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| • words on "these keys" from gcp:: The original idea behind the "These Keys" concept came from a variety of songs I wrote back in the late nineties which I originally vowed would NEVER see the light of day. After a brief period of infertility (emasculating indeed, but only in the musical sense), I finally began writing tunes with the confidence engendered after developing enough technique to play and sing simultaneously. The songwriting process up until that point was a piss-poor melange of coming up with the basic chord structures, laying them to some audible form via MIDI, dumping them to tape, and THEN trying to come up with lyrics to lay over them. This process is evidenced and realized in a number of tracks on the "On The Canal" disc, including "No Surrender" and "Saturn Falls". Consider, if you will, this period, entitled "BS: Before Synchronicity". Flash forward, then, to the fall of 1998, when, after a summer of cataloging blueprints at my dad's architecture firm, nights were filled with piano playing and toying with singing vocals along with the songs. This combination had always confounded--yes, befuddled me in the recent past, and I was more apt to ditch the whole thing that tempt embarassment. In trying to comprehend how artists like Ben Folds and Bruce Hornsby were singing lilting melodies atop furious finger-splitting ivory tirades, I found myself at an impasse. Once realizing, however, that, with all things, technique will come with practice, I set about simply singing over static or rhythmic chords. This not only proved to be a possibility, but actually a benefit for my voice, as it was more in-tune and in-sync (not N*Sync, mind you) with the music in general. So, the "These Keys" project, subconsciously shelved since the initial scrawling of these tunes, is a representation of the early days of singing and playing simultaneously--true singer-songwriter material, personified. I know it seems a basic concept, but it's much harder than the pros make it look. -gcp |
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