I just took a little break for the holidays. Didn’t you?
Anyway, I wasn’t completely idle. I got a little obsessive about this bit of music. You might remember a post back in October, A Simple Word, about the original version.
The music then was a work in progress, and now it’s not.
What has changed? Not much — just a whole lot of rearranging, reinstrumentation, remixing, speeding up by 1 beat-per-minute, and last (but not least) cutting about 45 seconds out of it.
It will be hitting the streaming services in a little while, but you can listen to it right now at Bandcamp.
The strangest thing, though. You know how most music seems to be in 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, or whatever, with occasional pieces being in less common time signatures like 5/4 or 7/8, etc.
Well, Always is in 4/4, as expected, but… the phrasing is unusual, and I just noticed it as I was finishing up. Normally, you’ll have phrases lasting 4 or 8 measures, then changing to some other phrase, something like a four-measure verse, then another, then a four-measure chorus, then back again to a four-measure verse. Or maybe 8 measures of each, or even a combination of different length phrases. Nice even phrases. You get the idea.
Always has three-measure phrases. It may sound to you like six measures because of the note-lengths and the number of beats-per-measure, but it really is three measures per phrase.
Not that it matters. A 6-measure phrase is just as unusual as three-measure phrase.
Anyway, I was surprised when I noticed. I’ve said before that I tend to just let things happen, rather than plan them out ahead of time. Everything was done as it was because it “felt” right.
What’s next, musically? I have no idea. I’m waiting for some inspiration to hit. The “No Resolution” piece is still sitting where I left it…I’m hoping the new year will bring some…ahem…resolution to it.
Or I may dig one of my old efforts out of the vault and rework it. There are about a zillion of them available for fiddling with.
Non-musically, maybe I’ll talk about some of my favorite authors in hopes that they may become yours, too. That’s a very strong possibility, considering I just fell into rereading (again) a series of novels. I was planning on just rereading the first of them, but you know how it goes.