7 Questions for Michael Ekeghasi

Posted on by Richard Lomax

Our latest songwriting interview is with Michael Ekeghasi. Michael was born in Lagos in Nigeria and lived in Finland where he built a large and dedicated fanbase. Michael performed to an audience of about 15,000 people at the Pelipoikki rally in Helsinki. He shared same stage with the likes of famous Finnish rapper Paleface, Malang Cissokho and the renowned Helsinki Symphony Orchestra.

Michael Ekeghasi

He has now relocated to London where he has recorded a string of well received singles and written a host of excellent songs for our very own Positive Songs Project in 2020. He regularly collaborates with fellow PSP luminary Maya McCourt on the Flotsam Sessions.

1. What’s the first piece of music or song you remember hearing?

A piano rendition of “All my life” by K-Ci and JoJo. It is probably not the first music I’ve heard but it is a memorable one and that is because it led to my first ever recording experience but that is a story for another time.

2. Can we talk a bit about the last song you wrote… was there a specific intention when you began to write it?

The last song I wrote, before the latest one, stems from a conversation I was having a friend who happened to have co-written it with me. We did not set out to write a song. It was just a simple but deep conversation about the horrific situation in the world. How so many children are suffering from the lack of food, basic amenities, education and health care. The idea of writing a song only came when we thought could not do a lot about the situation but then realized that we both have a tool we could use to raise funds and create more awareness, and that is our song writing skills.

So we set out to write “Dying is not for kids”. It’s a very emotional song. I remember playing it in a song sharing group sometime ago and one of the audience told me he would not listen to the song again because he has a daughter and he can’t imagine her going through “all those sufferings”. But that is the reality of the world we live in today. My co-writer and I were able to raise some funds through donations on release week for Pelastakaa Lapset ry (Save The Children), an NGO in Finland which is dedicated to helping children and families from impoverished societies. The song was written in Finland and recorded in Poland.

3. As a follow up, is that your usual process and if not how does it differ?

Not really. Most of the song I have written starts from jamming, trying out new chord combinations, humming some melodies and then lyrics. Usually, I keep a note of potential song ideas which comes from observing my environment, listening to other peoples stories and from my life experiences. When a song comes to me, no matter how crude it sounds, I try as much as I can to record it using my phone or any recording devices at my disposal, otherwise I will forget it and the song hardly returns. I have some strange feeling that it goes to the next person who is ready to work on it as I can swear I have heard a song from a random artiste which I think came to me in the past but for some reason I did not capture it.

4. Is there a specific experience that you can bring to mind that has encouraged you to write music you wouldn’t have written otherwise?

Yes. There was one recent instance during the pandemic lockdown. I was introduced by a friend to a songwriting group online called Positive Song Project (PSP). In this group, there are weekly songwriting challenges that we go through. One of the challenges was to write a song from an animal point of view. I have never thought of such before, I wouldn’t on good day yet I find the ideas it quite fascinating. That week I wrote a song called “Hooman” which is how animal pets would call us as humans. It is a very simple song written with only 3 chords: a representation of how less complicated pets could be.

5. Tell us about your latest single, Blow. It contains a sample at the beginning and seems lyrically related to the concepts of family and friends.

“Blow” was also a product of PSP which I had I mention earlier. It was easy yet difficult to write as it was very personal, probably one of the most personal songs I have ever written. It is the story of a struggling artiste who chose to follow his passion but family expectations are holding him back. He feels trapped, almost like their was a spell on him which is preventing him from making it in his career and the only way to break this spell is to plead to his mother to pray for him. The voice sample you hear at the beginning of the song is a real life voice message from my mother.

I have had many people come to me after my live performances, some in tears, telling how they were touched by the song. How they could relate to it. I was simply crying out, expressing my ordeals the best way that I possibly could through music. But I’m happy to know that the song speaks to people in similar situations.

6. Give us a Michael Ekeghasi Oblique Strategy… Are there any special techniques you employ to get a new song started?

Nothing special. As mentioned earlier, I just starts jamming and freestyling. I try to record the sound as soon as possible. Then go back to it a later to develop it further into a song tapping from some of the song ideas that I have.

7. Take us through your gear list. When you demo new songs or ideas, what is your home recording setup for writing? For example, your favoured instrument? Any favoured FX pedals or plug ins? Which DAW(s) do you use? Which interface?

Here is some of my gear:
Two sets of JBL pro speakers
32 inches HP Monitor
Two channel focusrite audio interface
Focusrite CM25 MKII condenser microphone
Behringer ECM8000 ultra-linear measurement microphone (for my studio room acoustic measurement)
Behringer XM8500 dynamic mic
Two acoustic guitars – Ibanez and Faith. These are my main musical instruments.
A Gio Ibanez electric guitar
DT 770 pro headphones
Two 16-key midi controllers – M-audio and Novation.
An 81-key full weighted Yamaha p-45 digital piano
Millennium MPS-850 e-drum
Various percussions from Bonga to Cajuns and all sorts.
C-key Harmonica
A Boss loop pedal
These are the ones I can remember now.

When I demo songs, it’s usually starts with me, my acoustic guitar and microphone, then other instruments follow suits depending on what instruments I could hear playing in my head. I also like to experiment and play with various others sounds and instruments. I use a FL studio as my DAW.

Follow Michael Ekeghasi on Instagram to keep up with his latest releases.

Listen to Michael’s songs for the Positive Songs Project at soundcloud.com/michaelekeghasi

7 Questions For Thomas Truax

Posted on by Richard Lomax

Thomas Truax (pronounced troo-aks) is an American singer/musician, inventor and multi-media artist.

One of the most imaginative characters on the pop music fringe, since the year 2000 Thomas has been traveling the world performing with his evolving “band” of bizarre self-made Harry Partch-esque instruments including a motorized drum machine made of bike wheels called ‘Mother Superior’ and a pimped-up Dr. Seuss-ian Gramophone called ‘The Hornicator’, as well as his venerable resonator guitar ‘Hank’. Time Out magazine has dubbed him “The king of home-made instruments” while Splendid magazine called him “one of the five or ten best singer/songwriters in the world that you’ve never heard of…an exceptional talent, unique and resistant to comparison, yet fairly accessible even to casual listeners.”

