JD Torian

Writing a Sing-Song by Accident

Very oddly-but maybe predictably, I wrote and recorded a song on guitar a couple days ago. Probs because, only a few days prior, I kind of realized that you don’t have to sit down with a guitar for it to be a real song. To say that I ā€œrealized,ā€ this is a bit dramatic. I just stopped believing the opposite.

I guess it kind of set my subconscious pea brain free, because I’ve been so deep in my setup and doing other stuff, playing my Grandmother, monosynths, all this other garbage, I just kind of needed a break.

I’ve got an old—not very old—but one of those Squier 40th Anniversary Jazzmasters for super cheap, and I just love it. I was just sitting down playing it through the one pickup that actually works on it, plugged it into the OP-1, recorded two passes, and then fed the OP-1 mic through the guitar amp and just started singing stuff, slowly working through what the lyrics would be.

So not entirely unlike improvising an electronic song, I just kind of wrote through this song in real time.

All worlds are colliding here. Everything’s starting to turn into the other thing. All processes are affecting other processes pretty positively. The more work you do, the more work you get. It’s pretty great, because it all feels like not a lot of work.

All these rules you set out for yourself are so imaginary. We are ruled by imaginary things like money and time, things that really, truly do not exist. A good reminder of what does and what doesn’t exist, musically, I have found that there’s pretty much only one musical problem in life: there’s not a song. And the only fix is to write one.

Does the world need more music? Probably not. Are there enough songs? Yes. But I'm an artist, so there are going to be more songs.

And that’s it.

#creativity #guitar #improvisation #process #songwriting