should correct.

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If you enjoyed this post, why not support an independent artist by grabbing some music here. 

Or why not click here to learn about one of my other albums, Happy People.

Metallica and the limitations of classical theory

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Here’s a video – admittedly one with a sense of humour – that analyses a Metallica song and claims it has a bar of 21/32.

Being a nerd, I wrote an analysis of this song for my university dissertation which was all about genre distinctions in heavy metal.

Even then I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of using classical notation to transcribe this kind of music simply because heavy metal musicians don’t use it. It’s the wrong language, though before recording technology became so readily available maybe it was the only option.

This guy, nice as he seems, mistakes skill at the music for being able to think about it from a western classical perspective. Being able to think ‘let’s make this bar 21/32’ is not in any way more advanced than thinking ‘let’s make this bit go ‘ba dum dum’ ‘.

A rhythmic grid is one way of feeling music, but it’s not a rule, just an option. Western classical methods are definitely fine, and very useful tools that I use myself, but they are not the only way to think of music and I find myself mildly annoyed at musicians who only see through this lens. In fact it’s one of the reasons I don’t regret not being a music teacher anymore – all the qualifications saw things via that lens even when they were pretending not to be about classical music.

So, yeah, music theory. Raaaw.

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If you enjoyed this post, why not support an independent artist by grabbing some music here. 

You can download a free ep here.

You can also join the mailing list for instant access to a free song and a to get regular updates about releases and gigs. Click here for the mailing list!

 

Gig report: Surrey Steampunk Convivial

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On Saturday 5th August Gareth and I played at the Surrey Steampunk Convivial.

This is always a great gig. I’ve played at something like eight or nine of them over the years and it’s always fun. Sometimes I’ve played to a nice full room, sometimes to a small but lovely audience. This gig was more the latter, but the audience certainly built up over the set.

Before our set there was the small matter of the tea duelling competition. The aim of the game is a simple one: hold your tea-dunked biscuit aloft the longest without dropping it, and get it into your mouth to win! It is a series sport, arranged in tournament style and held at steampunk events the world over.

Tea Duelling at the Surrey Steampunk Convivial

And then, late because we were on Surrey time, not clock time, we had a bash through some songs.

As a solo performer I’m quite used to juggling the setlist, deciding on different songs to play depending on the mood and energy in the room. So it seemed natural to do that on this gig too, which is arguably not fair on Gareth. But I did it anyway, and he managed to keep up despite me not explaining myself and just introducing songs out of order.

Halfway through a song that Gareth probably wasn’t expecting!

In particular, with the smaller audience some of whom were really paying attention and listening to every note, it seemed necessary to have Self Made Man earlier in the set rather than Flow my Tears. Self Made Man is a little bit more immediate, and has a funny intro whereas Flow my Tears is a bit more serious and it seemed appropriate to put it in and save Flow my Tears for later. I reckon this was the right call.

Anyway, a fun gig and a good way to round off the initial trio of gigs with Gareth. Things are sounding pretty good.

Here’s some video:

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If you enjoyed this post, why not support an independent artist by grabbing some music here. 

You can download a free ep here.

You can also join the mailing list for instant access to a free song and a to get regular updates about releases and gigs. Click here for the mailing list!

Mastering the ‘Secret’ album

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As I write I’m listening to the first draft master of my ‘secret’ instrumental album. This has been a labour of love, put together over two years, five years or if we go back to when the first tracks on it were initially composed, 15 years.

Here’s a picture of me burning a CD so I could listen to it on various speakers, including the ancient CD player in our kitchen. My wife reckons she got this particular CD player when she was 16, so it’s the better part of two decades old. it even has a tape deck. If we can make a recording sound good through this, we can make it sound good on anything.

If everything goes according to plan the album will be out in the autumn. Fingers crossed!

Gig report: The Horns Watford supporting The Far Meadow

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Tuesday 1st August Gareth and I played our second gig as the Tom Slatter Duo (no, that really isn’t what we’re called). We were at The Horns in Watford, supporting The Far Meadow, a proper prog band with keyboards and everything.

This was the last week at work for me before a well deserved two weeks off. Working in an education related charity as I do, the period after school exams is incredibly busy and I was at the end of a month of total madness. Before the gig I was therefore mildly dreading it. I assumed I wouldn’t have the energy to perform even slightly well.

Thankfully that’s not what happened. By the time we were on stage adrenaline had kicked in and I had all the energy I needed.

This was also a better gig than the previous one in Darlington. We missed out So Far From The Shore, for time reasons (and cos it’s a bloody difficult song. Why on earth did I write it?) so the set included:

  • Happy People
  • Satellites
  • Some of the creatures…
  • Flow my tears…
  • Self Made Man
  • Black Water
  • Wizards of this Town
  • Set light to the Sky

It being a hot night, my guitar went slightly out of tune on Satellites which was annoying, and I think Gareth wasn’t 100% happy with the solo on Flow my Tears. Nevertheless the rest of the set went swimmingly.

It was a pub gig, with lots of the crowd (a very healthy 40-50 people, pretty good for a Tuesday in August) there for The Far Meadow. Therefore there was plenty of chat and we didn’t have the whole room paying attention for the whole set. I don’t mind this at all, that’s part of how pub gigs work. I regard it as a bit of a challenge to get them all.