Truax crafts rich, poetically evocative songs about insects, trees, technology, and a lifelong obsession with things lunar, including various reasons ‘Why Dogs Howl at The Moon’. Notable supporters and collaborators include Jarvis Cocker, Duke Special, Richard Hawley, Amanda Palmer, Brian Viglione (of the Dresden Dolls/Violent Femmes) and the late author Terry Pratchett.

Thomas spoke to us about his unusual songwriting setup…

1. What’s the first piece of music or song you remember hearing?

My Mother’s heartbeat.

2. You co-wrote one of your most recently released songs, A Wonderful Kind Of Strange with Budgie. We heartily encourage co-writing as part of this project but as we all write in different ways it can be an interesting challenge to figure out how that will work. Can you talk to us a bit about the process you engaged in with this song? For example, did you work face to face? Did one of you have the initial idea to build upon?

Well, that song is one of a number of pieces that will be the main meat of my next album.
It’s not really a co-write, though there is no doubt that Budgie’s input on these pieces have had -and will have – a big influence on how they will turn out (it’s a slow project that is still in the works). And I also hope there’ll be a bit more back-and-forth on some of the yet-to-be-finished pieces, but mostly, he’s playing drums. And man, I love how he plays drums! Budgie saw me play when we were on a bill together in Germany and he was always a hero of mine. I warned him before I played that my drum machine Mother Superior was pretty basic and couldn’t hold a candle to what he does but he absolutely loved Mother S.

Some time later I asked if he’d be interested to do some playing along with Mother S and some song ideas I had and he was very much up for it. I have done this with some other drummers in the past with good results (and occasionally not so good). So next time I was on tour in Berlin, where he lives, we set up a recording session to do that. We spent a lot of time talking, ate a lot of cake and drank a lot of coffee. Then we had some technical problems. So we ate more cake. This is modern rock-n-roll excess. I had a handful of pieces in varying degrees of development, some just rough sketches and some (like ‘Wonderful kind of Strange) were closer to already half-finished songs. He really nailed it, he just listened once and then we usually just did a few takes. Now my fear is that I will just be too precious about finishing these and it will take forever.

3. Your collection of self-designed and constructed instruments play an important part of the ‘Truax-sound’. How much of that process is part of the writing? Do you write on a traditional instrument and then figure out which instrumentation to use or do you start with ideas and sounds direct from your ‘band’ and then write around those sounds? If the process is always different, feel free to talk about a specific song.

I do different things, but the instruments I build don’t necessarily play by traditional music rules, so I start interacting with them and they tell me how limited in tonal or rhythmic options I’m going to have to work with when I move on to layering with traditional instruments like guitar, if I go that way.
I don’t see that building instruments is much unlike building songs. Basically I’m collecting little bits and pieces and gradually assembling them into something that I hope is going to turn out musical and pleasing in the end.

4. Can we talk a bit about one of my favourite songs of yours, the beautiful song, The Butterfly and the Entomologist… was there a specific intention when you sat down to write it?

Thanks. That’s an odd one for me because I came so very close to throwing it away so many times. I’m glad I didn’t, but it was certainly not one of those that came together easily.

I worked on it in little baby increments over years, and though I thought I’d struck something good combining the image of this giant butterfly in my car (which was something I’d dreamed) and this chord progression played on the guitar with a motorized fan, I felt like no matter what else I did with it began to feel contrived and, well, just not right. I kept hitting the wall with it. Also it bothered me that as the story developed it felt like I was trying to imbue it with some kind of political message or moral, and again that felt wrong to me, because it wasn’t born from that. And I didn’t like to envisage myself as a political songwriter. I had a stereotype of this in my mind and though I have a great deal of respect for political songwriters I thought that’s not my forte.

But in the long run I realize this was me just being too hyper-critical of myself, and of labeling myself before anyone else did. I decided to play an unfinished version of it at the antihoot open mic in NYC, and as often happens when you play something in front of other people, it suddenly looks different than you think it did. I had one of those moments where towards the end of the piece -which is quite long- I realized the listeners were gripped by it, that it was working somehow and deserved to be finished.

Occasionally a song comes together fast, but more often not for me. I remember an art teacher in elementary school once instructed us to keep working on a drawing even if it’s not exactly what we had in mind in the first place, because it just might turn into something better than you’d had in mind. And if not you’re still working on improving your skills.

5. As a follow up, is that your usual process and if not how does it differ?

I’d like to think I try to approach it differently each time, but there are some patterns. There’s usually the old standby question of lyrics or music first, and I can go either way. I like to build on something rhythmic, so if I come up with a chord progression or melody I like, I might record a loop of rhythm as the next step and lay those chords down on top in a sketchy way. Then I start to build on that. If I don’t have a new lyric idea that fits I go skimming through piles of old notebooks of lyric ideas that I’ve collected over decades to see if anything marries. I often spend a lot of time ripping out old pages of what I now see as garbage so that I trim it down for next time. Occasionally my recent songs include a line or two that are twenty years old. I’m thinking ‘YES! Finally I found a home for that line!’
Musically then its just a case of whittling away one way or another.

6. Give us a Thomas Truax Oblique Strategy… Are there any special techniques you employ to get a new song started?

One that I get a lot of mileage out of is to work on writing and recording a whole song really quietly, especially if it’s meant to wind up being played loud.

Another technique is wherever I am in the process of writing a song, whether it be a new barely-started idea or something that’s maybe all but finished, I like to put it away and let it simmer and ferment for a while, sometimes a long while. Ideally so long that you forget it, and when you hear it you think: was that something I did? A bit like those old lyric notebooks again. If you can step this far away from it, you can approach it almost as if someone else brought the idea in and then you can judge it and challenge yourself to better it from a fresh perspective, if you decide it needs bettering.
I like to take little nuggets or sketches or loops that might be the seed of something and bury it, maybe check on it now and then, add a little water, give it time to flower naturally. This is why I work so slowly in coming up with new things.

When you’re lucky, when your muse drops in, things can hit a point where they start to write themselves. That’s the rare but very special day.

