Common Sense Dancing: Mellotron Suite: Long Summer Days

This piece of music was written quite quickly after I realised that I was going to need a third theme in Where Shall We Go, rather than just repeat another variation of what have become called Ambling Excitedly and Caught In The Rain.

I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Quite by accident it seems to evoke exactly what its title suggests. Its mood reminds me of some of the incidental music of my favourite film, Watership Down**.

Extra points if you can smell the dry grass and feel the sun on your face.

Tomorrow we end our journey through Common Sense Dancing - see you then!

** A film that, bizarrely, links Hancock's Half Hour and Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War Of The Worlds..

Common Sense Dancing: Clare's Dance

I was house/cat-sitting for a friend in January 2004. One morning I sat down at their piano while the kettle was on, and my hands fell into the pattern that underpins this tune. I became interested in how small movements of the fingers to adjacent piano keys changed the harmony.

Of course I knew it would, but there was something about the movements of the suggested distant chords/keys that reminded me of an old friend with whom I had lost touch a couple of decades prior.

I ended up naming the piece after her. I thought, were she to hear it, that she would probably like the first half, but probably not the second. While Minimalism appealed to her, Jazz-rock never really floated her boat..

The work of artists such as Bill Bruford, Brand X, Weather Report, Quantum Jump, etc. have had a huge influence on me through the years, alongside composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Michael Nyman. All these elements get stirred together, and I end up writing things like Clare's Dance.

Flute by John Hackett, ambient and lead guitars by Nick Fletcher.

See you tomorrow!

Common Sense Dancing: Mellotron Suite: Ambling Excitedly

The three longer pieces of incidental music from Where Shall We Go were simply named Theme 1, Theme 2, Theme 3, until I started doing the artwork for the album and I felt that I couldn't really go to press with such mundane names.. I chose names that partly reflected the position of the music in the play, and partly the feel they created.

The underlying guitar part of this piece, Theme 1 as was, originally came about from me playing around with ideas surrounding an arrangement of Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill..

The violin and flute parts were initially going to have leitmotifs to represent the She and He of the play, but other than the first melodic idea heard on the flute which is repeated in various ways across the incidental music, this idea was dropped. However, the interplay between the two top lines was intended to be conversational, mimicking the two as they walked - whether it's successful in that is perhaps not for me to say!

After that excited amble, I'll see you tomorrow for something a little more reflective!

Common Sense Dancing: Mellotron Suite: Caught In The Rain

After all that excitement yesterday, we're now on the second half of this tour through Common Sense Dancing, and this piece from the Where Shall We Go Mellotron Suite calms thing down a likkel. It appears during the rain sequence of the play.

Check your weather forecast for today - April showers, and all that..

You can almost see the clouds parting and the blue sky breaking through at the end!

Stay dry, now! See you tomorrow :-)

Common Sense Dancing: Come On! (Put That Hoedown)

As with My Island and Antasia, Come On! (Put That Hoedown) was a product of a KvR monthly contest. The theme that month was 'Hurry Up!'

I chose a dance, a gardening pun - and a tune that just doesn't let up.. There might be the odd touch of Fairpoint Convention or Mike Oldfield in there somewhere.

The violin was jauntily (and nothing short of heroically) played by Clare Lindley (Stackridge, DLM), flute flauted by John Hackett, and lead guitar by the fabulous Nick Fletcher of the John Hackett Band.

Phew! See you tomorrow!

Common Sense Dancing: Mellotron Suite: Main Theme

I had a bunch of short ideas that I never thought I would never make in to full guitar pieces, but when the notion of making Where Shall We Go appeared, I felt I could use those ideas as the basis for the music through the play. During the writing stage I new I was going to be arranging for flute and violin so set up those sounds on virtual Mellotrons (using GForce's excellent M-Tron Pro). And got rather used to the sounds!

Once the real instruments had been recorded I felt it would be a shame to have the Mellotron versions of the music lost, and that it would be nice to have some of the music separated off from the play to be pieces in their own right - thus the Mellotron Suite was born.

This piece, however, never appears in the play in this form. The chord structure appears at the start and end of the play, along with a couple of other arrangements popping up here and there, but without these flute/ violin parts. The melodies appear without the context of the guitar (I'll let you work out where, should you wish to know!), but here everything is presented together, united at last..

See you tomorrow :-)

Common Sense Dancing: My Island

My Island is just a silly song written as part of an island-themed monthly competition on a music website, KvR, in 2003.

It was, so far as I know, the first full, properly mixed piece of music recorded using Zynewave Podium while it was still in beta. This re-recorded version, as with the whole album, was made using the same software (just a few versions later!).

I'm not certain of many songs that include the word 'compunction.' Only other one I knowingly know is an old Stackridge tune - Marigold Conjunction. Any one know of any others..?

Thank you John Hackett for your fluting, and Kim Eames for your backing vocals!

See you tomorrow!