Since I released my second solo album IronBark, I’ve been gradually blogging about each song. Here are the previous posts:
Track 1 – The Beast of the Air
Track 2 – SteamLife
Track 3 – The Cartographer’s Tale
Track 4 – What the Orderly Saw
Track 5 – Watermen’s Square
The Engineer
The Engineer is the sixth track on the album, and one for which I have a record of the songwriting process.
What’s it about?
The Engineer continues the ‘Miser’s Will’ story from the previous three songs. In those songs, various mechanical and weird body parts are discovered in different locations. This song is from the POV of the engineer who is then kidnapped, drugged and forced to fit these body parts together.
Yes, it is just as silly as the other songs on the album. I do love a melodramatic sci fi or fantasy story and the steampunk theme on this record lends itself well to a narrative like this.
The Writing Process
For the 50/90 songwriting competition a couple of years back i was falling well behind and decided to try to do something about it. So four times in a row, back to back, I wrote four lines of lyrics off the top of my head, picked up my guitar, pressed play and just started playing and singing.
The original idea for The Engineer came from those improvisations.
Here’s the original improv recording:
Tomslatter silence by Indiesongwriter.net
It’s a rambling twiddly affair isn’t? This was at the end of about three hours of improvisation and I was running out of ideas!
However you can hear the melody being composed in real time as I try out different ideas and shape them into a workable tune. Early on you can hear the ideas that would turn into the verse and chorus of the finished track.
Taking the best parts of that improv, I then tidied them up, added a bridge that used the chorus melody from Watermen’s Square, and came up with this acoustic version of the Engineer:
Tomslatter pieces by Indiesongwriter.net
Which is pretty much the finished version but without the drums keyboards and bass.
The Recording Process
What I like in this recording is the drum kit, which if half made of various samples of bits of metal clanking together and half of real drum sounds.
I also like the keyboard loop which I came up with by randomly programming in notes from the E Lydian scale and putting the sound through a delay. More improv, and it sounded good – really reflecting the drugged-up state that the protagonist finds himself in.
Inspired by/Blatantly steals from:
Not sure who I’m ripping off for this song, but I’m sure there must be ideas from others in there.
You can hear the whole album at this link.
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