I’m typically a slow songwriter but I’ve also challenged myself in an experimental way by doing a thing in my bandcamp Full Moon Music Club, which is to fulfill the promise of a song or piece of new something every full moon. Maybe it’s a bit like your positive songs project in that this puts me under the gun, and forces me to work in a way in which I can’t let things ferment, or linger too long on details. Occasionally something really magic happens, sometimes it’s really stressful and I have to release something to my most supportive fans that I feel isn’t quite what I’d like it to have become.

Sometimes I feel I’ve had to cut corners and it’s so often that I’m cringing slightly while pushing the upload button just about Midnight on the night of the full moon. Maybe that’s because I didn’t have time to iron things out or self-critique, and maybe that exposes a little truthfulness or human flaw and perhaps that’s good sometimes. Maybe the Full Moon subscribers get to see some aspects of me that I wouldn’t be brave enough to shout from the rooftops, so maybe they get to know the real me better that way.

I get experimental, paint with a wider brush, throw ideas more wildly, maybe come up with new techniques that I wouldn’t have otherwise. And possibly best of all with this situation, is how these pieces reflect the present, how I’m reacting musically or lyrically to the proverbial ‘now’.

It’s cooking the dinner and serving it to your guests right away, before it gets cold.

7. Gear-head Question! Take us through your gear list. When you demo new songs or ideas, what is your home recording setup for writing? For example, your favoured instrument? Any favoured FX pedals or plug ins? Which DAW(s) do you use? Which interface?

I have a twelve-year-old barely-breathing macbook that I will drive ’til its wheels fall off, running Logic 9 on Snow Leopard, with a focusrite Forte interface. I built up an arsenal of plugins and got to know the ins and outs and I got tired of upgrading. And now with background updates and things going obsolete, I hate having to keep up with all that. It can just put you in an endless loop of upgrading and relearning and you never get around to actually writing and recording. Everyone is expected to be a beta-tester these days and I just don’t have time for that, I get enough of it trying to sort out the technical glitches with my new instruments. One day it’ll all go down and I’ll have to upgrade but I dread that. But the essential elements of recording digitally with a DAW are no longer progressing in a way that makes what was there a few years ago pale or obsolete anymore.

I have an RC-300 looper but I prefer my old Boomerang, because that’s what I had first. I suppose it could’ve been the other way around. Again it’s what you’re comfortable with from working with it for years that matters most.

Stay up to date with Thomas’s tourdates releases at thomastruax.com

Check out his current album, All That Heaven Allows (available in blood red vinyl!)
https://thomas-truax.bandcamp.com/album/all-that-heaven-allows

And his excellent Songs From The Films Of David Lynch…
https://thomas-truax.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-films-of-david-lynch

7 Questions For Avital Raz

Posted on by Richard Lomax

Jerusalem-born Avital Raz is a theatre maker and musician. Her first solo show My Jerusalem was derived from a controversial song. It combines live music with storytelling and projected images. A politically-charged tale of a drunken one-night stand, infused with stories of growing up in the turmoil of 1980s Israel.

Avital Raz // Photo credit: Jimmy Spaceman

Raz started out as a child singer of classical music. She studied at The School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem and After completing degrees in vocal performance and composition, she shifted her focus to India where she studied the ancient art of Dhrupad singing with Prof. Ritwik Sanyal of Benares Hindu University.

This improvisational style led to a surge in creativity and Avital’s first album: Sad Songs About The End Of Love – 11 of James Joyce’s poems from Chamber Music composed mostly in Raag style and recorded in India and Israel with local musicians.

Her latest musical release ‘The Fallen Angel’s Unravelling Descent’, a collaboration with Keith Angel (producer) was given four stars by RnR magazine and high Praise in Folk Radio UK among other publications.

“There is no-one quite like Avital Raz in the world of music right now, and she should be applauded for the intelligence and singularity of her artistic vision. The Fallen Angel’s Unravelling Descent is a genuinely original musical statement, full of wise, exotic and gleefully mordant songs that manage to be simultaneously challenging and melodic.”

Avital spoke to us about songwriting and her latest show ‘Jerusalem’…

1. What’s the first piece of music or song you remember hearing?

AR: I don’t know if this counts as music… My mother had her own version of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. Some of them had melodies and some were more of a deranged chant. I remember my Mom, my sister and I shouting it for hours: “Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town, Upstairs, downstairs in his nightgown, Tapping at the window, crying through the lock, Are all the children in their beds…?” So, I’m going with original compositions by my creative mother.

2. Can we talk a bit about the latest show you are performing, My Jerusalem… The seeds of its creation are from one of my favourite songs of yours, The Edinburgh Surprise. The song feels so visceral and instantaneous. I remember hearing it for the first time and it made my hair stand on end. Was there a specific intention when you sat down to write it?

AR: I’ve got a lot to say about that but I’ll try to be concise…. Being an Israeli living in the UK, people made all kinds of assumptions about me so I guess I wrote the song to give a complex picture of where I stand. It describes a drunken sexual encounter between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man in Edinburgh. When I released it, it sparked some controversy on twitter not only from right-wing traditionalists but also from Palestine supporters and feminists. So rather than clarifying my political position, it brought up more questions which is why it ended up being the backbone of a solo show I started developing two years ago. I toured the show and adapted it to film during  lockdown. While performing the show, in one month I was both called an Israel-hating-antisemite and a Zionist racist. I started to think that the subject of Israel and me as an Israeli having my own narrative was so contentious, lots of people came to the show wearing blinders. So, together with Chris Davis, we created a documentary film to accompany My Jerusalem entitled Your Jerusalem interviewing Palestinians, Israelis and people in the UK about issues raised in the show (holocaust, occupation, Jerusalem, racism, gender politics…).

