Words are the Hardest Part of Instrumental Songs
The very worst part about making instrumental music, the hardest part, is naming the songs.
And then once you’ve named them, people will, hopefully, comment on a track, and I never have any idea what they’re talking about. There’s a couple I remember, just because I’ve remembered to go back and listen. And it’s never the one you think that someone would like, but whatever.
So this record, I’m releasing this week, not for any other reason, but I just got around to it. And it’s got 16 songs, and that is a lot of songs to name.
So, I just finished reading the original Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. And he has a lot of good turns of phrase that I was gonna go look through. But instead, I was lazily downloading some short stories of his. And when I thought of the idea, I was on a random page, and I highlighted 16 phrases, kind of shaped them into whatever, and that’s what I went with.
And it’s kind of the same way that I make these songs, too. I just sit down, get an idea, and then record them super fresh and hot. And hopefully that translates.
And my favorite way to do all this stuff is use the Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field as a bit of a tape recorder. Like a four-track. And then bounce over. And off you go.
There’s no, well, there is now, but I’ve never used the undo button. So just kind of commit and move on, and all these songs are like that. There’s a couple, maybe, that I did outside of that, but they certainly weren’t anything but totally improvised.
And it all just fits together as an art project, and if people like it, great. If not, there’s plenty of other music to listen to.
But another thing on these releases, there’s any number of people ready to coach you on a release strategy. But since my audience I could basically take to lunch at the same time, there’s an audience, they’re small. I just release it, and I will talk about it a little bit on Instagram after it’s released.
I don’t really understand the talking about it before. If you’re a small artist, to get it all hyped. Not like I’m gonna hit the charts, so…
Anyway, it’ll show up at some point this week with a bunch of random stuff for titles.
It’s called Limited. I guess you could say cleverly, because I limited myself on the recording, but something popped up on the screen in my car saying “Limited View.” And I just got a picture of it, and I liked it, and that’s where we are.
Happy listening.