I think it may be my use of social media, or just this soundbyte age we’re living in, but I’ve noticed my attention span has shortened and this has had a pretty big impact on my music. I’ve found that lyrically I used to take a little more time with ideas, maybe spreading out a whole sentence over 4 lines or more. Complex rhyme schemes (which used to come semi-naturally for me) were baked in to taste. Now I have one idea per line, and a simple A/B/A/B rhyme scheme the whole time. It’s like my mind is spitting out soundbytes one after the other instead of building more involved ideas. This ‘get to the point and move on’ has affected my guitar playing, too. It’s crazy. When improvising, I used to take a riff or an idea and explore it over 8 or 16 bars or whatever. I don’t solo too often these days, but I noticed during a guitar solo at a recent Boolean Knife gig, I repeated one small figure over and over for 2 bars, then switched to a totally different figure and repeated that for two bars, and so on and so on.
I’d like to revisit my other way of doing things. Building ideas over time (lyrically and musically) while also including nods to this short-attention span era. Somehow split the difference. Not sure how to accomplish this. I think I need to open up and be willing to explore. Put that as a priority over productivity. Sometimes right when I get an idea for a song I immediately imagine how the link is going to look on Facebook or whatever. NOT GOOD. Is my audience really my Facebook friends? It used to be that I was the audience I was trying to entertain. I’m not saying that I’ve been making bad music- I’m very happy with my last effort “Accidents and Melodies”. But the writing has been more of an immediate gratification sort, rather than a deeper mystical exploration. We’ll see what happens next…