 

As this is a music blog, I should say the show is a mixture of songs broken up and infused with storytelling and projected video. I was getting fed up with gig life. I wanted audiences to listen to me as I put a lot of care into my lyrics and had too many experiences of performing as background music to people chattering. Perhaps for that reason my songs became increasingly filthier, so people would be shocked enough to stop their conversations!  I enjoy the attention I’ve been getting from theatre audiences and the fact that being thought provoking appears to be a strength. As a musician I  was once offered a mentoring session with a high level promoter in London who shall not be named. She told me, if I stopped swearing and didn’t go so political, I’d have a chance of “making it” with my pretty voice

3. As a follow up, is that your usual writing process and if not how does it differ?
AR: I’m not sure I have a writing process. I tend to either do something really reckless and stupid and then write about it or write because I’m so miserable, I need to unpack the emotions and sculpt them into something with beauty to be able to bare them.  Some songs have come about through wanting to have the last word, so they’re really written to someone specific and some from dreams. I’ve never been very disciplined or imaginative. I spent years in India studying Dhrupad, an ancient form of Hindustani music which is improvised. I think a lot of my melodies are influenced from singing in Raag. 

In the case of ‘The Edinburgh Surprise’, I was touring a lot and listening to a lot of Bob Dylan at the time. I had a long train journey from Edinburgh to Manchester and it just came out fully formed. Some songs are just like that, others take years of chiseling. 

4. The use of prosody in your songs has always struck me as meticulous. Do the lyrics come first and then you match the music to them? Or do you have the emotional base of the music first and find words to match that?

AR: I think in most cases the words come first. I often have a story to tell which is probably why I’ve found my way into theatre.  I mentioned songs that come from dreams…, there are quite a few of those and they usually have music, sometimes it’s only the music in a dream and I wake up and try to figure it out. 

5. Is there a specific experience that you can bring to mind that has encouraged you to write music you wouldn’t have written otherwise?

AR: I’ve started working on a new show, like My Jerusalem, it will be a mixture of songs and storytelling. It’s a ghost story and its main plot line in a woman in her 40’s is depressed after a miscarriage. One day, during lockdown, she manages to finally open the door at the back of the utility closet that would never budge and discovers her long deceased grandmother’s ghost standing over a pan of sizzling halibut. 

The show and the songs in it will focus on infertility and pregnancy loss with a backdrop of the pandemic exploring questions of life and death and family bonds. 

For the last five years I’ve been struggling with recurrent miscarriages. I’ve found it’s quite a taboo subject but after My Jerusalem, I feel equipped to try and raise awareness to it and hopefully through my show and songs provide some solace to women/ couples who often feel isolated and even ashamed to discuss what they’ve been going through.

6. Give us an Avital Raz Oblique Strategy… Are there any special techniques you employ to get a new song started?

AR: SUFFER! suffer in life, feel things really deeply, have your poor heart broken and then maybe you’ll gain insight into the fabric of being alive that will be worthy of an audience… but honestly, what do I know? My songs tend to offend people ‘trying to have a pleasant night out’….

7. TECH QUESTION! Take us through your gear list. When you demo new songs or ideas, what is your home recording setup for writing? For example, your favoured instrument? Any favoured FX pedals or plug ins? Which DAW(s) do you use? Which interface?

AR: I’ve recently started experimenting with a loop station. I’m hoping it will provide a musical soundscape for my next show.  Beyond that I use protools with a Mbox pro. I recently acquired a good condenser mic. I can’t remember brand names or any techie stuff. I listen to a lot of music recorded in the 60’s and 70’s, some of it in India, Sound quality is not something I care too much about.  The instruments I play are guitar, Tanpura – which is a 4 stringed Indian drone instrument that singers use to accompany themselves, glockenspiel and I create a lot of midi sounds mostly from what protools and contact have to offer. My house is a graveyard for dysfunctional instruments. People keep giving them to me and I keep thinking one day, I’ll use that accordion or fix that bass but I don’t…. 

Tickets for ‘My Jerusalem’ are on sale now for 28th May at The Duke’s in Lancaster:

And online everywhere on 30th May:
https://www.facebook.com/Worldcelt/posts/1105974536579487

Listen to and buy more music by Avital Raz:
https://avitalraz.bandcamp.com

Tales From The Songwriting Frontlines

Posted on by Richard Lomax
Photo by: Aurélien Digard

Photo by: Aurélien Digard

In an interesting and technical entry for our Songwriting Blog here at Positive Songs Project we caught up with regular PSP contributor and wonderfully prolific songwriter Mickey Van Gelder.

Mickey Van Gelder is a Blues musician, songwriter and lyricist based in Lancashire, UK. He’s played with harmonica player Pat Clarke around Manchester and at the Colne Blues Festival. He’s written songs with Pierre Matifat of The Swinging Dice for both of their albums released so far and he’s sung with them several times since 2014 in the UK and touring around Northern France shouting the Blues. He is very proud to be working with French prog-rock band Cheap Wine having written the lyrics for two of the songs on their LP ‘Schrödinger’s Pipe’ released in 2020 on the Celebration Days label.

In the early 1980s, he was lead singer and guitarist in the Brit-funk band World Series which included Pablo Cook on percussion. Their 1983 single ‘Try It Out’ was recently re-issued in 2019 on the Chuwanaga label in Paris.

He discussed with the Positive Songs Project how he used the mathematical number sequence known as the Fibonacci Sequence to write his piece of no-fi electronica ‘Ahava’ for Phase 2 Positive Song.

Listen to ‘Ahava’ here:
https://soundcloud.com/mickeyvangelder/ahavah

Mickey writes:

This is the start of the Fibonacci sequence:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…

Each number is the sum of the previous two. The ratio between successive numbers get closer and closer to “The Golden Ratio”.

This ratio is found in nature and seems to be some kind of most efficient number when it comes to fitting seeds in flower-heads, creating spiral shaped shells and so on.

Having written a Blues from the perspective of a dog for a PSP badge, I decided to indulge myself and see if I could build up an electronic rhythm using the Fibonacci sequence. Maybe it would sound pleasing because of the Golden Ratio?

I thought that I could use 8 as the basic 8 quavers to the bar and try to place a cross-rhythm to a count of 13 against it.

I had a chat with my son who has a degree in music and he said that you don’t normally write different time signatures for different instruments playing together. I decided to put everything in a standard four to the bar rhythm and see what pattern emerged with the bass playing one note at the start of each count of 13 quavers.

I ended up with a scribbled diagram that looked like this:

The pattern repeats every 13 bars. This diagram is the key to the structure of my tune “Ahavah”.

I really liked the result that each beat in the bar gets accented at some point in the 13 bar sequence.

