“The Books: Cool and Hot” will be released on May 24th, 2022. This is a 2-track release with two new versions of previously released track The Books.
Tracklist:
“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.
The Books Release Page
(More info and streaming/download links)
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.
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.
“Beneath a Burgundy Moon” is the second track of my debut supersingle The Books.
The Books Release Page
(More info and streaming/download links)
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.
(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.
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.
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.
“The Books” Track by Track #3 – 03 21 of 2022
Mother moon has had her say
She binds the wrist, she breaks the clay
A ballad with a clenched fist
She tears her way through the velvet mists
Mother moon shines on the land
She blurs the vision, she stays the hand
A peril firm in her decision
She floods the sand to give provision
Fields of bergamot
Realms of rye
Sprawl beneath a burgundy sky
Shields and burgonets
Soldiers strewn
Sleep beneath a burgundy moon
Fields of bergamot
Realms of rye
Sprawl beneath a burgundy sky
Shields and burgonets
Soldiers strewn
Died beneath a burgundy moon
Your mother’s gonna break your heart
Your mother’s gonna break your heart
Your mother’s gonna make you sad
Your mother’s gonna leave you dead
Mother moon wears veils of cloud
She finds the flaw, she tracks the proud
A hunter with an iron claw
She sails her way through winter’s thaw
Mother moon is red as wine
She dyes the earth, she stains the pine
And so that they might know their worth
She bleeds her lilies from their birth
Fields of bergamot
Realms of rye
Sprawl beneath a burgundy sky
Shields and burgonets
Soldiers strewn
Sleep beneath a burgundy moon
Fields of bergamot
Realms of rye
Sprawl beneath a burgundy sky
Shields and burgonets
Soldiers strewn
Died beneath a burgundy moon
Your mother’s gonna break your heart
Your mother’s gonna break your heart
Your mother’s gonna make you sad
Your mother’s gonna leave you dead
“The Books” is the first and title track of my debut supersingle. I’ll be going track by track and writing an article about each of the three songs on the release to document my journey and process. The following is the first of these, describing the story behind the song and its creation.
The Books Release Page
(More info and streaming/download links)
The process of writing The Books started several years back. It began with the formation of all three guitar riffs featured in the song before any other music save the main lyric “Do what you wanna’ do”.
The first of these riffs I wrote was the chord-riff you hear after the chorus in the song. I was motivated to write a riff one night after watching the BBC documentary “The Joy of the Guitar Riff” early in my guitar-playing journey.
When I put my fingers on the top three strings of the guitar I found myself playing the riff that would eventually become the part in this song. I think it was a bit different in its original form. It worked well as a riff but never had a song to go with it.
The other two riffs were connected to each other from the beginning. One is the shorter, more repetitive riff heard in the intro and the verse. It emphasizes the tritone interval giving it a darker, tense sound but resolving quite quickly. These notes reminded me of some film score or another I had vague memory of from my childhood.
The short riff was built, however, as a variation on the initial parts of the riff heard in the chorus. This chorus riff (heard also in the second part of the intro before the first chorus) is a more theoretically technical riff that tells a longer story. It showcases a mid-riff key change, dancing around one set of notes without landing on them until the time is right. I formed it to act as counterpoint for the first lyric I wrote for the song.
That initial lyric “Do what you wanna’ do – I don’t care about you” and the melody (or some similar melody) that went with it came in fairly early. It was the day the game Lords of the Fallen came out and I was trying to launch it on Steam. Steam needed an update out of the blue at just that time and the thought that came to mind was “Do what you wanna’ do – I don’t care about you”. It sounded like a hook to me so I held onto it and started working on a riff to go with it.
The inspiration for the structure and mid-riff key change came from Let’s Dance by David Bowie – the bassline in particular. It was a song I became rather obsessed with. Actually, although I’d heard Let’s Dance before, I took notice of it and the bass part after first becoming obsessed with a different song: Vacance (Or Vacances or Vacation or 바캉스) by f(x). It which uses the aforementioned bassline as a guitar riff in its chorus. When I found out about the origin of this riff from a Youtube comment I took an interest in Let’s Dance. I became more interested in the work of David Bowie’s and Let’s Dance producer Nile Rodgers who would become an influence to me as a guitarist. Who says Youtube comments can’t be helpful?
The original chord-based riff may have been altered to follow a similar key change structure. This introduces some different notes in the third quarter of the sequence. I don’t remember what it was like originally but I probably changed it to fit that structure at the time I matched it up with the other riffs to all be part of one song.
This initial work (with only a single lyric) was done years ago and I didn’t make any more progress on the song for a long time. It was probably 2015 at the latest the last I had last written anything. I was sitting on the material for a very long time. This was a period in which I didn’t know what I was doing as a lyricist. Not that I know now, but I didn’t write many lyrics at all except for a time of around six months in 2019. This was very stressful for me so I gave it up again, and I didn’t make any progress on the yet unnamed track that would become The Books.
It was late 2021 when I when I tried writing lyrics again, this time jumping straight into this song. I had been working on instrumental music throughout the year. I wrote a lot of guitar music and started playing with a pick in 2021 after using almost exclusively fingers previously. But in the end of the year I felt ready to turn my attention to something I always wanted to do – writing vocal songs.
I was sick with a cold or flu at the time. I don’t think it was covid. My voice was very low and I wanted to try recording vocals in that state. I think I had already tracked guitars at that point, although I would redo them later. I didn’t have lyrics ready but I thought if I took even another day my voice might go back to normal. This motivated me to write and record all the vocals for the song in one afternoon. It is for this reason that the song only has one verse. I’m a slow lyricist and that’s all I came up with that day.
Guitar parts were redone and the strings and other sounds were added quickly in a final week of production in February, alongside the production of Beneath a Burgundy Moon. I think the solo and higher vocals in the chorus were added at this time as well. It came together a bit rough, with perhaps not enough production time, particularly around the vocals. Vocals will continue to be my weak point – my experience is as a guitarist and producer of instrumental music after all – but I’d like to document my journey in this area through my release catalog and these writeups.
“The Books” Track by Track #2 – Beneath a Burgundy Moon
Do what you wanna do
I don’t care about you
I don’t care if you’re mine
Throw me a line anytime
When will I care about you?
When will I care?
Do what you wanna do
This should be a rebel song
But I don’t really care
Don’t care for your rebellion
Don’t care about my share
Don’t care about your sympathies
Don’t care for second looks
Don’t care to cook a second meal
Don’t care to cook the books
Do what you wanna do
I don’t care about you
I don’t care if you’re mine
Throw me a line anytime
When will I care about you?
When will I care?
Do what you wanna do
Do what you wanna do
I don’t care about you
I don’t care if you’re mine
Throw me a line anytime
When will I care about you?
When will I care?
Do what you wanna do
3-Track supersingle “The Books” will be released on March 21st, 2022.
Tracklist: