When I used to play in bands we used to rehears a lot. When I now play for myself I really haven’t. It seems like a band-thing to do. A band needs to rehears in order to sound good together. Don’t get me wrong, I am not claiming that I sound good, not in any objective way (which can’t exist can it?). I’m just saying that I sound like me, and good together with me. How can I not?
A couple of years ago, after I had just stopped playing in bands, I found that there is another up-side to rehearsing and that was, and is, to remember your songs. A band plays them so frequently at rehearsals that forgetting them is almost, illness and accident induced apart, impossible to forget.
I found this out because I forgot my own songs. I wrote a song, played it a couple of times and then moved on to the next one, writing and playing. After a while, and maybe three or four songs written, the first song was forgotten.
First couple of times this happened I was really bummed out. I always thought that I had forgotten the best song in the world. (This was, however, never the case… I think.) After a while I came up with an explanation which might be true but it also might be true only as a defence mechanism, actually, there were two explanations or defence mechanisms.
The first was a little thing that I had picked up from, then, Swedish talk show host, now, television program producer, Erik Haag, then host of a show on ZTV called Knesset (ther was only one video-link for Knesset and that on has Kristian Luuk as the host, he was prior to Erik, you get the idea of the show at least) He, once on the show said something on par with: I don’t write stuff down. If the idea is good enough I’ll remember it. Sadly this isn’t true since the brain, our hard drive, can’t distinguish good ideas from bad. I guess one can, to a certain extent, train ones memory but one rarely gets to choose what one remembers.
Bad method or not I applied this to my song writhing. If the song is good enough I’ll remember it.
I don’t think that I did. I did remember some songs. If they were better than the once that I forgot I doubt. I remembered some really poor songs.
The other explanation that I came up with is a true one. I decided that what I thought was fun was to write songs and when I had written them that was it for me. If I forgot them so what. I write that this is true because it is. Writing is what I enjoy but I no longer see just songwriting as the entire process, there is the recording part of it as well. This means that I need to record a song before my journey is complete.
I could record it at home, just after I had written it but then the idea of quality sets in. I mean: If I have spent days, weeks, sometimes months in getting a song together why would I want to make a bad recording of it? Who would package a diamond in a paper bag?
Since studio time is hard to come by, for a poor student like myself, I now have to remember my songs and how do I do that best if not go back to my teenage band-days of rehearsal.
This is essentially where this monster post leads. To tell you that I have, for the first time actually, rehearsed the songs to appear on the next album and good songs they are, I’ll bet you I’ll remember all of them.
(For those of you wanting to read even more and also ask the question: But hey! This is you second album you are about to record. how the hell did you go about recording the first one if you did not rehearse for that one and that one, as we all know from your whining about it, took you two and a half year to complete? An extremal valid question! Here’s the thing. My first album was for the most part written on synths, in the computer. so when I had written a part I just pressed save and the computer remembered the song for me. So what you can deduce from that sentence is: this time the songs have not been written on the computer.)
