Last week's homework assignment from Brian Eno's School of Song course involved writing a song in an 'uneven' time signature, for example, 3/4 or 6/8.
Eno detailed how in 1990, he'd written a song with John Cale called 'Córdoba' for their album 'Wrong Way Up'.' Eno and Cale took the lyrics from a language-learning book named 'Spanish In Three Months'.' Eno challenged us to use the English-translated sentences from the same book to write the lyrics for our song. Below are some example sentences:
Don't go near the edge
He leaned out of the car window
It's very easy to meet English tourists in Spain
We have not been able to find out his name
I was dreaming of all the places I have visited
Out of context, all of these seemed oddly sinister or melancholic.
Finally, Eno asked us to toss a coin to choose the chord sequence. He limited us to G or D. The coin had to be flipped eight times, and the order of the chords would depend on the coin's choice.
I went with a 3/4 time signature. My coin toss got me a G D G G G D D D chord sequence, which I initially found maddeningly difficult to write a melody over. My natural instinct was to play a more even rotation of G and D to start the song. I got lucky with the sequence at the end (the coin showing mercy), but every time I'd get back to the start of the sequence, I'd trip over. In the end, I added a descending melodic line to the guitar part to give my brain something else to focus on.
Between the tropical rain showers.
Lyrically, my first thought was to write a longer narrative from a combination of the mysterious lines, but then I decided to go with a minimalist approach. I chose the final line from the list, then messed about with it. During the recording, I had a happy accident where I muddled up the lyrics between the different takes but then layered them over each other when mixing the track. My lyrics ended up as some variation on:
I was dreaming of all the places I have visited
I was visiting all of the places I dreamed of.
I was visiting all of the places I visited.
I was dreaming of all the places I dreamed of.
The ambient sound in the background is a tropical rain shower in northeast Brazil hammering down on a trellis roof above me, and some kind of whining insects (crickets?) in the bushes. These rain showers signified the start of the rainy season in Brazil, which will last until May. We have now returned to the Northern Hemisphere and the Spanish winter. I'm still waiting for the fog of the journey to clear.
More from me and Professor Eno next week.
Until then, JCV
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