DarrenIzzard.com

Tag: titles

  • What’s Coming?

    There have been unavoidable delays with Alex’s artwork, although it’s coming along well now.

    With that in mind, I’ll go through the tracks on the new album. You’ll have to imagine the sounds until it’s released.

    1. Crystallised Coffee
      • Alex likes this one. My notes say “mysterious, glistening” but really I have this image in my head of a crystal somehow containing a complete cup of coffee. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but if I was, it would be freshly mined out of caves.
    2. Tinted Windows
      • “Dark and reflective” say the notes. I sometimes listen to music while travelling and as I watch the scenery pass by I think of it as a live music video. It always works. But what if the windows were, well, tinted? They’d be dark and reflective I suppose.
    3. Neon Vesper
      • I used the word “neon” but still failed to be synthwave. As for the “vesper,” that’s just the old term for evening. So, we have new and old, of course, but with colourful lights breaking through as the sun fades.
    4. Dancing Sparks
      • The image is of something industrial going on, but with an odd reminiscence of that version of Wizardry I did for C64Audio many years ago. Heavy machinery and magic all happening at the same time. The 6:8 time gives it a free-form whirling feel as the track progresses.
    5. Impersonating an Estate Agent
      • The first track with lyrics. I just had this line pop into my head: “Impersonating an estate agent, come see the basement.” It sounded both absurd yet creepy, and had to become a full song. I know nothing about real estate, of course, a fact well-illustrated here.
    6. A Day of Surprises
      • Upbeat with woodblocks in the rhythm and some busy chords going on. And a synth that goes “wow!” every so often. That’s the surprise. Don’t tell anyone.
    7. The Sign Said This Way
      • That beep in the background is from an experimental synth I was coding, a very simple sound but it was nice to find a use for it. The track is quite relaxed, with the guitar finding its own way forward among some meandering keyboards.
    8. Thirty Years of Now
      • A re-imagined and considerably extended version of one of my old Amiga tracks. Always fun revisiting one of those and trying to write new material to blend in with what I wrote all those years back. I wrote a bit about the title in the previous post.
    9. But His Face Had Changed
      • A melancholy start gains power and an unsettling feel via an organ-like lead and some choral pads. While working on the cover, Alex suggested the “he” referred to in the title might be the false estate agent as his true intentions become clear. Quite possibly!
    10. Stirring Sugar
      • Lighter with a shuffle, but still some reflective chords. A lot of my tracks have a retro-gaming feel, but the tune of this one particularly reminds me of my old Amiga modules. Mind you, I wish I’d had strings and brass like this back then.
    11. It’s a Mistake, Brian
      • I chanced upon an old newspaper article about a man doing the right thing in handing a wallet into the police, which was returned to its rightful owner. Good man. But this isn’t about him. This is about a guy who hands everything he sees into the police, regardless of whether it’s lost or not.
    12. Helicopter Man
      • Done originally for a certain streamer who shall remain nameless. I’d made little bonus tracks for his rave streams, and this was one I contributed for New Year 2025. The story is based on an incident his wife revealed from when they were dating. Some people just can’t resist the spotlight.
    13. The Bell Forge
      • I wish there were a deeper reason for this title, but it has bells in it. I mean, some of the others have bells too, but I can’t call them all “The Bell Forge.” It conjures up the image for me of exploring a large, abandoned hall. With bells.
    14. The Realm of the Board
      • The original idea was a song about an old decaying wooden board, but somehow I couldn’t make the lyrics come together. I considered a few different approaches to this “board” idea, even checking a thesaurus, and ended up throwing them all in. That’s this song. It’s as many things associated with boards as I could make rhyme. The funny thing is, it almost makes sense.

    There we have it. 14 tracks, just over an hour. Coming soon.

  • Naming things

    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.