Sunday, August 19, 2012

Song #237 of 9999 - Colorblind by Frankie Big Face

Two more weeks of writing about my own music (as mentioned in my post of July 20) and then back to my normal blog!

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Song #237 of 9999 

Title: Colorblind
Artist: Frankie Big Face
Year: 2011
Album: Nur Ein 6

Click here to listen!

Ah, the chorus vs. refrain debate. In Round One of Nur Ein 6, the challenge was "no chorus." In the tradition of songs like Blowin' in the Wind and Bridge Over Troubled Water, I used a catchy refrain to end each verse and this seemed to confuse everyone, resulting in the posting of dictionary definitions, hints at disqualification—it was quite the scandal. But frankly, I didn't care much then and care even less now. This was the best song I had written in over a year and I was pretty happy to be back in the songwriting business.

I'm pretty fond of taking a broad concept like "colors" and building a song from a number of phrases related to that concept. This is yet another breakup song but the incorporation of all these "colorful" phrases allowed me to build something of interest relatively quickly. I just started making a list from the very obvious ("feeling blue," "green with envy") to the more obscure ("golden years," "in the red," "white as a sheet") and then assembled them into a song that has some fairly vicious overtones before leveling out. I wish the chorus—oops, refrain—were as clever as the verses but I think it works okay. The guitar riff that opens the tune got a lot of positive attention and I was successful at remotely recording drums (i.e. with a laptop at someone else's house) for the first time so some nice things came out of this track.

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