Let me fill you in on the past year, creatively speaking…

Remember Our Creative Community? And my own personal goal to post 12 recorded masterpieces (humour me…) this year?

No?  Well, seems I didn’t either.

Actually, I did…I was just ignoring it…

It all went so smoothly for about 5 minutes.  Then I decided to go and produce our church’s first worship album, and it all went a little haywire.  Great excuse huh!

The last song I posted here was back in May.  MAY?!?  Where did the last 6 months go?  Wait, I know exactly where they went.  Lots and lots and LOTS of hours in a recording studio with the awesome worship team from Awesome Church.  It’s a sacrifice I’ve been glad to make, though Diane and I have definitely felt the strain too.  The album is very nearly done though, and this is a good good good thing.

Anyway…

About a month ago, I did a post over at my good friend Jenni Clayville’s blog telling a bit of my story, because like everyone  … I have one. Or two. Maybe more.

In the comments, Jenni’s amazing husband Brian requested a song for his birthday.  Now, he may have been joking (I really don’t know – I never asked – it’s not like I haven’t embarked on this personalised song thing before), but it was the impetus I needed to write something of my own again and see if I could remember how to do this.  I’ve been writing and recording congregational music all year, which involves a very very different process to how I approach my non-church music, which mainly comprises mini electronic pop epics (poptronica).

So I wrote this. You now have your own song, Brian.

And Jenni, I still want to re-do yours properly as a thank-you for sending me the audio file of Brian’s snoring that inspired this.  I’m just looking for a big band… who’ll work for free…

Gotta say though…my snoring is WAY worse than Brian’s. Though the only time it’s been recorded I had sinus and a completely blocked nose, so…

Back to the song…

Lyrics: as usual for me, it took a long time to get the lyrics to happen. Music = easy peasy, but lyrics…no. Except when I’m writing church music, when the lyrics often come first and suggest the melody, etc.  In this case, as for all my commissioned “song-for-a-friend” works, I try to dig up plenty of dirt from significant others, but usually most of the good stuff comes from Twitter and Facebook stalking anyway.  Add in some inspiration from a great post on Brian’s blog, and we have a song that combines Biblical truth, snoring,  fishing for sharks, gas and twittering…amongst other things.

Music: again, as usual for me, it’s crammed too full of ideas because that’s pretty much how I roll all the time; always lots going on.  I love the production side of making music, even though this isn’t produced as well as I’d like it to be, purely due to time constraints.  It also has a few of my now trademark twists, which are therefore not twists because it would be a twist to do something straight.  I may be the M.Night Shyamalan of poptronica.

Love Endures (Snoring) by dg4G

Waking everybody with a sound
That’s been likened to sawing
Some call it snoring
All the best husbands do it
So our wives have something to tweet about

As if the bobbleheaded conversation
sprinkled with some speculation
covering the sanitation habits of the generation
that we’re raising all across the nation
…wasn’t enough

(some choral wailing)

Kids are upside down in nearly
Every single family picture
It’s probably better that way
Definitely better than attempts
to fish for sharks from the car

I wonder whose genes he got?
Should this be rhymed with bergamot?
Maybe, but probably not
Though citrus-scented gas
Might be a winner

(some more choral wailing)

(Love)
Love never gives up, never looks back
Never gives up, never looks back, never gives up…
(endures)

(Love endures)…

Waking everybody with a sound
That’s been likened to sawing
Often called snoring
And if I’m not sleeping through life, you’re not going to either.

**Could I have possibly written a more tongue twisting bridge? Why yes, I could have. This abridged tongue twister (ha!) was the compromised version… It was also much harder to sing at 12.30am than it is now at 10.00am. Hmmmm…  Did you hear the stumbles in there?  I might as well have sung “dup nebber dip dup”…

Here we go again.  I’m playing one of those meme thingys.  I did a lot of talking with my LifeGroup Online peeps tonight (none of this semi-street-talk really works in my accent, does it…), and decided, as I was working on a song, I’d heard enough of my voice for one day…

And yeah, more team videos are coming, but at the moment videos for our church are being produced by the Master @Machroi, though she did decide this was worth a diversion so she could add her magic.  Just as well too! Prorably This backs up my earlier contention that I’m no actor…

…yes, the “Great Blog Transfer Project of February 2009″ continues, but tonight I needed something not involving CSS/HTML/whatever.

So why, dear readers, did I choose to succumb the the Facebook 25 Random Things meme?

