An earworm does not have to be deep and meaningful; the best are utter nonsense. All an earworm has to do is clog up the eardrums. I do, however, like to explore my mind and my emotions as I find this to be cathartic among other things. In the process of writing some of my tunes a lot of background is brought in and this is an observation on the process, I seem to use. Sometimes they transcend into pure pulp, but other times they just linger around at the level of moody introspective self-indulgence.
Its become something of a bank holiday tradition with me, and yesterday was late summer bank holiday; the last one of the year. I like to drive to exotic places like Skegness while listening to my own awesome work and thinking up new songs. I’ve noted this pattern before. Carpe Diem grew out an August bank holiday trip to Mablethorpe a number of years ago. As did More Euphoria which was the result of a May bank holiday road trip.
Such a road trip is a form of soul searching. Hurtling around country lanes at the national speed limit and narrowly avoiding oncoming farm traffic ensures that I have to stay alert, and this uptime alertness allows my unconscious mind to mumble around the issues in my life. I am aiming to get a solid hook-line out of it all but more importantly, I am collecting and collating experiences. I’m trying to work out what I want to convey, not necessarily in rhyme at this juncture, or even in words, but just gathering a clutch of themes that will later precipitate into song. This can be something of a lengthy process and I don’t really know the direction it is going in (much like the road trip itself!). Some of the themes may be lost, or merge with other themes years on. Some might present themselves as lyrics there and then. The important thing to me about all this is that when the themes do cluster together, I have a sense of what the song is about and this gives me scope for more structured approaches to formulating a production.
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