I don’t think I’ve written more than a dozen or so songs since I moved out here to San Francisco in 2005. Probably much less than that. A few clips of melody, maybe a riff or two, but nothing concrete, not like my last songwriting wave in the early 00s when I was jamming with Bruce and Eric in jeb!. The latest actual song milling about in my head is an instrumental I created using the sound of London’s District Line clacking down the tracks near Earls Court as percussion (which I recorded to my phone); I have not yet had time to lay it down as a demo, though I did get as far as making a very rough loop of the train as a trial run.
Why do I bring this up? Well, it seems my next writing project involves songwriting.
What’s this, you say? Has Jon gone off the deep end in a severely misguided attempt to write a multimedia book? I mean, he’s a pretty decent writer and makes cool covers, but music? What the hell is he thinking?
Well, I blame Wesley Stace for this. Formerly known as John Wesley Harding for you 90s alternative rock people, he wrote a fun novel called Wonderkid about a quirky band that, against all odds, became a huge hit in the 90s, primarily due to having an extremely large preteen audience. It’s a hell of a fun book and worth checking out.
Sometime later, I was chatting online with a friend about the Osmonds (I forget the context), when I came up with an idea of writing a music-based novel myself. Thus the family band The Lidwells were born!
That said…
Now that I’m at the point of wanting to do some prep for the Lidwells project, I’m not just thinking about making character sheets and a working discography (yes, I’m going that deep), but may be writing a few of the songs mentioned in the text. All told I’m hoping to write about a dozen or so songs during the course of writing this book.
Added to that, this story takes place in the 90s during the alt.rock boom, so I’m going to have to write music that sounds like it would have fit then. Will I record them as demos and post them here? Yeah, there’s a good chance of that happening.
This should be interesting…
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