I really prefer to play popular music, not in its commercial meaning of being popular because it's sells a lot, but in its ancient meaning of it speak to the hearth of peoples. It can be about anything, love, passion, revolution, birds, cars, whatever. As example, if you talk about love and mix freedom with it, you get a revolutionary song because real love is true revolution.AlexTheBassist wrote:But that's totally against the core idea of music: to transmit a message without using a single word. If a musical piece requires presence of lyrics, then it's plainly weak. That's the reason I still haven't put online any of my own sounds. Despite I've got some deeper theory knowledge than most do, I still can't always write music that speaks for itself.Dominique wrote:But generally, what make me feel a music have a meaning is its lyrics
I also have a relatively good understanding of the musical theory, but most of my song are relatively simple, that mainly because it must remain playable with a good rhythm when I sing. Some can be more complicated, as example I made my own arrangement of Moon of Alabama. For that, I used the original piano partition. This resulted in very unusual guitar chords for the lyrics parts, so unusual I don't even remember their names without looking to my notes. The main difficulty was to find chords which are both playable, and which respect the amazing dissonances and rhythms of the original partition. The chorus was a lot simpler, nothing to change from the original. For another song, I stated playing 2 chords and experimenting with substitutions. The result is a song with a lot of chords, but which can be simplified in no time in order to play it with other musicians. For another song, I started from the wikipedia description of the Gregorian kind of music, and improvised something. Even if the result is following the same tonality, it is certainly my most complicated song because the lyrics are the longest of all my songs, and they made me to explore different modes of that tonality.
For me, to follow the lyrics help me to make the music. I know that many other musicians begin with the songs and put some lyrics on it. I really prefer the opposite way. To make a music that speak for itself is the most difficult. First you must know what kind of feeling you want to bring to peoples, and you will never know if the feeling you want them to feel is the feeling they feel. With the lyrics, it's different. Some peoples will like them, when others will find them scandalous. I don't care because I sing for the peoples, and if someone find that to be scandalous, it implies he or she is just a rich bastard that must go out of its ivory tower and that, in the main-time, just deserve to be scandalized. Politics is boring because you have to be politically correct, which ultimately will impeach you to think. With arts, you don't have that limitation, at least as long you are giving enough context for peoples to understand or feel what you are talking about.