Using Noteworthy Composer software, I built up a steady four-on-the-floor percussion part but put a synth bass note on each of the highlighted beats. To begin with, I kept the harmony down to just alternating between two closely-related chords and used a single-note bass part on a low E on every quaver in every bar.

Just that 13 against 8 rhythm sounds funky. I put it on a loop and very quickly I forgot about counting and just enjoyed the off-beats.

Once the rhythm was written out, I was able to place the harmony and the melody in time with the 13 count and phrase the changes over the 13 bar pattern.

As for the title, “Ahavah” is the Hebrew word for love. It has the numerical value 13.

The Positive Songs Project has been great for me. Being part of a community really got the creative juices going and gave me something to work towards each week. And I met some lovely, like-minded people. Thanks everyone!

Check out Mickey’s work with Cheap Wine:
https://celebrationdaysrecords.bandcamp.com/merch

Watch the ‘Ballad of The Good Old Light Bulb’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrcmhwJYRZI&t=6s

7 Questions For Siobhan Wilson

Posted on by Richard Lomax

 
Siobhan Wilson is a Scottish singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, film and TV composer. A trained cellist from St Mary’s Music School, pianist, guitarist, and composer – she has 10 years of live touring and studio production and after a 5 year stay in Paris, France, has returned to the UK where she has become one of Scotland’s most exciting artists, where she is completing a masters in composition at Edinburgh University and open study at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

 

Her 2017 album ‘There Are No Saints’ was shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year and drew attention from the likes of Rolling Stone and BBC6 Radio Lauren Laverne who listed it as her ‘album of the day. Wilson is a regular live performer at BBC Scotland and BBC6 radio stations and was also shortlisted for “Best Musician” in The Sunday Herald Culture Awards in the same year. She has toured the UK, USA and Canada supporting the likes of Suzanne Vega and The Proclaimers and as well as her own sold out headline tour.

 

Siobhan kindly spoke to us here at the Positive Songs Project about some of her songwriting processes and her latest release ‘Plastic Grave’ 

 

1. What’s the first piece of music or song you remember hearing?

Our house inherited an old upright piano when I was 7 and I was instantly attached to it. The piano seemed really gigantic and sitting there right in front of it and being a small person was like sitting in front of a whole wall disappearing into a world of sound. Upright pianos are cool like a piece of furniture you can go and sit on to relax. I mostly remember how it felt. I loved touching the wood of the piano and the ivory keys and I remember looking at all the different parts of it and thinking how can something this large and weird looking be the music and the singer. When I was little I was always personifying instruments like this.

 

2. Can we talk a bit about the latest mini-album/giant EP you released, ‘Plastic Grave’… Was there a specific intention when you sat down to write it?
The song ‘Plastic Grave’ on my latest mini-album/giant EP was written with the intention of being timeless. I wrote the song ‘Plastic Grave’ in a couple hours with Luciano Rossi, who is a composer/engineer/writer/performer, and we recorded it there on the spot and it was done. My favourite songs are the ones that are so instinctive and the inspiration and creativity zone is really flowing and you instinctively make the song like, the longer I make music for the more and more I really value that process.

 

3. As a follow up, is that your usual process and if not how does it differ?
I have a whole load of different processes. I throw a lot out. I really make loads and loads of demos. It takes guts to go into a studio and be like whatever happens happens. That’s why I recorded most of my new album with Steve Albini. He is famous for having guts and going with what’s going. People who obsessively try and package and change everything are conforming to a commercial presentation of a product, but Steve is just recording what’s happening and it’s his attitude that makes the experience valuable. ‘Your Moon Has Come’ is on my giant EP and it was recorded in Steve Albini’s studio. It’s my hope that you hear that song and it sounds like a live performance. I like to record in one take or two (where I can – it’s not always possible).

 

4. Is there a specific experience that you can bring to mind that has encouraged you to write music you wouldn’t have written otherwise?
Yes all the time. Every song is totally unique and relevant to the very specific context of your life in that moment. Everything impacts it from what you’ve eaten for breakfast that morning to who has died that year (they did not die as a result of being eaten for breakfast haha I realise that I am typing this too fast). I’m recently obsessed with silence. I’ve introduced a lot of sound to my ears over the years and they need to get a rest. I love the sound of the ocean and all the different white noises that a tide makes on a beach, especially a cold and rainy beach with Scottish weather. That kind of experience of listening to the sea recently made me go home and play with white noises and filters and listen to ocean sounds. I’m kind of glad that nobody will ever actually hear those kinds of things I do for fun because they sound terrible.

 

5. You co-wrote the wonderful song, It Must Have Been The Moon with Stuart Nisbet. We heartily encourage co-writing as part of this project but as we all write in different ways it can be an interesting challenge to figure out how that will work. Can you talk to us a bit about the process you engaged in with this song? For example, did you work face to face? Did one of you have the initial idea to build upon?
Stuart Nisbet is an excellent guitarist and songwriter who I know in Scotland. For this song He sent me the words and I set them to verses and music. I sent him the demo to make sure he liked it and he did so, that was it! The powers of the internet.

 

As a solo artist I like to invite other people into my process cause it gets boring being alone. If you’re in a band you’ve always got that combination of minds . I like collaboration but I’m a solo artist so that’s always been a bit of a contradiction in the fundamental mechanism of my whole career that I simultaneously enjoy and struggle with.

 

I work really fast and that scares a lot of people. When I have a lot of blind faith and trust in a concept I just really go for it so I’ve learned over the years it’s more chilled and comfortable to collaborate with some musicians by email and then there are only a couple who are on the same wavelength to do so in person. I’ve never been a particularly jealous person in the sense that when somebody possesses a skill I don’t have, I want to collaborate and learn about it and mix it with me and see what happens. I never look at artists and think “I wish I could do that” I’ve always regarded my favourite musicians with absolute admiration and respect for their craft. I realise my own limitations and there are many, and I’m attracted to working with people who can do things that I can not.
 
In this sense, I’ve never been jealous and intimidated and I have always hated “scenes” with rules and hierarchies driven by commercial success as opposed to content and musical approach. I exist in loads of different genres for that reason because I’ve never been confined to existing within a scene and a genre that I want to belong to, I’m more interested in learning about things I don’t know about yet. 