Well partly because I was kinda-sorta-indirectly challenged by Jenni to turn it into a song after her highly entertaining video version.

And partly, as a fun way to start Valentine’s Day, Diane and I decided we’d better respond to the tagging together (though Diane did hers in the more conventional manner).

The MP3 is a bit long, a bit “midnight-recording-whispery”, a bit crap really, but I think fitting it all into a 4 minute “song” (I use the word loosely) is somewhat impressive. Though not near as impressive as the one take vocals the whole way through…there’s clearly no mistakes in there…oh no…

I’m also fairly sure I don’t want to use this as my February entry for Our Creative Community…but let’s see how the month pans out

And since the likelihood you can hear what I’m singing is small, here’s the things :

1. I’ve only ever broken bones doing wimpy things, like playing handball.
2. One of my front teeth is fake.
3. It’s fake because it got smashed out by a flying metal ruler.
4. Toilet paper must be over, not under. I will fix it if it’s not.
5. The consequences of my nut allergy are a refreshing change to choking to death.
6. Depending what theatre production I’m in, I’m either God, Satan or Fagin.
7. The first time I used a non-electric razor and shaving cream to shave was when I was 24.
8. The first word I knew how to read was ‘Niacin’. Thank you Cornflakes.
9. I’m only 72% of the man I used to be.
10. I never bothered crawling.
11. The first song I ever wrote was called ‘Rock-a-Bye-Bra’ when I was 4.
12. It was full of nonsense words.
13. It shall never be spoken of again.
14. I usually change my hairstyle at least every two years.
15. The fact my dad says ‘prorably’ for ‘probably’ only stopped annoying me when I was 27.
16. I dance in the car.
17. I wrote an album of songs about being jilted. And called it ‘Catharsis’.
18. None of my real life friends Twitter.
19. None of my real life friends blog.
20. I once played Dead Or Alive’s ‘Brand New Lover’ fifty times in one day. I still love that song.
21. The sourer the sweet/candy/lolly, the better.
22. The most fun thing we ever did in Barbershop Quartet was sing Motley Crue’s ‘Kickstart My Heart’ or ‘Dr Feelgood’
23. The second most fun thing we ever did in Barbershop Quartet was hide from our bass, usually in cupboards. Sometimes for up to an hour. In one cupboard.
24. I was upgraded to business class on my first international flight, but I was 15 and too young to appreciate it.
25. I think ‘inconsiderate interlocutor’ is the best phrase I’ve heard all day.

In response to my last post, which for a few of you is the first time you’ve heard some of the loony creative stuff that comes out of my mind and mouth, some background. This may be reminiscent of the 25 Things tagging on Facebook; I really must do that, I was tagged a while back…

1. I don’t play any instruments, so it’s me and my voice. There are loads of reasons for this, at least one being the amount of time I spent in choirs at school and university.
2. Most of the music I’ve written in the past 5 years has been congregational praise and worship music, often to suit a specific season in my church, but a few that have lasted the distance too.
3. We’re going to do some studio recording this year which will hopefully result in an album.
4. I’m getting off topic.
5. Despite not playing instruments, I know lots of theory, so instead of playing a guitar or keyboard, I sit and move dots & lines around the screen, adjusting intensity, length, pitch, etc. However, it means that what I create in this way is very different to what I create with my church worship team. This is a good thing.
6. I love electronic music, especially the crossover of electronica (or armchair techno & intelligent techno, my fave names from the early 90s) with choral music.
7. Writing for me, rather than congregationally, only restarted in December 08. However, I was a little distracted by how much fun Garageband is and have only completed this one song…and then only because of joining @ourcc. Nearly everything else I’ve done on there has been (somewhat dodgy) recordings of some of the more congregational songs I’ve written, usually in a very different manner.
8. I might post some of those here for your curiosity too This may also include some older recordings, and maybe even some that I’ve done which don’t have explicitly Christian lyrics.
9. My wife and I often discuss the difference between relative and absolute truth, and the general shift in society to the whole “this is my truth, tell me yours” type of thing, rather than an acceptance that some things just are, no matter what you do or do not believe. This was a major seed point for what became “Unchangeable Truth”.
10. With the idea floating in my head for ages, the process of physically ‘getting it down’ only began on Saturday after the huge week of prayer at my church meant zilch self-creativity time…it was worth it though.

That’s 10 lines of somewhat interconnected thought. I’m looking forward to where all this goes!