Friday May 18th 2012 is the first International Fascination of Plants Day, and to mark the occasion biologist Anne Osterrieder had asked me to write a song. The thing is, I don’t know much about plants – on a cellular level, culinarily, culturally, horticulturally – I possess extremely limited knowledge. What was I going to write about?

I’d set aside Saturday to spend the day writing, but I’d mostly spent it eating cheese and talking about macaroons on Twitter. At about 9.30, I’d watched the Lord of The Rings up until the point it gets boring*. I could procrastinate no longer.

And maybe it was because of the Ents in Lord of The Rings**, ancient mobile trees, whose fastest movements took hours. But I started to think about this place I’d been to on the Olympic peninsula, where a thick temperate rainforest gave way to a cliff and thin beach facing the pacific ocean. When I walked down to the sea I was greeted with mile upon mile of oversized driftwood, whole tree trunks than had been bleached white by the salt water and left on the beach. All thanks to the sea, dragging all those fallen giants away and back to this elephant’s graveyard, eyeing covetously the line of trees teetering on the weatherbeaten coast, which resisted, for now. There are some photos, but I don’t think any capture what I was feeling as well as the song, that at about 1am on Sunday morning, I finished writing and recording: a world of slow, powerful forces, a vista which has probably looked more or less the same for several thousand years.

The Methuselah tree, not far from Death Valley in southern California, is estimated to be 4,800 years old. It was born 2,800 years before Christ and maybe 400 years before Britons built Stonehenge. Pando, The Trembling Giant, a clonal colony of aspens near Fish Lake in southern Utah, is estimated to be 80,000 years old. As far as I can work out, it’s believed that human beings could not have made their way to North America before around 45,000 BC. In tree years, Pando was my age before he saw a human being. Europeans arrived six months ago.

It’s unusual for me to write a song from the point of view of a tree, much less get so animated about it. I’d not make much of a hippy. But in considering the timescales involved, it’s hard not to be awed; and the timescales on which the life of a 5,000 year old tree is as transitory as a human life.

*no spoilers, but immediately after “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”

**they don’t tip up until the end of the second film, but I know they’re there

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I’m not sure whether this song has much of a story – maybe just that in my cynical old age, most jobs which you imagine to be terribly exciting turn out to a bit of a slog. Also, it stems from the Alan McGee quote (about Coldplay I think) describing their music as “bedwetter music”. Now I’m no Coldplay flagwaver, but it’s the sort of macho bullshit that makes me despair for the male race. If the masculine, strong alternative is Oasis, I’ll take Coldplay.

“I don’t want to hear a song about a little man crying over a solitary meal” attempts to strike the same tone. “I don’t want to hear about men being sad, they should be out watching team sports and pursuing women”. I tried to think about what such a person does want to hear about (apart from sex and violence) and “A great big bear dragging a tractor over a field” was the literally the most masculine thing I could think of. That rhymed.

Having got that far, the rest of the song was just to work out who this bear was and what he thought about. And to make sure, by the end of the song, it was really about a little man crying over a solitary meal. Fuck you, Alan McGee.

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Making friends can be hard. I sometimes feel like a friendship klutz; knocking over vases as I desperately attempt to look nonchalant. I don’t know why I supplanted this to romance – more dramatic, I guess. I think as a straight man, hitting on a lesbian would be super-embarassing – it would show a basic lack of knowledge about the person you’re supposed to be interested in. I think the next up/down from that would be taking a vegetarian out for a steak dinner. The stuff about the dogs and the rivers and the isolation came later. As it always does.

Playwright Samuel Beckett is famously supposed to have said “fail better” with regards to artistic endeavours; of course what he actually said was “flail batter”, in answer to the question “whats the best way to whip up a really tasty tempura?”. And he was probably really really drunk, because he was an Irish playwright, and that would fit the stereotype perfectly.

Implicit in my New Years Resolutions is fail more. Failing more means learning more, and doing more stuff. So, with this in mind, I attempted a banjo/bass cover version of my favourite Fugazi song, Target. I don’t think this is wholly successful – and it’s not spectacularly bad, which would at least be funny.

This is incidentally a song which inspired me to make music, do anything creative at all, and sums up a lot of my enduring hatred of “talent show” formats. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – if you want to seize the sound, you’d don’t need a reservation. Only I didn’t say it first.

For most songs, the original is the best (I’m not The Beatles biggest cheerleader, but I haven’t heard a cover that’s improved on their version). For others, there is one definite version – maybe not the original. Hallelujah is the obvious example; Spain’s version of Spiritual; pick your own…

Sometimes a song stands up more than one reading. The Ben Folds and Flaming Lips versions of “She Don’t Use Jelly” being one that jumps immediately to mind.

