Okay, some of y'all have suggested that at some point I should put some of the music I do up here. I haven't done it yet. I know, we don't judge here...except when we do.
But...I'm in the process of putting two albums together, and I'm just intoxicated enough and sleep-deprived enough to let y'all watch the process. And I'm gonna go one step further and ask you to help.
Putting a song together is really difficult. Imagine playing Wordle, but there's no five-letter limit, and phrases have to rhyme. But here's how it's done: You find something to write about, and some music to go with it, and then you have to present it to the musicians you work with and let them help you finish it.
To do that, we use "The Demo." You sit at home and compose a song, then you record it - all by yourself, and present it to the band. If they like it, it gets taken apart and reworked and redone, and then you "lay it down." The band records it, track by track.
I've been working all afternoon and evening and into these wee hours on a demo.
This one starts in 1993, when I was with Raintown. One night at a rehearsal, we started jamming and came up with a structure for a song. I was the "songwriter" of the band, so I arbitrarily dubbed it "Pirate Radio." The intent was that I would go write the lyrics and melody and bring it back to the band. It never happened. We had a dozen songs we were working on, and "Pirate Radio" was just one of them. And as it turned out, we broke up in 1994 and orphaned all the ideas we were working on.
28 years passed, and "Pirate Radio" was completely forgotten. There were other bands, other songs, other demos, other recordings. Until this morning. This morning my old collaborator in Raintown and I were exchanging old memories, and somehow we came across "Pirate Radio."
Long story short, he had a recording of the rehearsal where we jammed the song. I listened to it, and thought, "Man, that was a cool idea. We should have worked on that one."
So...I pulled the old jam recording into Garage Band. Then I pillaged my news feed for a lyrical idea, and found one. I wrote a verse and a chorus, and laid it down as a demo. Over the course of the last 8 hours I came up with a second verse, and added more to the demo. Just rough ideas. The intent here is that Bill and I will agree on various ideas, then we'll start to put down the song for real.
But it starts with a demo. And because Tony has asked in the past to hear what I do, I'm going to share how a song gets built. Here's the demo, what I send to Bill so he can refine his guitar parts and accept or reject my lyrical ideas, and then we build from that into a song and a recording.
As it is, Bill really likes this idea of mine. So the process has begun. The end result will be a recording of the song, and I'll share it here when it's done.
But here's what I sent him. The instruments come from a rehearsal recording of us jamming in 1993. The lyrics and melody were written today - er, yesterday - and I laid them down over the past 8 hours while I've been making cinnamon rolls.
In a demo, the lyrics can be hard to hear, so I'll provide the lyrics. Give it a listen, read the lyrics, and tell me what you think.
Oh, the vocals stop after the second chorus, and what's left is the jam from 1993...until it collapses. We'll fix that later. ;-)
Here's the link to the demo: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ap1itbYdlfU1gdtP_HkGXJDqFDAMhQ?e=kqBjGR
Here are the lyrics, so far:
Pirate Radio
They found a body in a barrel in the reservoir
a little southeast of town
It had a hole in the head where it shouldn't been
Somebody put the boy down
The water level's down cause the rain won't fall
And they're holding up the river's flow
Now the lake's telling stories like a charismatic preacher
on pirate radio
You can run but you'll only die tired
Hide till we run you down
Dance like your feet are on fire
You're wired up tight for sound
Dirty little secrets won't keep
No matter how hard you try
Silent waters run deep
But you're living on camera
Livin in the camera eye
Got a hand in your pocket
Got a number on the door
Everybody's tuning in to
Pirate radio
So they trotted out the coroner to tell a tale
The coroner pronounced him dead
It might have been the water or it might have been the barrel
Or the hole in the side of his head
Maybe he's a wise guy
Or maybe he's a biker
There's really no way to know
But the newsfeed's running on Instagram and Twitter
And the pirate radio
You can run but you'll only die tired
Hide till we run you down
Dance like your feet are on fire
You're wired up tight for sound
Dirty little secrets won't keep
No matter how hard you try
Silent waters run deep
But you're living on camera
Livin in the camera eye
Got a hand in your pocket
Got a number on the door
Everybody's tuning in to
Pirate radio
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
I though the intro instrumental was very different from the song core once it got started. I liked both, but maybe as two separate songs.
As for the bulk of the song, had a southern rock vibe to me. Was thinking 38 Special or Little Feet...(specifically Texas Twister), maybe some Rossington Collins.
Like Tony, I look forward to listening again.
