I’m no expert at making albums. I’m sure there are right ways of doing things that I’m getting horribly wrong, but nonetheless I’m muddling through.
I’m now at the point with album 5 that I have 13 tracks I’m happy with. I’ve been toying with some ideas for at least one more track, but the total length is already a little over an hour.
Of course, most of them still haven’t got even a basic mix sorted out, and there will be lots of tweaks and changes to come.
To that end, I have to keep track of which track is which. Most of the tracks are just numbered at this stage. For the most part, only ones with lyrics are titled. The rest just have a number, a length and a collection of words which sort of describe them.
As an example, let’s look at a track from Someone Like You. This one was the sixth I started for that album, so for a long time it was called “Song 6.” The description was “nasal synths, bell lead, sense of adventure, harp bridge.”
During a stream I went through the tracks and gave titles to those which didn’t yet have one. For Song 6 I was particularly caught up on this “sense of adventure” and, trying out various ideas, I kept starting my thoughts with “I wonder if…” and eventually realised it fitted quite nicely. So Song 6 became I Wonder If.
If you check on the album, you’ll notice that it didn’t end up as track 6 either. It became the first track. (Ordering the tracks is a whole other matter.)
So back to album 5, itself lacking a name as I write. Eight tracks have names, but I have yet to assign a title to Song 9 (“heavy drums into light guitar/piano-backed, echoey, 6:8, emotive strings, rock guit solo”) among others.
I’ll tell you about one that did get a name, however. It’s Song 13, Thirty Years of Now. This is based on a MED module I made way back on the Amiga, which had the title NewTech. That old tune only lasted about one-and-a-half minutes, so it needed a lot of new material, and given its age it was hardly “new tech”. Time for a rebrand.
I thought a bit about its sound, its feeling, but none of that led to a title – but the age, about 30 years, that seemed promising. I typed in “Thirty Years of New” but as I looked at the words, I kept seeing “New” as “Now”, and the paradox of “Thirty Years of Now” really appealed to me.
I rarely start with a title, and if I do it’s almost always for a song with lyrics: Captain Faded Red was one of those, as were The Second Door on the Left and Bondanavasieta. There’s going to be one on album 5 too, Impersonating an Estate Agent. I don’t know why I thought of that as a concept, but once I started to ask myself why anyone would do it, the words started to come.
Sometimes I think of a title on its own, without a song to connect it to. I keep a collection of interesting titles and once in a while I’ll find I’ve written something which fits one of them. For instance, I’d had “The Earl Tumult” as a title sitting around for ages, and it was quite late in The Telescope‘s development that I assigned it to Song 10.
As time goes on I hope to explain a little more about where some of the titles came from. Vague notions, in-jokes, references nobody else will get, anagrams… oh yes, some of them are anagrams. I like a good word puzzle.
