My songs mean the world to me, they reflect me and are made in my image per
se. I have always been fascinated by the idea of music being a piece of eternity written in time. It rings close to my heart with the words of Christ "eternity/heaven is set in your heart".
It reminds me of a Narnian moment when a manger becomes the door to the New Narnia and an entire kingdom in the place of the Old Narnia that was being destroyed. It fills me with thoughts of what it means to be a creator incarnated in the shape of the created.
SingVocation is a seven part indie music epic of sorts, set to a video or free fonts, free animation, copyleft pictures and self footage. Horny Devil BV fonts really bring out the story of the song. Thank you
Blue Vinyl.
I first wrote part 3 in 2008 when live music had been shut down. It was a part of a protest movement to open up parks and gardens to musicians. It was also the time when i quit my job and realized my full time vocation was songwriting.
The original version had a first stanza that was contributed by another person that i will leave unnamed and chorus that i co-wrote with that person. For the next two years i thought I'd forget this song and move on, and i did until the song came back to me. I scrubbed off all the lines i did not write and i had part 3 as we know it today.
Changing the name to SingVocation plays on the fact that i was making my vocational self-discover an invocation of sorts.I had to work to forget the tune it earlier had and it took me some time. Here is the first attempt to bring it back to life.
Here is the first tune I worked up but it never felt like it could hold the entire weight of the song.
Then i started meddling around and one break through was when i stumbled a Pink Floyd chord change that happens in the Division Bell Album
C F Fsus2 C
I was spending my time in the doldrums,
F Fsus2 C
I was caught in a cauldron of hate
F Fsus2 Am
I felt persecuted and paralysed,
G F Fsus2 Fmaj7
I thought that everything else would just wait
Dont ask me how that progression sparked it off but I discovered Am to Am b5 which rang harmonically close to the famous Vikram JS progression in the Grubby Halo song Killer, that followed by D brought in some kind of resolution that was again thrown off by F. Now F E ad lib is a grubby halo staple from Love Remains and another song i wrote It Never Happened as a sequel to Love Remains. The possibilities seemed endless in terms of extensive soloing. and i thought i had struck something.
so i sequenced the music on FL Studio Demo version and recorded it
While sequencing the music i just ad libbed a Esus 4 D intro, and reversed it for the outro. I did not even think about it much it was just a whatever-intro. Later it all made sense. In more ways than i can explain here.
The song had a part where i married 2 either-or verse options i had written previously to be a kind of line-by-line call and response. (Let my music stay alive- Let the muse stay around). Little did i realize this would become the motif of the song as it would grow. I did not think of naming it Freedom in Song, in the absence of any prelude i just warmed up my voice to the first words that came to my head, it sat on the song and stayed right there.
Out of the blue i just wrote a four stanzas, and recorded them. Again i extemporized the Learning to Fly to that Great gig in the sky, allusions to Pink Floyd and and Christ's Second Coming. I realized that though it was a continuation of the same song it was standard between the earth and the sky, i felt it had to lead to something of a greater story to tell.
Pink Floyd's Learning to Fly is the theme song of my life. Grubby Halo got it's name from it. I remembered the lines "Suspended Animation A State of Bliss" don't ask me how but i remembered Christ crucified. Then i remembered the lines "A Dream Unthreatened By The Morning Light, Could Blow This Soul Right Through The Roof Of The Night" an image that has blown me many moons and stars and light years. So all of that translated to Cross Blessing.
As i was about to record it I thought i would keep the call and response part a guitar solo, i asked Vikram on chat and he was a little busy to give it the time it needed. So i sang "Imagine now a guitar solo" almost like a joke and then realized i was on to something when i cam to the line "i would not have to sing these lines, liberated confines". By the time i was on to the the point of the "yeasty epicenter" and "marry your lips to her voice". I knew i was where i was supposed to be with the song. Then came the part that took me back to Pink Floyd's dream blown soul right through the roof of the night. Blown by song!
I thought the song was complete and that it was going to be a Trilogy and i showed it to a few friends. Chubz a songwriter friend sent in a few lines that had the words "I may not move mountains", "they call me a bard" and "though i sing my loudest, i may not reach your ears" i was on a roll again. Her contribution reminded me of Derek Sivers's advice "Be An Extreme Version of Your Self".
I had shared the song with a
Christian Songwriting Organization (CSO) yahoo group, hoping for some helpful comments. They are thick around irony and metaphors. One of them kept arguing that I was egoistical when I thought so highly of my songs.
So i added the line, "Songs are just a metaphor for the salvation within, I'm honored to co-author the life i've been given". Now the idea of songs being a "metaphor" is from my friend Bryan Richard who was once writing a story of Bangalore's independent music culture to capture the essence of music being a "metaphor for freedom".
The part about co-authorship comes to me from 2 sources. One biblically ALL scripture was supposed to have been inspired by the HOLY SPIRIT yet written by human hands and composed in human intellect, leading on that the interpretor of the same message has to be lead by the same Holy Spirit. My friend
Baruk Feddabonn would talk extensively about letting go of a piece once it has been written, so it may be co-authored by the audience.
My songs ironically want people to think for themselves and so I often paint opposite meanings together leaving the listener to see the path s/he is drawn to. I refuse to tell them to even think for themselves in a Life of Brian way. I sometimes say the opposite of what people want to hear, so they can think up their minds, spoofed and not spoon-fed.
the next part was written almost as a joke, i initially wondered if it was too pornographic, but i remembered the line from Cross Blessing "you know it when she's there" which has overtones of recognizing the song's inspiration but also reminds me of the arbitrary line between erotic art and pornography. "I know it when i see it" hullabula.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
| “ | I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. [Emphasis added.] | ” |
| |
This expression became "one of the most famous phrases in the entire history" of the Supreme Court.[1]
The rest of the song was quite unstopable. diverging across the romance between the song and his singer, breaking down into the next part New Song in a New World at the call and response part where finally "the songs are multiplying". A new world is described, drawing from the New Heaven of the Bible, The New Narnia in The Final Battle and Roger Water's Each Small Candle from the album Flickering Flame, which was Water's side b to the Dark Side of the Moon!
"Each small candle lights a corner of the dark
When the wheel of pain stops turning
And the branding iron stops burning
When the children can be children
When the desperados weaken
When the tide rolls into greet them
And the natural law of science
Greets the humble and the mighty
And the billion candles burning
Lights the dark side of every human mind"
the lines "natural laws of science- meets the waif defiance" is a tribute to Waters. Leading up to the perceived end of pain, leading into My Song My Way- "i will sing again for song and not for gain". Here i bring in my take on everything. I think dissent is patriotism, and the highest devotion might be unabashed honest blasphemy tying it in with how the bashfully religious skirt around the overtly sexual passages of scripture as metaphor "not 'really' about sex".
I had this idea for a spoken word intro that went "if God so love the world that she came to us in song to set the singer free have we prostituted and raped her beyond recognition in out very acts of worshiping at the disco sanctuaries of song and dance"
When i was compiling the music, i wanted to get it all to fit in a mini disc that runs 21 minutes playing time. I realized that i could not have the extended outro on each part and i just for kicks reversed it, and there it was sitting perfectly on the words for the spoken word entry. The next few lines just flowed out and in seconds it was written.
i let this sleep for a few months and revisited it and found nothing in it i wanted to change, which is a very rare thing if you know how i want to keep tweaking a song. I worked on different keys, and tempos and finally zeroed in on the final recording. The recording was done in one take.
The video became almost impossible to upload on my slow internet, so i first put up the low res version and my good friend Nishal added the better one from his high speed connection.
