Little Birdies
Blog by Nu Ingenue (musician/vocalist/songwriter)
Commentary by Colin Wright (designer)
So I’m really bad at all of this blogging stuff. It’s not that I don’t WANT to keep people updated on my thrilling life. It’s just that…well there’s nothing really thrilling about it for the moment.
I think you might be surprised what people find interesting about other people’s every day lives. What is mundane for you might be wildly interesting for someone else.
This means that I will have to entertain everyone (and by everyone I mean my currently nonexistent public) with my wit and general knowledge.
Well damn, I guess we’re done for, then. It was a nice try.
Or I could just tell you about what happened last night. (Don’t get excited, I’m not going to tell you THAT much.) A lot of stuff came up at our first practice. Basically, Nick/Vincent (I never know whether to call him by his producer name, Nick or his stage name, Vincent…how complicated the art world is…) told me that I needed to set down my bass for a while.
It was actually a lot more roundabout than this, but that was the long and short of it, I suppose. He seemed very hesitant to bring it up, and you were actually a lot more accepting of it than I thought you would be when I heard it.
This, as you can imagine—or perhaps cannot—came as a huge blow to me: for as long as I can remember I’ve been writing songs with the bass. Stripping the instrument from the songs therefore felt very unnatural and slightly insulting. After all, what do the songs have apart from vocals and a bass line?
Your music does, in it’s natural state (at this point), have a very coffeehouse feel to it…just a bass and beautiful vocals. It does make sense what he says, though, that once you are forced to change it up a bit, there will then be room for other sounds to enter the mix, hopefully ending up with a more mature and full sound.
Then he explained, and little birdies peeled open my overcast mind to reveal sunshine and happy thoughts. It wasn’t that he didn’t WANT the bass: it was just that he wanted to leave room for other instruments first and then work the bass back in.
I like the little birdy visual. Very creative.
Phew.
So now my question is: how does that work “practically”? How do I teach anyone the songs without the bass???
My question is: how did you intend to do so WITH it? You always say that you aren’t as up on the theory as just writing by sound and intuition…how do you teach someone else that?
I guess time will tell…