“You’ll lose a good thing” is one of those for me, one that I recently rediscovered. I first heard it in the mid-90s as a small, soulful cry of dignity, nestled amongst David McAlmont and Bernard Butler’s first album. David McAlmont, for those unfamiliar, is like an English Anthony Hegarty with tunes (at least in the voice department) – and I had thought their version definitive. I probably didn’t even realise it was a cover. Here is a live performance which I think I like even more than the album version:

Until last week I’d never heard the original. Boy, was I in for a treat. It was written by a 20 year old soul singer and blues guitarist called Barbara Lynn in 1962. It was massive hit, and I think you can tell why:

This defiant, upbeat song transforms into a celebration of selfhood – or, more accurately, McAlmont/Butler turned it into the frightened rabbit they did. Ms Lynn is smoking hot, possessed of a fine soul voice, and is a pretty rockin blues guitarist. Triple threat. (Plus she’s an awesome songwriter).

That song was released 50 years ago. I googled Barbara Lynn, and yes, she’s still alive. Moreover, she’s still gigging. Moreover, she JUST TURNED SEVENTY. Would you like to see a video of her playing “You’ll lose a Good Thing” six weeks ago AT HER SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY PARTY, 50 YEARS after it was a first a hit single? Well there is one, but the recording quality is not very good. This one from 2008′s better:

I’m reminded of seeing Nina Simone in the 90s. In her case, she seemed pretty rickety and eccentric in between songs. But when she sang, when she played… I can still remember the shiver that went up my spine when she started to sing “I love you Porgy…”. She, as they say, still had it. As does Barbara Lynn. And long may she continue – although if she wants a rest from live performance, I can’t help but feel she’s earned it.

Last week I made this little video about my prepared superbass – which is a real mutt of a guitar. As the video explains, it’s a baritone guitar which in the past I’ve strung E-A-d-g-b-e, the capitals denoting bass strings and the lower case guitar strings. When a bunch of the strings pinged off during a restringing a few days ago, I retuned it DD-D-D-d (here DD denotes dropped D bass, D denotes dropped D guitar, and d regular guitar d) and twisted the remaining strings loosely around the playing strings. You can hear what it sounds like here:

I really like it. And I’ve recorded, as promised, a song with just Prepared Superbass, ukulele, and voice. So if you can hang around for a few weeks, you’re in for a treat.

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The original is significantly more upbeat. But I’m a gloomy folk person, so this is what you get. The original song has SO MUCH going on – space, robots, fretless bass solos, synth brass and buried within a really beautiful harmony and melody, a really direct and innocent-sounding vocal performance, and a story that feels like it’s from the 1940s. I’m not sure my version does it justice, but the original arrangement obscures most of the good things about the song too. Much like Leonard Cohen’s own version of “Hallelujah” -  it took a reworking to bring out what a good song it actually is.

No, I did not just compare myself to Jeff Buckley and no, I did not compare the RAH Band to Leonard Cohen.

Crab Lord Destroys City

A lot of the songs I’ve been writing lately seem to focus around unusual or “quirky” subject matter. I can see how this could put someone off – tales of weird shit can quickly get very annoying. I think the reason that a lot of psychedelic music is very much of a time and place is the imagery – often taken so seriously, even when being humourous, and so clearly allegorical and rooted in the attitudes of the time. (I think one of the great things about mid-60s Dylan is the way he constantly introduces surreal and scattershot humour into his songs – humour that is invariably not funny).

The thing is, I want to get away from the school of songwriting which deals with well-trodden tropes. “You’re just so bad, babe, but I can’t get enoughhaya”. There are good songs written about these stories in that style, but they’re few and far between – and most are probably just echoes of the platonic original, written by Robert Johnson or one of those old delta bluesdudes.

When is an original song, a surprising song, “just” a novelty song? A one-joke gag, a one-idea track that turns up and goes nowhere? Some would consider They Might Be Giants’ Birdhouse in Your Soul in that category – I think it’s properly amazing. Generally their work plays with language, genre, structure, and meaning – which some people hate, and I find deeply creative and inspiring.

Songs are like scupltures -  except underneath the smooth stone is something living and breathing.  I’m interested in the living flesh encased within the stone – I want to find the cracks in the song to work my way inside it. There needs to be a rough edge which catches my fingertips as I run my hand over it. Overused tropes, overproduction, familiar lyrics, all of these feel like a smooth block of marble to me. Pretty on the outside, no idea what’s going on inside. Equally well, it can’t all be cracks – that’s a pile of rubble and not a sculpture – and if I want to run my hand through rubble, physically or aurally, I’ll go to a building site.

Originality is very hard to come by, and constantly tackling “quirky” subjects is way to not get taken very seriously. But, to paraphrase John Flansburgh (I think), that’s something an artist actually has little control over.

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I’ve had the lyrics for this song floating around for over a year –  originally set to a slightly shitter chord progression, which I’ve forgotten because it bored even me. Almost all of the songs I write happen because I have a riff or chord progression and an idea for a lyric or a story in mind –  the concrete lyrics condense around the rhythm, melody and harmony of the music. Then there’s usually some wrangling as bits get added and subtracted, different instruments wander in and out, and I make some effort to put a pretty frame around the whole thing. Anyway, this was a very rare case of writing the music around the extant lyric – and the first outing for my hammond organ guitar sound. This was achieved with a lot of different guitar parts, all ebowed and stuck through Logic’s Leslie effect. A lot of in-the-box recording, which I don’t tend to do for clean or dirty guitars, but for heavily effected sounds it can sound pretty good (ebow+leslie deffo counts in that category). Anyway, I digress… let me know what you think, through the usual channels.

