Staying classy? In THIS economy?

Weekly Composition Post — "The Walk"

(Poster image crop from original by "Malta Girl" used under CC 2.0 license)

This week's prompt-composition piece is called ["The Walk"](tab:https://sagefox.bandcamp.com/track/the-walk).

I wanted to try and least write something every week, even if I don't make the "short accompanying fiction" stage, and I realized there was maybe some congruence between the mental story I had while I wrote this, and the emotional rollercoaster working on it turned out to be.

A consequence of these little one-week songs being born from prompts, and maybe a little bit of the fact that I tend to think "cinematographically" (i.e. in terms of vignettes/scenes/"bits"), is that the songs I've done so far tend to have a sort of... mental movie reel behind them that's guiding how I think the sound should be.

As an example, the piece from last week, "The Bottle", conjured an image of something sinking slowly into a really clear tidal pool; something shiny, made of green glass or the like. The resulting story I wrote diverged there, but that's the gist.

The prompts this week were

To me, the mental "reel" was someone taking a walk (hilariously, I feel like the surroundings were a lot like an autumn Possum Springs, the setting of Night in the Woods) on a circular path: starting somewhere familiar (home), moving through different places, but then circling back to return to the familiar. For a second, I thought about the person on the walk having visions of their entire life in a whole 'journey from birth to death' way.

Problem: writing this song drove me crazy. I had started with the base guitar loop ("Chill Chords Acoustic Guitar," if you have Logic Pro) that spoke to me. Everything after that, though... whuf. Instrumentation, structure, individual notes, volume levels, texture, everything felt wrong. I was never, ever satisfied.

Most of the time I spent writing the song happened on Friday and Saturday, with just a bit this morning. I spent so much time editing, revising, moving pieces around, moving them back, changing instruments... part of the problem is that I am not really a musician and definitely not an electronic musician. I am mostly composing on what "sounds right" to my ear, but when something sounds wrong, I don't really have the framework or experience or knowledge to go, "It sounds wrong because of [x]" so I can address it.

Instead I have to fumble around in the dark, and the result usually isn't... great. Truthfully, I finished this song for today, but I am not sure I entirely like it. If I wasn't making myself stick to the "post the song at the end of the week and that's that" structure, I'd still be editing it for days to come.

The title, "The Walk," is really about my original mental image, but really... it kinda reflects this process, too. I started somewhere comfortable, with some help (a pre-made loop I'm using). I had to wander around and see things firsthand, over and over again, on the way to finishing (the proverbial "walk").

Ultimately, though, I did make it... well, home. The last 8 bars or so, the C section (that I'm still not 100% on but there you go) at the end, is what I wrote this morning, and it really was "how can I get back to where I was at the start of the song?" How can I get home?