On Self Made Man I think we did get them. That song is a bit different, and with the second guitar part it really works. I felt a definite change in the audience once we got there. The same was true of Black Water, particularly the end section which is a proper singalong bit (not that anyone sang along this time). I think we kept them to the end for the most part too.

What helped, and what really made this a great gig for me, was the presence of a few of the denizens of The Tom Slatter Immoral Support Group. Andy, Andy, Spike, Mark, and Matthew (Oh god, I bet I’ve missed someone off. It’s inevitable isn’t it that if I write a list of people I want to thank I’ll miss people out cos I’m forgetful and rubbish with names. I’ll just throw a few random made up names at the end of the list to cover myself), Charlie, Nancy, Imhotep and Phil all came down to see the show.

I am genuinely rather chuffed that people seem to be liking my stuff. I might have been recording for a while but putting effort into live shows is something I’m only just starting and having people come along who like the music is a really lovely thing. Makes it all worthwhile.

Although there could have been more heckling. Come on guys.

Anyway, we headed home happy, although how happy Gareth was sleeping on my ancient second-hand sofa, beset by my cats who were rather miffed at being kicked out of the front room I’m not sure. He’s says it was fine, but he might just be being polite.

Anyway, here’s some video, and yay for gigs:


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If you enjoyed this post, why not support an independent artist by grabbing some music here. 

You can download a free ep here.

You can also join the mailing list for instant access to a free song and a to get regular updates about releases and gigs. Click here for the mailing list!

Half price tentacles!

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Sale! Fit the Fourth cds now available for £5.

My fourth album, a collection of songs that I poured my heart and soul into; that concluded a musical journey for the character Seven Bells John that began on my first album 6 years previously; that contains some of my best ever songs, including what might be my signature song Some of the Creatures…. is now available for just a fiver.

I asked David Elephant, CEE (chief executive elephant) of my record label if the 20 pence I previously had received per £10 would now be 10 pence. He informed me that the 20 pence I had been receiving was part of the £5 that has been discounted. So I won’t be receiving that, but as he put it I should probably ‘shut up with my whinging’.

Still, it’s a great deal. If you don’t have a copy now’s the time to get one! Click here to do so.

Rehearsal videos!

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Here are some videos – my first attempt at a multi-camera thing. Well, I say camera, my phone and my cheap zoom recorder. And yes, I could have framed the shot of me better, but meh, who cares right? It’s a scratch recording of a rehearsal.

Specifically it’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, and Black Water. We’ll be playing both at upcoming gigs – have a look at the sidebar for more gig info!

 


Midsummer Madness or How Tony Survived

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Tony being warmly greeted by yours truly

Last Sunday I wasn’t too well. Overwork, a summer cold and a lack of sleep had laid me low. But Mothertongue were playing on Sunday in Balham, so I wasn’t staying in bed were I belonged. I was heading to south London.

The other motivation, along with supporting Mothertongue and fellow BEM acts Under a Banner and Verbal Delirium, was to find and punish a man named Tony.

Tony claims he’s a fan of my music. That might be the case, though if you can decipher this sub-Joycean melange of a review you’re more clever than I. He is however guilty of the most egregious, violent punning on the internet. He’s, let’s be frank, a twatbadger and one I was determined to deal with, despite my cold induced fug.

Mothertongue! Mothertongue! Mothertongue! Mothertongue! Mothertongue!

Mothertongue are everything I want in a band. The moment I heard the opening lyrics to Tyrant of the Lizard Kings – “I’ll work the pedals and the devil can steer, things are gonna change, gonna change round here” – I was hooked and the rest of their album Unsongs is an absolute delight.

What do they sound like? Well, at Midsummer Madness, the gig in Balham, they were sans drums, so this gig wasn’t exactly typical. On record, with the full electric set-up they’re all catchy choruses, hooky trumpet lines, catchy choruses, interesting guitar parts, catchy choruses, amazing lyrics, and songs you want to dance, jump and down and singalong with.

I like a singalong chorus and Mothertongue have got ’em by the bucketload.

Acoustic, obviously things were quieter which meant the melody writing was highlighted, both in the vocal harmony parts and the lead guitar and trumpet. Frontman Louis was a delight, thanking David Elephant of Bad Elephant Music was signing them, thereby taking them from obscurity into further obscurity.

As a teenager, as well as my metal, I loved Britrock stuff like Mansun and Gomez and so on. Having got older, I also like clever muso things, and I’ve always liked a singalong bit. Mothertongue do all of that and this gig was the perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Before them I caught the end of Under a Banner’s set and was surprised by the cover of Metallica’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which they performed with gusto and skill. Broken down trains had kept me from the venue for the start of their set, but I really enjoyed what I heard.

Verbal Delirium from Greece were clearly the audience’s favourite of the three and I can see why. There’s was a performance of real class and skill, and much closer to a traditional prog act – albeit with goth and metal ingredients as well – which explains the enthusiasm given the prog bent of the rest of the bill.

By this point however, I was flagging and had gone deaf in one ear – a hindrance more related to illness then loud music. Tony by this point had already heckled me from the stage, which I’m sure is not the right way round for heckling, but other than giving him a warm friendly greeting (see the picture above) I decided that it was time to head home and find my bed.

Next time, Tony. Next time.