“Cool Summer Mornings, Hot Summer Nights” Coming June 21st
Ridder Jameson’s first album “Cool Summer Mornings, Hot Summer Nights” will be released on June 21st, 2022. This is a 10-track release with 8 new tracks and the two tracks from The Books: Cool and Hot.
“Cool Summer Mornings, Hot Summer Nights” Coming June 21st
Ridder Jameson’s first album “Cool Summer Mornings, Hot Summer Nights” will be released on June 21st, 2022. This is a 10-track release with 8 new tracks and the two tracks from The Books: Cool and Hot.
Ridder Jameson’s first album “Cool Summer Mornings, Hot Summer Nights” will be released on June 21st, 2022. This is a 10-track release with 8 new tracks and the two tracks from The Books: Cool and Hot.
“Cool Summer Mornings, Hot Summer Nights” Coming June 21st
Ridder Jameson’s first album “Cool Summer Mornings, Hot Summer Nights” will be released on June 21st, 2022. This is a 10-track release with 8 new tracks and the two tracks from The Books: Cool and Hot.
“03 21 of 2022” is the second track of my debut supersingle The Books. It was named just to mark the date of the release to make that visible on platforms that don’t show it. In hindsight I probably should have given it an actual name. It’s sort of a bonus track on the release – a fairly short instrumental track.
I was intrigued by epic rock songs that moved between different styles throughout the piece. Songs that might start out as a ballad but end up as a real driving hard rock tune later on. I wanted to learn how to do this and decided to start work on it when listening to a particular example – Mistral Wind by Heart.
So I started working on a song inspired by Mistral Wind but I was never happy with anything after the initial acoustic section. I also never wrote any words for it. This becomes the song 03 21 of 2022.
I held onto the material for a while (years) and thought I might one day make it into a full song. Instead I came into a situation where a small instrumental track was what I was looking for to round out The Books. I thought this track worked well with the other two so I decided to leave it as is and release it.
Slide Riff
I think at the time I didn’t have a guitar slide. Actually I think I may have had one I was given at Christmas. It was a poor size for me and got stuck on my finger on Christmas day. I tucked that one away and never used it again. I only had a fear of it getting stuck again whenever to tried it.
So I built myself a slide using a piece of metal off old earphones and a bit of kind of coiled wire from a spiral notebook. This wire acted as the ring component to go around my finger. With wire I could set the size and it wouldn’t be able to get stuck. It was inspired by the Slidewinder which I thought was an interesting design. They seemed a bit expensive for me though. There are magnets in those to lift the guitar strings up slightly to play without the strings buzzing. I glued a refrigerator magnet to mine. The metal from the earphones didn’t really carry much of the magnetism, though. Only the smallest amount. It was with this slide that I played the main riff for 03 21 of 2022.
I played it on a Rogue acoustic guitar. It was the only acoustic I had then. I first tried to learn guitar of one of those (my parents bought three) when I was around ten years old. I didn’t stick with it. But I guess it did end up being the guitar I’d eventually learn on years later. So the secret to the tone of this track is my beginner’s acoustic guitar (probably with a nut replacement) and an earbud slide.
Burgundy Moon started as different ideas and I didn’t know right away it would all come together to be one song.
In general I was looking to write a song with imagery in the lyrics. I wanted imagery of fantastical lands – something with a real sense of place that might transport you to some unknown and far away world. It came to be that I was looking to write a b-side to go with The Books, and I knew this imagery and location-focused direction was where I wanted to head. I think the name “Beneath a Burgundy Moon” came about before I wrote any lyrics or music.
The idea of a song about a mother breaking her child’s heart I thought of separately but around the same time. I heard plenty of songs about one’s heart being broken and at one point thought “wouldn’t it be interesting if the person breaking your heart was your own mother?” – it’s a real twist on the expectations of a song about a broken heart, and one that could carry plenty of emotion. I wrote the lines “your mother’s gonna break your heart” and “your mother’s gonna make you sad” and to make it extra dramatic “your mother’s gonna leave you dead” made a nice closer to the stanza.
It was the phrase “mother moon” that I thought of that brought the ideas together. Now the burgundy moon could also represent the mother in the story.
Writing the Chorus
(The full lyrics of the song are written at the bottom of the page)
The chorus’s lyrics ended up including lines about soldiers and war which hadn’t been the original intention. It just worked well with the rhyme schemes so it ended up going in that direction.
I thought of bergamot immediately since it sounds like burgundy, and “realms of rye” was a totally instinctive line. But I had to look up words beginning in berg or burg to find burgonets, which is one of few options for words like that. A burgonet is a renaissance-era helmet, and it went well with shields which could rhyme with the fields of the first line.
“Soldiers Strewn” ends up with a difficult phrase to pronounce and is perhaps my greatest regret within the lyrics.
Changing the final line in the repetition of the chorus’s lyrics from “sleep beneath a burgundy moon” to “died beneath a burgundy moon” really spotlights the line. This is from the fact it’s changed at all (when everything else is the same) and also the more dramatic and violent nature of the words themselves. It messes with the tense a bit as well. It shifts from present tense to past tense, which is a bit odd. It might suggest that while the first time it describes them as sleeping they are perhaps already dead. It creates a powerful climax to the section, a theme used throughout the lyrics of the song.
Writing the Verses
It’s rather interesting that the verses ended up being done in a spoken word style. The song is perhaps written in a style much like poetry but I don’t recall exactly where the idea came from to do it that way. I did afterward, however, find the lyrics running through my head to the tune of the traditional song “Hush Little Baby” – This melody not only suited the lyrics well, but it’s a lullaby with many traditional versions being about things mothers will do for their babies. That seemed appropriate for Beneath a Burgundy Moon, of course. So I layered the melodic version with the spoken word version, and used a quite sparse instrumentation under it.
The lyrics themselves are fairly vague and abstract. There’s some imagery of the sort I wanted for the song. I’m listing a bunch of things to do with mother moon’s power to provide, protect or destroy.
It was actually a bit technical to write because I’m rhyming internal words of the first half of the second line of each couplet with the final words in the adjacent couplet. I mean, for example, the way the word “wrist” in the first couplet of the song rhymes with “fist” and “mist” in the second. “Way” in the second rhymes with “clay” and “say” in the first. This pattern came about by accident at first, I believe, and I continued it throughout. There is exception, though, for the final line of the second verse. “She bleeds her lilies from their birth” is the dramatic and violent ending line of the verses, not unlike the final lines of the chorus and post-chorus sections.
Instrumentation
This song includes use of a sitar effect for my electric guitar. It’s sounds a bit like a sitar but largely like a synth sound I think. Hopefully even someone from India would find it alien and fantastical sounding. I wrote a riff with it for the section after the choruses. I did risk overwhelming the simplicity of the verses by sprinkling in a bit of improvised sitar-guitar throughout them.
The drums in the track are programmed samples and I put a sixteenth-note delay (echo) effect on them. I think the delayed sound is distorted. This really took the drums to the next level compared to just using compressors and reverb to create that pumping sort of sound. It kind of breathes and sounds somehow alive I think even though it’s somewhat obviously not a real drum performance. A bit of an alien version of a drum sound.
