Cord
LD has gone on holiday to the mythical West Coast of America so, as seems to be the way that we’ve operated for the past few years, we’ve taken the summer off. You might think that some of our songs are probably best listened to during the months where there is some sunshine but we like to take the opposite tack wherever possible. It’s best to play songs about summer in the winter so that everyone thinks how nice it would be to spend a couple of days doing little in parks. It rained today anyway.
When I was at work earlier, feeling down, knowing the endless, shifting rain stood between me and the relative comforts of home, I wanted nothing more than to be riding a bus through San Diego. But now it’s raining outside and I am resolutely inside and I just want to listen to The Sundays and watch the rain drum against the pavement.
You’ll have to forgive me for using this as an actual diary rather than an effervescent news post. I’ve been reading The Celestial Café by Stuart Murdoch, you see, and it’s giving me nostalgia for when I was fifteen. Back then, blogs and the suchlike were the realms of the Internet-savvy but socially off-centre. Not so much people living in their parents’ basements (as the cliché goes) but university students who listened to Belle & Sebastian and wore corduroy.
I somehow found a group of people that all read and commented on each other’s blogs and I pretty much idolised them. Sadly my frequent attempts to ingratiate into their group just made me seem a bit of a dick but it set my tastes in good stead for when I did enter my twenties. Of course by that point the Internet had gone mainstream and blogs became a series of embedded YouTube videos and pictures of cats (I’m aware of the hypocrisy in this complaint).
For all the good the Internet has given us, that change is something that I’ll have to accept, but there’s a large proportion of people who will never know the pleasure of messing around with PERL and cgi-bins in order to install Greymatter. Anyway, reading that book has made me think about (re)starting a diary blog about life in LV. When we’re off vacation, you understand.
I’ve been using my time off to try and write songs, something I’ve not managed to do properly in 6 years or so. It’s odd to consider song writing as something that you have to practice but I would say it definitely is. Only when you’ve forced a song to completion do ideas start tumbling out. A bit like a blocked tap, I suppose. Probably because of my recent obsession, I’ve not managed to progress far beyond writing songs in major keys and leaning heavily on the chord of A. Sometimes you just have to wake up to the fact that your vocal range is one note.
DB x