 

6. Give us a Siobhan Wilson Oblique Strategy… Are there any special techniques you employ to get a new song started?
Songwriting is a kind of meditative extreme concentration and it’s hard to think of it as a design with a purpose, for me. So I mostly never force myself to write, I only write when I “need” to which is probably when the creative muscles of my brain need exercise, or already in good flow, or when an emotional event has happened in my life which I need to process and vocalise somehow.
 
I used to write in a shower room at high school cause it had a lovely natural reverb. I think the biggest question you ask yourself is “why” before how. If you know why you’re writing a song, then the process should be led by instinct. It’s a kind of problem solving of emotional reflection. I have no idea really why I talk about it and do podcasts regularly about it on my fanspace 
 

www.patreon.com/fanspace

 where I ask other musicians about it like Rachel Seramnni and Karine Polwart cause I still don’t know. 

 

7. Take us through your gear list. When you demo new songs or ideas, what is your home recording setup for writing? For example, your favoured instrument? Any favoured FX pedals or plug ins? Which DAW(s) do you use? Which interface?
So I recently changed this up a lot. I don’t like recording but I benefit greatly from being able to record from home in what is the live music apocalypse. I record and produce music but also a monthly podcast. I live stream with OBS which is a nightmare, but seems to get the best sound. This year I use little Genelec speakers for hi sounds and MAudios for low and some Sennheiser baby headphones. I put my guitar amp in between them up high so that everything is coming out from in front of me as much as possible. I have a starter baby soundcard, and a focusrite with 2 inputs. I put my vocal through a NT1 – which I am happy with but very frustratingly limited by but I will invest in more microphones when I can one day afford it – through a valve pre-amp that I use to monitor input levels in what I’ve convinced myself adds to the “warmth” of the sound. I use Logic cause it came free with my computer and I play cello and piano and guitar.
 
I like some of the sounds on my Nord, and I use Spitfire BBC free orchestra rarely however I prefer real sounds to samples. I like the plug-in Culture Vulture although I don’t own it right now and am saving up to buy it. I have an addiction to adding a Valhalla reverb to every single track on every single demo which I’m actively trying to get rid of and is an old habit I’ve always had. I don’t necessarily think liking a plug-in results in a good sound or is synonymous with the plug in being good for the musical product. I certainly am intrigued by homing into specific aesthetics which create my musical identity and palette however I’m rarely inspired by a plug-in when writing.
 
My collaborator Lucci Rossi is however very well versed in this world, and when I collaborate with him I believe it’s something he is inspired by in a very “musical” and “human” way, so that produces some really interesting sounds when we combine our influences together such as on the song ‘Plastic Grave’ or ‘Echo Location’. He’d be a great person to ask about plug-ins. 
 
What I find interesting is talking about production, because everybody interprets the word differently. I work best with people who collaborate without ego and with an interest in creating original music. It’s really a very happy consequence of the song’s existence if it can be accepted commercially. Even though I have a really strong tight-knit fanbase who I know personally and communicate with very often, even more so now in 2020, and I also check that they like the music and want to know what their thoughts are on not just my music but music that’s happening that they’re excited by, I’m forever surprised that anybody wants to actually buy my music, not because I think it’s terrible, just because I have no idea how to predict what anybody wants, and I never will. Even though I know my listeners more every year it never gets clearer how to write music “for” a group of people, and every album is a tsunami of anxiety of blindly and bravely presenting new work in the hope that it will be well received.

 

Follow Siobhan Wilson’s music at Patreon:

 

Check out her next live stream on 11th October.

 
 

7 Questions for Lizeth Ruvalcaba

Posted on by Richard Lomax

 

Lizeth Ruvalcaba creating music on stage.

Lizeth Ruvalcaba is an artist based in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico. She is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who specialises in live looping. Her main instrument is her voice, which she employs to create stunningly ethereal and atmospheric pieces of music. Lizeth has been contributing to the Positive Songs Project since it began.
 

We chatted to her about her recent song ‘Made of Light’ for the project, a collaboration with fellow PSP songwriter Maya McCourt.

 

 

1. Have you recorded any collaborations before?
Yes, I am fortunate to have been able to collaborate with many local and not so local musicians … but precisely this one with Maya is my first distance collaboration.

Listen to Lizeth’s collaboration, Respiro by

Kako y Los No Humanos

 


 

2. Who approached who?
I remember we were talking about that week’s playlist right at the end of PSP phase one. And we were sharing the mutual fascination for each other’s music and some experiences about recording and mixing, and I think it only popped up in the conversation like, ‘We should do a collaboration one day …’ Then the next phase came and as soon as I saw the collaboration station badge, I thought we could take the opportunity.
3. Did you discuss your process much beforehand or did you just dive into the recording?
Yes, we talked about it a little but not structurally, I think we basically focused on how much
freedom each of us would have with our part, and we agreed total freedom and once we put the main ideas together go with the flow of the song. At first it was just like ‘I’ll send you some piano tracks, a basic structure, and if the lyrics or maybe a Solo part require changes, we can do it…’ and after I sent my idea to Maya she sent me back three Cello tracks, lyrics, melody and some backing vocals … almost immediately … wow! then I just added more backing vocals.
4. About the song itself… was there a specific intention when you sat down to write it or did you stumble across the idea through experimenting?
I think it was mostly through experimentation. I had a couple of chords in my head and once I started recording them and decided to keep it simple and repetitive the entire song came out and I liked the idea of giving space to what could be generated with vocals and cello or maybe some effects. Then I had a conversation with Maya just before uploading the song and she told me that she just had a vague idea for the melody and started singing and recording it, doing some improvisation on the lyrics as well. I was surprised because I had thought of doing something similar and did the same thing with the vocals at the end of the song, so, I think most takes on this one are ‘first takes’.
5. In what ways did the collaboration change your usual process?
I usually think first about the song’s subject and try to imagine about what story I want to tell with my song, whether it’s instrumental or not; and I use that as my creative guide.
This time I didn’t think about it, I just recorded music without thinking about being in control of the end result. I have never done that for a recording. And the process and the result were beautiful!
6. What was your recording setup for this (DAW, interface, mics)?
Logic, Tascam US-144 interface, Akai MPK Mini Midi Controller, M-Audio Nova LDC Microphone.
7. Are you more or less likely to undertake more collaborations based on this experience?
Definitely more! Learning to collaborate musically with someone new is an invaluable experience.

