I have been thinking about the various stages that a song goes thru in its writing.
Have you ever noticed the number of stages a song will go thru, from conception to completion? Here is what I am thinking:
The first stage is the initial idea: no matter how it gets there. Most typically for me, its one of two ways: either some daemon will jump into my head, and give me the idea fully blown of a bit of verse with the music already there or I will start playing with one of my instruments and some melodic or percussive bit will just grab me and not let go. I call this stage inspiration phase one.
The next step can take some time to happen. Naturally you will want to develop this bit of a motiv into a complete piece of music, but where to begin? I would imagine that you will set the sequencer to loop and just listen, listen, listen. You may be in this groove for hours, and not a thing may happen at all. Then just when you are about to give up, a small fragment may come out, something that makes sense to you. This is a cause for celebration, but usually at this point its one in the morning and at some point, you gotta stop and get some sleep. I call this stage moving forward, phase two.
Now you would think this means that you can continue apace and finish out the piece, and maybe in some cases you can, but here is what usually happens to me: I sit and stare at the screen for hours and hours, trying synth presets, playing my horns and whatever to try and move it forward. At some point I realize that it just ain't gonna happen that day and move on to something else.
Frustrating this is indeed. I call this the doldrums, phase three.
I try and have other pieces of music in various stages of completion to work on. However, one thing that will inevitably happen is that that song I am concentrating on will start playing itself back in my head, hour after hour, whenever my brain has a few cycles to spare. This will happen in one form or another for the entire time I work on the piece. I think I have an mp3 player in my brain. Always, I begin to think this is the best song ever. How could I work on it if it wasn't? I call this the endless loop, phase four.
So let us flash forward days, weeks, months????? Finally, I come back to the song and get a huge amount work done in a remarkably short period of time. Often, if I am writing lyrics and vocal melodies, these will all be written in one go. Its like opening the floodgates, kind of amazing actually, but this is usually the way it works. This is the racehorse, phase five.
Now onto the soul killing part of the song. The arrangement is done, all the parts written, recored and ready to mix. And mix. And mix again. This is somewhat what I imagine running a marathon is like, mile after mile of the tarmac underfoot, the end of the race somewhere in the distance. Of course, there is no defined endpoint, and no one but yourself to pass you drinks along the way.
The really bad part of all this is that at some point you will maybe start to be heartily sick of your wonderful creation. Yes, burn out. The only cure for this is to finally call an end to it all, and say it is DONE.
A great feeling this, although I hedge my bets and wait a few days and have some listens in different environments before I say its complete. In many cases, I will put it up on the web (not now tho, the songs are all being saved for the CD that I will put out before I die!). I call this the thankgoditsfinallyover state, phase six.
Now you get comments, good bad indifferent. You have heard the song so much that you can't really hear it anymore, so you don't listen to it again for a long time. The longer the better, really, otherwise you will start picking apart the things that no one else can hear.
Eventually, you will be able to listen to it again as a complete and whole thought. Its only then you can actually judge what you have done. I call this the acceptance, phase seven.
Its almost like a love affair - all the highs, the lows, the burst of affection and betrayal, although this is only going on in your own mind. And the most mysterious part is that once complete, you will do this process again and again. Is there any other way to grow as a songwriter? Because expanding your mind and your reach is for me what this whole thing is about, that and of course somehow making that strange and difficult to define connection with another mind out there, somewhere in the ether.
And that, of course, is the essense of the brain transfer concept: that some vibration in my mind will somehow, thru the electromechanical medium and the actions of vibrating waves of air from the speaker cones will vibrate the synapes in your mind.
If it works, what could be more magical than that?