How My Music Changed Over The Last Year

After the intense work I did on “My Friend Parky” I wanted to go in a different direction. Not a Parkinson’s record.

Originally I decided I wanted to do a blues album but with Big Band style horns. I made covers of Little Milton’s “We’re Gonna Make it”, Junior Wells’ HooDoo Man Blues”, The 5 Royales, “Think” and Leon Russell’s, “Hurt Some Body” and I pulled up a couple of instrumental songs I had done in the past.

My muse had left me. I had no new songs to write.

I was reading books and watching videos about songwriting. Billy Joel said in one interview that “the sound of a word is more important than meaning of the word”. That really struck me.

Then I read a debate on Quora about Steely Dan’s lyrics. One side said they were just nonsense phrases that sounded good. The other side was adamant that the songs were not nonsense at all. That they had deep meaning if you take the time to understand them. I’m not sure which side I come down on.

That inspired me to start writing. I decided to write the first  lyrical phrases that came in my head. I was in a place at that time where I had a sense of losing control so the phrases reflected that. Then I put the phrases together to make a song. And if I had to change a phrase to rhyme I did.  Then I looked at the phrases and try to make them a little more cryptic. Adding some nonsense phrases.

The end result was “The Shape Of Almost”. It didn’t fit any blues style so I thought maybe 1970s Memphis Soul but I kept the Big Band Horns. I loved it and released it as a single. The song got picked for one of Spotify’s editorial playlists and I was suddenly get hundreds and then thousands of streams. So I hired a Fiverr guy to “promote” the song by pitching it to other Spotify playlists. The song went from 10,000 streams to 20,000 and I hired another one and it got to 30,000. Eventually it got to 40,000 streams and it still gets more than a thousand streams a month.

So now I wanted to make an album in the styles of R&B and soul from the 60s and 70s that I loved.

And my muse came back. And I was freed up a little writing lyrics. It became easier, at least for a while. I think I wrote a dozen songs in a couple of months.

I went to see the Michael Jackson movie (I loved it) with my son who was a huge MJ fan in the 90s. I decided I wanted to make some songs in his style. The first one was “Good Times On Fire”. I was very happy with the result so I repurposed some of the songs I had already written in a more 80s style.

So if you listened to the album in order (I know nobody does anymore ) It starts with Motown / Memphis Soul from the sixties and seventies. Then there a few blues songs. Then there are the 80s songs.