Listen to and download ‘Made of Light’ by Lizeth Ruvalcaba and Maya McCourt on Bandcamp: 
https://lizruvalcaba.bandcamp.com/track/made-of-light

Listen to Lizeth’s Positive Songs album:
Follow her on Youtube (highly recommended):
Check out her next live stream on 7th August:

Interview with Maya McCourt coming soon

Guest Post – Maya McCourt (Salt Moon)

Posted on by Lobelia Lawson

Why I Write Songs:

I write songs because I’m too cheap to go to therapy. Actually, that’s not true, and particularly because I currently am in therapy (affordable therapy is a thing, friends, apparently, and not just the kind you find in best mates, or the bottom of a bottle, or in the back of 90s magazines).

 

But to say I write songs as a kind of therapy is definitely true, and I’m sure it’s true of a lot of people who write songs. In my mind, it’s sort of what they’re there for. I think without problems to sort out I wouldn’t write songs, or at least the songs I currently write. I also write songs as passing the time on interminable night journeys home through London. I seriously don’t know what other people do on the night bus, apart from possibly wish they were dead. Happy people don’t catch the night bus because they’re at home in bed dreaming sweet dreams and not coming home pissed at 4 in the morning after saying they’d only stay ‘for one’. But I digress.

 

I often find by the time I come to the end of a song; I’ve discovered what I didn’t realise I want thinking all along. For me, songs are the truth I didn’t know I possessed, the careful unpicking of the tangle of thread that is my thoughts. Writing a song, you carefully tease out the tangle, arrive at the beginning that was there all along, and just invisible. Apart from that one song. That’s just about bees. Look, I just like bees. Not everything is a metaphor.

I also write songs to find beauty in sadness. Or to express the beauty in sadness, because I think without that sometimes the sadness would end me, honestly. Art is the expression of emotion. It is a vent, a way of making the cruelty of the world (on whatever level, the individual or the societal) sort of all worthwhile. Also sometimes to get people to sleep with you, which, let’s be fair, is a pretty important task.*

 

So, a mix between sweet distraction and beautiful acceptance. I get so lost in individual songs, that every song I write, I’m terrified it will be my last, but it never is, there’s always another one waiting around the corner, ready to be discovered, teased out of the tangle. And, y’know, it’s a pretty big tangle, so I reckon there’s probably a few more in there at least. Before I’m happy and my creativity dries up and I become one of those people slumbering peacefully while other people write songs on the night bus. But hey, I’ll be well rested.

 

*Write good enough songs and you can use them MORE THAN ONCE to sleep with DIFFERENT people. My songs are not this good, but I’ve heard it happens. Beans on Toast has an amusing story about someone pretending his song was theirs to this end, and a woman at one of his gigs being really surprised to find that this in fact was a song by Beans. Imagine writing a song SO GOOD that other people are using it to get people to sleep with them. That’s it, that’s my dream.

 

Check out Maya’s songs on bandcamp!
www.saltmoon.bandcamp.com

Photo by Nick Ed Harris

 

A HOLIDAY FROM NOTHING

Posted on by Richard Lomax

Tales From The Songwriting Frontline

 

Three weeks ago I heard a rumour from a neighbour, of a Japanese Garden a bicycle ride away from me. Knowing that I had some songs to write (and thus some subject matter or at least a pleasing environment to find) I filed the rumour in my back pocket.

 

In a phone call the following evening I mentioned the idea to my friend Jimmy and he suggested I take my passport, I then talked to my friend Sonja the following morning and she suggested a ziplock bag with toothpaste and deodorant, a plan began to form…

 

To write this week’s song I would take a pretend holiday. All these little accoutrements: the passport, the ziplock bag with toothpaste and deodorant would help ease my mind into a vacation state. I made the boarding pass for myself with a strict departure time of 10:45am and by 11 I was on my bike and on a bon voyage.

 

The idea of a holiday in my mind ended up forming both the subject matter and the environment for the song A Holiday From Nothing. I landed at about 11.20am and wandered round the gardens ‘til I found a nice spot to pitch up, in a clearing in front of a huge tree. I had my guitar, pen, paper, coffee (of course), and a drum sample that I’d been wanting to use. I played the loop on repeat and played around with chord sequences to it. The (capo’d) C to Bb to Dm was originally something I played around for the chorus which seemed like a good place to start seeing as I already had the title of the song.

 

Various holiday based phrases found their way onto the page postcards and souvenirs… wish you were heres, ways of saying goodbye. I toyed with the idea of alliteration between farewells and various things I wanted to escape – ta ta to tension, goodbye to grief, but the advice of a (very wise) new friend warned me that this might be too negative a path to take for postive nature of what this song what supposed to be. I kept some of that (postcards to panic and pain) but started to focus more on what I wanted to head towards rather than what I wanted to escape from.

 

The tree’s size meant that the sunlight was dappled and only fell on the circular spot I’d chosen to sit. The sun moving across the sky meant that this spot moved around the tree rather like the hours of a clockface. I moved with the sun, dragging my setup with me each time. This action made it into the third verse of the song.

 

After writing and re-writing across three pages I had the draft of the song before me. The chorus chords became the verse chords, forcing me to follow where the melody wanted to go as the verse jumped into the chorus. The lyrics were edited and it was taking shape. I was ready to record the song as a demo on my phone to take home and begin recording properly in my studio. I’m still over the moon with the demo… there’s a moment between the last verse and last chorus when I am interrupted by an elderly couple lost in the park asking me for directions. It’s a perfect moment captured on the demo that feels so natural and lovely… I manage not to miss a beat from playing to conversing, back to playing again… and with the birdsong and the atmosphere of it, I wish I’d not had to change the key so I could have it transition in and out of the middle of the song (I often have to change key between writing and recording… my writing singing voice is different from my recording one). I’ve settled on leaving the conversation in its entirety on the end of the studio version and the original demo recording is also available for all to hear. 

