This interview was conducted a few weeks back with Helen’s Evil Twin, a songwriter who completed the 50/90 challenge with room to spare. You can find her on myspace here.
1. 50 songs – did you have a system for finishing?
Not really. Originally, I intended to do an album in a day early on, and then another one together with my friend Andy Dwyer (levitator), but neither of those happened. Then when Tim did his second pigfeast, and Nancy did her adventures in jazz, that encouraged me to try the same, hence “Lentilfeast”.
In the meantime, various other challenges had been set up, so I was partaking in random collaborations and reciprocal challenges, and then there were mini-challenges happening in the hypnopaedia chatroom that Mal had set up. The new genre of “Exquisite Corpse” song helped to up my song count a lot.
I ended up doing 2 “collabfeasts” where I spend a whole day co-writing with another 50/90er – once with Nancy Rost and once with Hoopshank. They were very different experiences. Nancy and I had an ocean between us, and a grand plan for how we were going to approach our songwriting, which we stuck to fairly faithfully. Hoopshank came to my house, we had no plan, just a couple of guitars and far too much cider.
All in all, I think that, while I didn’t have a system, I was helped through 50/90 by random challenges, which I did pretty much all of, and collaborations.
2. Which song did you consider your biggest success? Why was it successful?
Hard to pick one song. I’m very proud of “Witching Hour” which was a collaboration I wrote with Swampjaw McLaughlin. It was the first set of lyrics I’d written without music, and I think they came out pretty well.
I really love “Middle of the World”, which was a really tough song to record.
Download Middle of the World
I used a synth emulator, but I didn’t have any way to record it, other than to plug a jack lead from the headphone port to the microphone port of my computer, so I could hear neither what I was playing, nor the backing track. I just had to guess, and then manipulate it once it was recorded. I then sent the backing to Nancy, who did some vocals, and then we added some aeroplane noises and some people speaking in foreign languages. To get the foreign speech, I recorded a skype call with Nancy, Hoopshank and Dan Wallbank, and we all said the odd phrase in any languages we knew. That was then put in as background sounds. I think that song was definitely the hardest to produce.
For a song that is more typical of what I write, I think I’d say “Pride”. It’s very simple, but I think it works well and gets its point across.
3. Music or lyrics?
I’m not really much of a lyricist, so when I write lyrics I like, I’m generally very proud of them, but really, it’s the music for me.
4. Are there any songwriting clichés, musical or lyrical, that you use too much?
I tend to use very simple chords and rhythms on the guitar, but I don’t think I really go with cliches much. Maybe I do. I sing “Oh” at the beginning or end of lines a lot. Does that count?
5. How have you developed as a songwriter through this challenge?
I’ve learned a lot about recording and mixing. Also, my instrumental skills have improved. This all has made it easier to make the sounds I want to, which then has expanded my songwriting horizons a fair bit. Sometimes you need to know how you can do something before it occurs to you to try it.
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