Btw, I don’t know what the coldest western city outside Anchorage is. I don’t even think Anchorage is the coldest city in “the west”, however you define it. The song implies that the coldest western city outside Anchorage is London. Although it feels that way on this cold February evening, the coldest western city outside Anchorage is probably somewhere in Canada.

It’s a bit late, I know, but here they are: my new year’s resolutions for music and life.

1) Write more songs
This is pretty much my constant resolution – write more, write faster, write looser, write better. Last January, Darren Hayman wrote and released a song a day – a workrate I don’t think I would ever achieve without the songs being shit, and certainly not while I have a job. I toyed with the idea of releasing a cover a day, but decided against it – it’s a pale shadow of what Hayman and others have accomplished, and I would feel as if it were trying to wring undue attention for myself from work that is not my own. If I were doing it every day, I worry I’d struggle to inject much stylistic variation and I think it would start feeling like hackwork quite quickly.

Nevertheless, I want to write more. Having a slightly lower barrier to entry helps – i.e. being less critical of ideas before they’re fully formed – but just acknowledging how important writing is to me and how weird I get when I don’t do it properly and often is also key. It’s something I forget.

Summary: Songs aren’t a chore, they’re an opportunity for creativity.

2) Enjoy it more
I put a lot of pressure on myself to write more, write better. Paradoxically, I think my best and most creative stuff comes from having a certain amount of playfulness. If the writing process is fun, I generally enjoy listening to and performing the song more.

Summary: More fun please!

3) Gigs
I’m not certain whether I should be focussing on more gigs or better gigs. Probably both. If there’s going to be a crowd, if we’re getting paid, if a gig is fun, if I like the promoter, if the promoter hasn’t asked us to bring 20 people, if there are people on the bill I like, if it’s something a bit different, if it’s a gig or a venue we’ve never played before, if we feel like the promoter likes us and their crowd might – these all feel like decent reasons to play a gig. I may even get involved with organising a gig or two. Ooooooh.

Summary: Not more, not better, but nice gigs.

4) Tweet a bit less
I feel like 2011 was the year I hit my twitter stride and really started enjoying it – using it for conversations, jokes and a medium for a form of surreal stream-of-consciousness storytelling that I find highly enjoyable, especially when other people join in (to wit: an alternative version of Sex and the City that even I might watch) . However, these experiments take up a lot of tweets, and I get annoyed with others who fill up my timeline with volume, whether or not their quality is good. Don’t expect my stream to be less self-indulgent or discursive – far from it, I think there’s a lot to be done with Twitter that I haven’t figured out yet – but maybe I could moderate my rate a bit?

Summary: Twitter friends don’t let other Twitter friends alienate their followers with large quantities of stream-of-consciousness tweets.

5) Make Pastry
I learned shortcrust in 2011, and have already done puff from scratch in 2012. Filo is NEVER going to happen, so let’s cross this one off, eh?

Summary: SUCCESS!

6) Eat less pastry

I am a little bit tubby after Xmas, still. Time to stop shoving pie at my face.

This will require feeding all the pastry I plan to make to people I like. You’re welcome.

Summary: make friends with pastry then give them pastry

7) More photography
I’ve fallen out of photography in the last few years, and getting an entry-level DSLR and (unrelatedly) an instagram account may be my way back into it. I really like how science blogger Alice Bell uses photography and commentary to make London look way existential* – how photographic composition forms an observation (figurative as well as literal). Obviously the use of photos has been widespread on twitter and flickr as a social tool, a discussion-starter – and I find the creation of a world (environmental storytelling, if you will) by judicious use of image very interesting – patching together fragments and inferring the inbetween. Let’s see what happens.

Summary: Photography is way existential

8 ) More drawing
I’m a terrible draftsman; I got barely a passing grade at GCSE art. But I’ve used pen drawing a lot to start to sketch out the conceptual heart of a song, its shape before I have words to describe it. Its inky birth moan.

Summary: Draw your own album cover(s).

9) Film-making
Not sure about this yet, but I feel that I want more to fit around a song – give it its pipe and armchair and comfy slippers. I don’t know whether this is image or costume or dance or film yet.

Summary: More art, more story.

10) More blog
Or rather less blog, more frequent. Something between the essays I write on this site not often enough and the fishfood I sprinkle on my twitter feed rather too often. Works in progress, ideas, comments, images, rather than just… essays.

Summary: Less is more.

That’s all the news. Add your suggestions below the line.

*this is less a resolution than a comment: 2012 will not only be the year that “way existential” becomes my default compliment, but also the year it fully transitions from being an ironic Clueless quotation to me really meaning it and forgetting where I got it from. Current status: only 42% Cher.