 

Demo: 

https://granfalloonmusic.bandcamp.com/track/a-holiday-from-nothing-demo

Final track:

https://granfalloonmusic.bandcamp.com/track/a-holiday-from-nothing

 

Enjoy the song. Treat yourself to a holiday in your brain. So it goes…

 

Be positive.

 

RLx

(AKA Granfalloon)

 

Lessons I learnt from writing a song-a-week

Posted on by Richard Lomax

 

 

First things first, why should you care what I have to say on the subject? It’s a fair question, one I’m asking myself right now…

Some backstory: In 2014, before I began my current project Granfalloon, I challenged myself to write a song-a-week every week of that year. It was exciting and it was maddening, it was frustrating and also deeply gratifying. I learned a lot about myself and my creative process. And, on New Year’s Eve 2014 I finished my 52nd song and I was definitely a better writer at the end of it than I was at the start.

This version of the challenge, The Positive Songs Project, arose from a conversation between myself and PSP’s co-founder Lobelia Lawson, when we were speculating the amount of anxious or sad songs about isolation we might end up writing during the Coronavirus Lockdown this year (2020 for anyone reading in the future… how are ya? Are you enjoying earning money and being able to hug another human being? You lucky thing you!) and in response we suggested attempting a song-a-week challenge with a spin: To write a positive song every week.

So as we’re starting this wonderful and insane journey once again I thought I might jot down some thoughts about what I remember from 2014, and some lessons I learned the hard way, to share with anyone embarking on this Odyssey for the first time.

1. The page doesn’t need to be empty when you start – I’m no purist about writing a new song every week. For me, the page doesn’t need to begin blank. If you have a chord progression that you’ve enjoyed playing for 4 years, or a single lyric that you love but just cannot find a song to put it in, this project is PERFECT for it. If you have a subject matter you’ve been telling yourself you’d write about for ages, that’s a great starting point for a ‘fresh’ piece of work.

2. The creative muscle is just that, a muscle, and you’re exercising it to strengthen it, not to create something perfect straight away. So pencils down when the bell rings! The deadline nature of the project is to strip away the unenjoyable aspects of the creative process (the overthinking, the perfectionism). Imperfection is the best we can aim for in a week. No over-mixing, no worrying if that line is good enough… when the week is done step away from the song. And that Submission Box offers you a wonderful closure so that you can begin the next song. But that’s not to say you can NEVER return to it. Just before Lockdown I was, in fact, engaged in recording my favourite songs from 2014’s set of 52. This of course entailed rewrites, arrangements, orchestration, rehearsals with other musicians, all after 5 years away from those songs. But the reason I was able to build that body of work to pick from, is because when the time was up, I moved on straight away. You’re working on the big picture and coming back for the details later.

3. The only failure is not sitting down to try. I did attempt another song-a-week challenge in 2017. This time I asked a bunch of artists from different mediums to join me (I remember two other musicians, and a stand-up comedian… I might have forgotten someone). From the beginning as each deadline rolled around, excuses would appear rather than music (or jokes…) “I didn’t have time to do it”… “What I came up with wasn’t good enough…” “I didn’t finish it…” Suffice to say this version of the challenge only lasted a few weeks before petering out. I became disheartened with the others’ approach and in the end gave up myself.

But it taught me two things.

Firstly that I shouldn’t have worried what the others were doing, and secondly (and it’s probably my inability to have properly communicated this to them that was the root cause of my frustration), that this isn’t something that you have to come up with excuses for. This challenge is the tool that you’re using to give yourself time and permission to sit down and work your creative muscles. If you sat down and tried to write for 30 minutes, 20 minutes, 10 minutes that week, you have succeeded! And whatever happened in that time is something you can submit that week!

4. Anything can constitute a piece of music, anything can be a song. Over 2014, I submitted 52 pieces of music. Some of those were conventional songs, some were grand studio productions, some were co-writes with others, one was a joke song written on my birthday about my housemate nearly cutting her finger off, one was a 29 second instrumental, one was a techno remix of the previous week’s song, one was a prospective soundtrack piece to an unwritten film, one was a scary story delivered as a monologue by an actor. The scope of this can be a wonderfully freeing thing. I got to try out a lot of different styles and techniques as a result.

5. Rules are only there to give you permission to get over yourself. I love working to a brief. When you can create ANYTHING, you can become frozen by choice paralysis and end up creating nothing. I became fascinated with the Oulipo during 2014. They were a group of French poets who used constrained writing techniques. For example, Perec’s La disparition is a 300-page book which totally avoids using the letter ‘E’ even once! What I enjoy about these rules is the freedom they give me from my own judgement. For example, if I pick up a guitar to write a song and the chord I play is a G major, my kneejerk response is usually one of disgust or self doubt, “A G, Richard? Really? How original…” However, if the rule has been imposed externally, all of sudden I have freedom from that judgement of myself. I can enjoy that G major and blissfully move on to the next chord, thus removing a roadblock to creativity.

6. And finally, the disclaimer… the negation of all which came before… Creativity is and should be, the rule to overrule all other rules! – I think creativity is the Prime Directive of a song-a-week challenge. I undertake this challenge in order to create. The rules of it are self-imposed and only to offer structure when I feel like I’m falling. So whatever rules you are working within for this, disregard them (and this) the minute they get in your way.

Hopefully you found something helpful in these scribblings. Best of luck to you with your song this week!

Excelsior…

So it goes…

Be positive,

Richard Lomax (AKA Granfalloon)
 

Almost 40 Members!

Posted on by Lobelia Lawson

 

The PSP has almost 40 members now! I’m very excited to see what you all come up with for next week. Richard Lomax and I have written our songs and are doing some collaborating this week with various artists and one another – so I’m very excited to share the songs with you next Wednesday!

 

I’ll be working on site updates in order to make submissions and new member information easier to input into the site for artists. I think if we want this to grow – we need to make sure that you can all add your information yourselves (who knows you better than you?) and the submission information is also proliferated onto the site with Richard or I having to manage or curate the content. (although it will still be moderated for all the obvious reasons!)

 

Thank you all for joining and hope that you find this project as rewarding as we have so far!! xx