Just wanted to touch base with you on the progress thus far. How many songs are tracked and mixed at this point?
17 have been completed and mixed. 19 are mostly all tracked up as far as instrumental overdubs go. So I’ve got 19 left to sing at the moment.
Writing lyrics for 36 songs can’t be easy. Where are you getting your inspiration from these days?
Luckily 2 of the songs we’ve done have been covers (One is “Coming Around Again” by Carly Simon but I’m not telling what the other one is yet). Also, 10 have been written by Mark & Rick, leaving me with a total of 24, which is still a lot.
Sometimes when I first write the song, I have a good idea of what it’s about. Sometimes songs are inspired by a lyric. With “Kung Fu”, this dumb catchy line “Kung Fu, do what you do to me” came into my head and I started writing it and 5 minutes later had a whole new song. That also happened recently with a song called “The Creeps”.
The hardest for me is when I’ve got the music but no vocal melody and no lyric idea whatsoever. That’s happened a bit recently cos I’ve been messing round with synths and recording them on my laptop and ending up with cool instrumental tracks. I’ve been doing it for fun, it’s a great way to kill time on a flight. A few times I’ve surprised myself and ended up with really cool tracks. Then in the studio Mark & Rick add their magic. So then I’m sitting there faced with something that’s very new sounding that I have no idea what I’m going to do with lyrically and melodically. I sit down and sing over them for ages and trawl my subconscious to see what emotional response I’m getting and then I write lyrics that go with those feelings. It’s a slow nightmarish process but it’s been yielding some amazing results. That’s how some of our most interesting and best new songs have come about.
I mostly write about stuff that’s going on in my thoughts at the time of recording. So it could be about my personal life, or about the comic book I just read, or else something that someone said to me last night that’s started a thought process. The cool thing is that we’ve been working on this stuff all year so it’s all varied and inspired by different things..
It sometimes takes me a long time to write lyrics, last week I spent 3 days on a song. I beat myself up about it but today I read that Leonard Cohen spent over 2 years writing “Hallelujah” so I don’t feel quite so bad.
Top three things on your Christmas list:
If Santa was really rich, this is what I’d like:
- Fender American Vintage ’62 Jaguar in Ice Blue Metallic
- Moog Little Phatty Synth
- A Roland Jupiter-8