Tuesday Tune : Baltimore
In a way I am surprised it has taken this long for me to write about this song, but I wanted to make sure there was some sort of musical chronology to what you were listening to. Once I had that set, I would be more comfortable jumping around tunes, so to speak.
So now we come to what is probably the last phase of the song writing that Kyri and myself did. I would say around 3 or 4 years ago, Alex lost interest in recording. He was busy writing plays with a friend of his from Uni, and so wasn’t around. Kyri and I still found the whole process enjoyable, so we decided to do a couple of experiments. I will do a blog about the unfinished demos we did, but this is about the first song we did in this period, and in many ways my favourite.
I had been watching The Wire at the time, and other than thinking it was a staggering piece of writing, there was something inherently heart breaking about the town. The way it seemed to have been forgotten by the rest of the States, and how it seemed to be cannibalising itself. It was slowly but surely self-destructing and all those people who lived there were part of the process.
I thought about the feeling of being dumped, that feeling of being part of the world, but also not. The way you are key to something, but then it is taken away from you all at once and you are an irrelevance. It was a tortuous analogy to say the least, but I feel the lyrics avoid the more obvious pitfalls I could have made.
Something Kyri and I seemed to do quite well was for me come up with some down beat lyrics, and he would come up with a tune that at first seemed at odds with what we were singing about. It became important to us that people could sing a long to the songs. It sounds like a silly statement, an obvious statement, but actually I feel a lot of singers, and song writers, alienate listeners by making their stuff unattainable. Christina Aguilera for example doing her warbling just makes all her teenie bop fans realise they can’t sing like her. Pretty much all the doo wops, a-ha-has were my suggestion to Kyri as I can’t sing, and if I am listening to something, I want to be able to join in, even if it is in the most basic way.
Both Kyri and I are big fans of Grandaddy and Flaming Lips, and I am pro electronic beep noises, with synths and the such like, and so layering these on the traditional piano score was something I really enjoyed doing, finding bits in the gubbins of his keyboard to make a ticking clock or the such like.
Now, I am obsessed with the sound of a gospel choir, and military drumming. They are both things I would add to this song. The drumming to start and finish the song as a sort of book end, and the choir in the chorus. We would never have been able to get either which is a real shame, but I think it would have made the tune awesome.
Anyway, have a listen, I hope you like it.
- Anand
