Creator Diaries: Part 1 - How I Hear Music
I love music. Music encapsulates every aspect of my life, and I can’t imagine a future without it. I often think about the scene from Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (a classic for musical cinemagoers), where Deloris reaches out to Rita by paraphrasing Rainer Maria Rilke, “if you wake up in the morning and you can’t think of anything but singing first, then you’re supposed to be a singer”. This resonates so deeply with me. Every day, I wake up and I want to sing. Each morning the first thing I do is walk over to my keyboard and play and sing. It doesn’t feel so much like a desire or want, but a need; a need that must be fulfilled. Every time I feel it, I remind myself, if I can’t think of anything else, then this is what I’m supposed to do.
However, I sometimes struggle to call myself a musician. In many ways, I know where my faults lie: I don’t listen to an incredibly diverse range of music; I struggle to hit and hold notes consistently when singing; I can’t play any instrument to a high level; I struggle to stay in time (despite being a semi-professional beatboxer); my ability to play and sing together is weak; and my music theory is limited at best. Only recently have I found the courage and confidence to create and share my own music. But more and more, I’m noticing that I can work out the chords of a song without help, that my hands are moving naturally from one chord to the other when writing music, that good ideas are coming, and that I now know how to fully realise them. Knowing that my abilities and knowledge are growing, my love for music only grows alongside them.
In this blog series, I want to share my experiences of creating music as a young, new musician. The series will track the process of creating my first song from conception to release. Through sharing my processes and experiences the aim is that artists and new musicians can find confidence, guidance, support and company in some of their musical challenges. I am by no means an expert in this, and I don’t want to pretend to be. I merely hope that my experiences can help other musicians who want to get their music out there and create the music they love. In this first post, I wish to discuss some of the experiences I’ve had with music, exploring the way I view and experience music, and what it means to me. The post culminates by highlighting a fundamental dilemma that artists face - do you make music you love, or do you make music people want to listen to?
Hearing and Experiencing Music
I’m constantly fascinated by the feeling of overwhelming joy and positivity I get from singing, and I know others are too. In my first year of university I joined my university’s Gospel Choir. I’m not religious, so in some ways I found it difficult to connect with the group, but I knew they accepted me because of how I felt about music and singing. When I first heard them sing, I wasn’t quite ready for the sheer power, beauty and volume emanating from the group. I'd never been part of this quality before, but I knew immediately these singers understood that overwhelming sense of joy. The passion that erupted was clearly in rejoice, and although I don’t attribute this to God, I understand the underlying emotion. When I sing, I am rejoicing. I am rejoicing in the existence of music, in the beauty of that moment, and in my emotions – I feel it in my soul.
I find it difficult to get across the physical sensation that music can have on me. A couple years ago I first heard the term, “skin orgasm”. I’ve since learned of what this actually is - frisson. Frisson translates from French to mean “aesthetic chills” and is essentially a wave of pleasure that runs across the skin (a bit sensual I know but bear with me). Not everyone experiences this sensation, which is why it can be strange or confusing to those who don’t experience it. There isn’t a clear explanation or way to help someone understand, but if you feel it, you know what it is. The sensation comes from a variety of things: it could be the melodic tones of a singer, it could be the harmonic progression of a song, or it could be intricate little riffs that pop up in the surrounding space of the music. Two artists that really capture that feeling for me are John Mayer and Mac Ayres.
I'm not always a fan of John Mayer’s music, but I do believe he is a master of emotive guitar playing, and I am always eager to listen to his music for those moments that trigger my frisson. Two examples from his newest album, Sob Rock, stand out to me. In "Why You No Love Me", just before two minutes in and half-way through the second verse, he retains the chord progression but shifts to a new melody and underlies it with a more pronounced classical acoustic guitar. Behind this, an electric guitar pierces through the space, playing a short motif, E-E-D-Db-E. The conflux of new instrumentation, interesting riff and beautiful chords evokes a powerful melancholia. In "I Guess I Just Feel Like", at the end of a solo, Mayer plays a soft electric guitar melody which culminates in a run that darts from B-Db-B-Bb, before sliding up an octave. The distortion and reverb is used so well that, without fail, I find myself closing my eyes and following the slide in my imagination, similarly evoking that frisson sensation.
