Well, sometimes that happens. I'm currently hands-deep in the write-up of our recent Italian trip, but I want to scribble about something else today.
I still play drums in a couple of bands, as if any of you who might be reading this well know. At times, I don't even know why I still do it, other than the cameraderie it brings, and....it gets me out of the house. I still greatly enjoy music, and playing it, but the aches and pains hauling equipment brings are greater at my age. I went through a long bout of physical limitation in playing, chronicled in this blog back in 2016, I believe, and got through it all somehow. My playing now has never been better. And yet, at times, I still ask myself "why are you doing this?" The two bands I'm in don't require much creative involvement from me, as they both have songwriters who the bands are closely identified with. And that's a good thing. In the case of Pocket FishRmen, it's a great thing.
Brant Bingamon is one of the great American songwriters, in my opinion. And yes, I'm biased, since I play in the FishRmen, but still, it's true. He has a very unconventional approach to song structure that's always interesting to play with. And over the last few years, I really like how the FishRmen have worked in coming up with new material. What happens is: Brant sends us all a demo, we individually listen to the demo, we listen to the demo at rehearsal, Brant plays the basic song for Cris and Jason to get chords and notes down, we begin arranging the song using members' ideas as fit....and voilà, a song is born.
All this leading to: last Thursday, Brant sent us a second demo of a song he'd been working on, "I Believe The Woman." We all knew full well a topical song of this nature might have a limited shelf life, so we'd better get this one in the set pronto. We set about creating our arrangement. In the initial run-throughs of the song, it was most important to just figure out how long each part went, and that took some time. Jason is the one who'll take charge during this time, getting the "number of times" each part goes, etc. And he'll work with Cris on the chordings, etc. Cris will usually suggest his own stingers during this time. This is the time I know to stay quiet and just concentrate on making sure I know the structure.
Once the structure is known (and "Believe" took awhile; at first, none of the structure really made sense to me), Cris and Jason will begin adding a little more to the arrangement, and then I'll start chiming in with things. One of the things I've done ever since playing in bands is something I'll call "forcing accents." I certainly did this in this song in the following to each chorus, to sort of build to a release of the next verse. Another contribution I made was to suggest everybody be conscious of framing the words of the song; you want this to be understandable by the audience. For instance, I suggested removing "extraneous material" before each chorus, to ensure audiences will hear Brant's "I Believe The Woman" each time. We decided to hang a bit before each chorus, and it worked like gangbusters. I also suggested a sing-along of the chorus at the end, but that still needs some work on the length of it. Still, in an hour we had a workable version of this song ready to go.
I write about this, as it's been awhile since either of my bands has had a new song ready to go; the FishRmen largely due to limitation in practice space availability, since remedied, the Hickoids...well, not enough rehearsal time, frankly. I hope that changes soon. Last Thursday was magical, and I like the feeling. It's one of the reasons I keep doing this. Let's come up with more, guys.
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