I’m on a roll with the lyric videos!
Seems like I’m still pretty knocked out with this cold. Nothing to do but drink hot tea and make lyric videos! Since I can’t really sing at the moment, (finally getting my voice back after losing it a few days ago), I might as well make it easier for others to sing my songs instead!
Here is Missed Connections:
A change in arctic winds has brought super cold air down to the northwest.. and it is unbearable! It finally got the best of me and I’ve been knocked out with a bad cold the past few days. To help make the most of it, I made my first lyrics video while laying in bed with hot tea.
I really enjoy singing along to lyrics videos, and I always look for something basic, just the lyrics, clear and easy to read, so this is what I wanted to go for. I chose ‘Confluence of Anomalies,’ since it seems to be my favorite song off of our recent EP right now.
Not being the most skilled in video making, I started very basic, using iMovie on my MacBook. I created an image in Photoshop with our logo and the song title, and another image that was all black, to serve as the background for the lyrics. I dragged the images and the mp3 file into iMovie, and typed the lyrics in white font using the text boxes. It was easy to increase or decrease the duration of each text box so that they lined up with the song.
Here is the final video:
Now the weather is looking much warmer today, the snow is melting away, and I’m starting to feel a little better.
Ride, by The Rungs
Seems I’m in no hurry yet to get where I’m going so I might as well enjoy the ride
A scene sandwiched in between the same framed window and the always looking over me sky
Even though you’ve been through hell, you can’t quit now you’ve gotta go pick yourself up and get a move on
Tell me what you’re waiting for, a day a week another year another year another year gone
I’ve seen waste arise from haste and so I’m taking my time
Buildings and trees stationary streamed along the way I’m going rolling wheels radio on
(lyrics written by Mandy)
With Halloween just around the corner, it is a fun time to think about characters!
Sometimes lyrics can reflect our deepest most personal thoughts and experiences. While I love to draw from my own memories to construct a song, it is equally rewarding, and sometimes even more fun, to put myself in the mind of someone else! Whether a dear friend, an acquaintance, a certain stereotype, or a made up character, playing a role can make for a great song!
Actors go to great lengths to get into a character. Tom Cruise apparently dressed up as a Fed Ex delivery man to sneak through a crowd without getting noticed, just as an assassin would, in preparation for his role villain role in Collateral. Actors might completely change their lifestyles and take on new hobbies for a short period of time while preparing for a difficult role.
For songwriting though, I say sitting quietly and thinking about the character you want to represent is more than enough. Perhaps with a glass of alcohol or some nice warm tea. Decide what and who your story is about.
Who: Depending on if they are strong or frail or troubled or content, etc, completely changes the perception of the experience. Think of someone, anyone, and channel the little nuances that make them so unique. Do they have a short temper? Unreasonable expectations? Unyielding patience?
What: Sit quietly and try to imagine something that you might not have exactly experienced before; a place, certain gains or losses, heartbreaks, historical events like the great depression or the infamous potato famine, a struggle with sexuality, a good day, a bad day, whatever you want to dive into.
Explore yourself! Then let the music and lyrics evolve 🙂
Right now I am imagining being on a beautiful island in Thailand, the song is very sunny!
I found that my mind flows most freely while in transit. For some reason when I’m walking, driving, or riding a bus, I just get flooded with ideas. Then when I arrive to the destination, my mind is distracted by the purpose of my trip and all of my ideas escape somewhere! Weird right?
Oh well, as weird as it may seem, I think we all have to find our special place where those creative juices can flow. When I think of writing, I picture an image of someone sitting at a desk with pen and paper in hand, furiously recording ideas. For some, that might be just the case, but if that doesn’t work for you and you find yourself stuck, why force it? Go sing in the shower, get out in the sun, go for a run, take a nap…whatever gets the brain-engine started. Sometimes we’ve gotta get creative to get creative!
So genius could strike at any moment, or a light bulb can suddenly flash on in your head, but don’t just wait for the ideas to come. Seek out inspiration, listen to everything around you, be a sponge and soak it all in! Sometimes inspiration can come from the funniest things. Like at work in meetings, on the bus talking to a stranger, waiting in line at the grocery store, the list goes on and on. I love it when my friends use silly expressions and cheesy metaphors because it gets my mind spinning with words. Be a sponge all day long and you’ll fall in love with the littlest things! 🙂
I remember getting out of elementary school in the early afternoon and bolting out on my bike to ride around the neighborhood with my friends. Our 3 little blocks seemed like an endless world of grasshoppers and lizards and perfectly branched climbing trees. We defined our surroundings by a combination of limited knowledge and our Disney influenced imaginations. A haunted house at the end of a long driveway, a hole in the ground that we tirelessly dug to China, the Creek where pirates had once been who we sent bottled messages to, and the sky fort in my backyard that transformed from a ship on the sea into a castle on an island into an airplane in the sky.
