To celebrate six months of undertaking this challenge of putting out a song a week on Substack, I’ve gone back to what I did in the very first week, and written and recorded the song on the day of posting.
This one was written in about 45 minutes on this hot and still Sunday afternoon in sunny Barcelona. I was messing about with this guitar sequence on the sofa when my daughter pulled an art book by the American modernist painter Stuart Davis from the shelf. The book landed with a thump and startled me, my wife, and my mother-in-law.
Later, while everyone else was having a siesta, I found myself flicking through the book, ‘Stuart Davis in Full Swing’. The titles of the paintings jumped off the page at me (as did Davis’s vivid, colourful paintings), and I decided to go back to one of Brian Eno’s exercises of using ‘found lyrics’ to complete the piece I’d be noodling away on. The melody is pretty simple, but it works quite well with the chords.
Recently, I’ve been working on more layered and intricate recordings, so it felt good to do something fast and loose, inspired by Stuart Davis’s vibrant work. Both the guitar and vocals were recorded in two takes (the lyrics were still unfamiliar to me, so I was winging it a little while cutting the vocals).
Lyrics:
Arcade town square
Arch hotel
Electric bulb
Men and machine
Lucky strike
Blips and ifs
Ready-to-wear
Standard brand
Percolator
Ultra-marine
Package deal
American painting
Something on the 8-Ball
Something…
Colonial Cubism
The Paris bit
Unfinished business.
Report from Rockport
Lesson one
Ways and means
Something on the 8-Ball
Something…
Something…
Something…
—-
Thanks for listening.
JCV
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