Mac Ayres is a very different artist and triggers frisson in a vastly different way. The first track on the Magic8ball album, "Sunny & 62", gives me frisson potentially more than any other song I know. The unchanging two-chord progression of DbMajor7 to BMajor7 played on stringed, e-piano synths uses those added sevenths unforgivingly (some of my favourite chords, and something that echoes an earlier track of his, "I’ve Always Been") while the vocals and harmonies are breathy, echoey and full, with a tone that almost glides through the space. The simple but confident beat with raindrops and hazed background noise place the song into a new atmosphere. Whenever this song comes on I am enthralled by its excellence. Quite annoyingly, because of this, I can't listen to the song if I need to focus or I’ll abandon what I’m doing and just start singing!
The song also intimately recalls emotions I felt when first listening to it - I hadn't seen my girlfriend in months and felt isolated in my new Cardiff flat. Yet I was excited to meet new friends, passionate about my Masters degree, and eager to start filming scenes for the upcoming Sex Education season (check out my A Capella group, @CU_Vox, as special artists in season 3!). The song filled me with both despair and hope all at once. Each time I listen to Sunny & 62, I am whisked back to my Cardiff apartment, and my walks through Bute Park in the cold Welsh winter. I think that music, far more than other art forms and media, has this localising effect – an ability to transcend time and place and remind us of memories, emotions and locations.
Music for Me, or Music for You?
When I listen to music, my emotions and interest don’t necessarily come from lyrics or performance. I typically view lyrics as a vehicle to progress the music, and my criteria is usually, “do the lyrics fit the vibe of the song?”, regardless of their continuity or meaning. I've often found it difficult to connect with the likes of Bob Dylan, Adele or Joni Mitchell, or artists that emphasise performance and lyrical meaning. In many ways, I find this quite contradictory to my nature – I am an experienced writer with a background in a diverse range of topics, who likes to discuss quite existential social and world issues. So why can I not translate this into lyrical meaning?
Aux-resident Joe Belham told me recently that he thinks of this as more abstract emotion: an emotion that comes not from meaning, but from experience, and specifically within music, emotion that comes from the composition, the production, and the overall sound of the music. I think this accurately interprets how I hear music. The emotions and feelings I get from music come from listening to the sound: the chilled beats, the sultry voicing of a saxophone, the contradiction of suspense vs. resolution in added 4thchords, the beauty of an unexpected harmonic trajectory, and the tone of a voice matching the instrumentation. It’s something I’ve tried to emulate in one of my songs, Look Up. My experience and emotion do not come through necessarily in the lyrics, but from the overall vibe and sound of the music, which is intended to demonstrate how I feel when I walk down the street and simply look up and gaze at the world in all its wonders. It’s not that the song resembles what I feel – it is what I feel.
I suppose this leads me to the concluding issue of this piece, and something that I will continue to explore as I lay out my songwriting process more clearly in the coming blog posts: Should you make music that you love or music that others love?
All artists play what they listen to and what they love, but I constantly worry about whether what I love isn’t widely accepted – will people like what I make? My inspiration comes from areas like 80s pop music, contemporary jazz, chilled soul music, and artists such as Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Mac Ayres, Braxton Cook, J3PO, Marie Dahlstrom and Charlie Puth. But if that's the music I want to make, should I compromise for those who don’t like it? I’ve found this particularly difficult on the lyrical side of things. I'm afraid those who find meaning in lyrics and performance may reject my style of embedding meaning and emotion more into the track’s sound. Similarly, my song structure deviates from pop songs, and I worry that it might not be well received by pop music listeners who are used to three-minute listens. I also contemplate what I want from music: is my intention to make money and sell lots, or is it a personal project that is intended to reach those who like my vision? For me, it's early stages, but these questions are there, and I'm sure they'll remain.
I guess you can’t write what you don’t feel, and while you can try to appeal to others and how they interpret and like music, ultimately, for music to be special, I feel it needs to reveal who you are, your emotions and experiences. I know that for me, making something that I love is important, if I don't love it, my quality and my passion drops. Trying to find a balance between making music for yourself and making music for others is something that I will battle with going forward, and something all other musicians must face every time they make their music.
In the upcoming post, I'll be sharing some clips from my first song, diving into its conception and my writing process. My journey as an artist is only just beginning, and it's a journey I'm excited to share with you.
Orion
We've made a playlist of tracks that Orion has mentioned alongside some of his other influences and favourites. Make sure to save the playlist as we'll be adding to it with each new Creator Diary post.
You can also check out Orion's personal blog here: https://jiggyicarus.wixsite.com/jiggysblog