I bring the riffs, the little chord sequences, the picking technique. I was playing a borrowed 50 years old Martin guitar. So beautifully resonant, and easy to play.
We have a little digital recorder that we use to record demos. The trick is to put words and music together, effortlessly. Finding the perfect match. Perfection is just an ideal in our heads, but we know when the magic descends.
Sometimes, usually accidentally, it all comes together. Then we try to recreate that moment. The trick is to recreate the unconscious moment, consciously. Not that easy. You can't try too hard, you have to let it happen. It's kind of a strange thing, getting back to something that just happened seemingly by itself.
We didn't quite get there. We got close. We recorded the basic song. We now have all the parts, now it's the process of playing them and making those changes flow effortlessly. You know, we now have to practice to get to the point where it's just all there, totally second nature, muscle memory, embedded in our DNA.
We moved one sequence of words and chords from the middle of the song to the beginning, and that seemed all the difference, it seemed to make it all work quite exquistitely. Suddenly there was a flow and a build. We were so close. We ran thru the song a couple times and just didn't quite get there. We will. We wrapped up the session a little frustrated. Close but not quite there. We will get together again soon and see if we can catch that lovely little butterfly without damaging it. Still, we can see it, flitting and fluttering before our eyes, just out of reach. Songwriting it's a challenging, fabulous, wondrous, thing.