Now I’ve gone back there a few times over the past five years. Walking the entire neighborhood in a short 20 min, I recalled strong emotions of adventure, fear and excitement that were once triggered by childhood fantasies. Have I lost this ability to create new dimensions? Have I acquired enough knowledge to scientifically understand everything in front of me and closed in on the gaps that used to be filled with make-believe? Or could I be suppressing a playfulness that is not a social norm in the workplace adult world? I remember this empowering phenomenon that grew in the company of my childhood friends. When we were in the same wavelength, sharing the same imaginative visions of being witches or steering a pirate ship. We fed off of each other’s energy and fueled each other’s energy.
I tried writing a song about these feelings and memories. Here is a video from one of our first attempts playing the song live. Right now its called, ‘Best Friend,’ but I’m working on the recording so everything is subject to change! (things can get crazy when it comes to recording 🙂 ) I dedicate the song to all of my good friends who I grew up with. Man we have sure learned a lot of lessons together! I’m so happy to have music as a channel through which to express these childhood memories.
Here are the lyrics to our recently released song, Confluence of Anomalies!
Verse 1
Confluence of anomalies
Weather man explain to me
I couldn’t sleep last night
Cold air in my window tight
Verse 2
Boy you’ve got a lot of nerve
Climbing up your learning curve
World looks rough from here
And all it took to get you there
(Repeat)
Chorus
From a satellite
A sea of lights
Giving you away
And there are no lines
In real life
Dressing up the day
Verse 3
Run business as usual
Isn’t it unusual
So hard to break a trend
Even with an incentive
Verse 4
Weather knows no boundaries
Latitude complexities
Try to draw relationships
All this based on estimates
Chorus
From a satellite
A sea of lights
Giving you away
And there are no lines
In real life
Dressing up the day
And it looks so small from here
What a shaky sphere
Only currencies of lights
Giving you away
(repeat 3x)
And it looks so small from here
What a shaky sphere
Only currencies of lights
And we’re all here
The end!
Since diving into music making I’ve also become a bigger music fan. This could be indicated by the correlation between the decrease of netflix movies and increase of musician/producer interviews watched on my computer. (trying to keep my math skills fresh here!)
I enjoy watching interviews of my favorite artists explaining their creative processes behind songs and albums and I wanted to write a ‘Top 5 List’ type of blog entry to summarize the key writing methods I’ve observed or practiced.
The thing is, my list of 5 kind of ended up at something around 20! Can you really sum up such a dynamic and creative process in only 5 key points? I concluded that each lyric writing technique deserved to be its own entry 🙂 So here is the first tip:
Accept the ideas that hit you!
My husband will sometimes jump out of bed when we’re falling asleep, grab his guitar and the i-touch I got him for Christmas, and fumble around the room in the dark exclaiming “I’ve gotta record this idea before I forget it!” I used to laugh at him when this happened, but now that I’m working on music, I find myself doing the same thing…
Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love, explores this phenomenon in her 2009 TED talk, ‘Your Elusive Creative Genius.’ Is it some kind of genius that strikes us with noteworthy ideas when we are least expecting them? Well not exactly genius the way we define it today, but more like an ancient version of the word. Gilbert explains how the ancient Romans identified a genius as a divine spirit that mysteriously provided artists with rich content and inspiration. Instead of the artist embodying the genius, something that Gilbert believes puts unnecessary pressure on artists today, the Romans envisioned a separation of the artist and the mysterious creative spirit.
For anyone interested in watching Gilbert’s talk, here is a link:
Now I had watched this talk for the first time about a year ago, and one thing I took from it was to be prepared. Be prepared for your ideas to hit you at anytime! Be it pen and paper, or cool trendy smart phone, grab them and record them when they strike! Capture them before they vanish back into the mysterious world they came from, whether its a genius spirit or the intricacies of your subconscious 🙂
therungsband.com 