Behind Calendar II // Clear the Air

This is the ninth of my ongoing series of blog posts on the Making Of my album as Granfalloon, Calendar - Chapter 2. To start at the very beginning and read my Making Of series for Volume 1, go here.

TRACK 9: CLEAR THE AIR

SUBJECT - Clearing the air

OPENING RAMBLE

I’m rolling straight into this blog after completing the one for ‘Shh!’, which took WAY too long. Let’s keep this momentum going eh?

I’ve been considering recently the privilege I have as a result of my fascination with the English language. I’m at a level where I can deconstruct the language, take it apart, and put it back together in ways that give new meanings. Some days, that feels like a super power.

Words can unlock the world. You don’t think so?

Try communicating feelings of ambivalence with the vocabulary of a six year old. Or lifting the veil on a prevailing hegemony, and how you feel about it using only numbers, colours and animals. It’s tricky eh?

I’ve been considering these things because I’m currently (and for the last 4 years) learning how to speak Dutch. My wife is Dutch. She speaks excellent English but I first began learning so I could gain some small insight into how she would form ideas in her native tongue. I have also recently relocated to the Netherlands, so this idle curiosity had been promoted to something of a pressing need.

Most people that I mention my move to, tell me that I don’t even need to learn Dutch… 

“They all speak English in the Netherlands don’t they?”

Hmmm… well aside from the fact that maybe they don’t all speak English in the Netherlands, it’s good form, or maybe necessity, to be able to speak the language of the country I’m living in. Especially if one is not living in a major city. Those background (foreground) conversations of fast paced Dutch exchanges are all around me. And it’s a person’s right to communicate in their own tongue whenever they wish but it certainly can feel isolating if you don’t speak that language.

Then there’s the inverse situation that I’ll encounter in the bigger cities here; the strange realisation that the entirety of the group of people you’re conversing with have switched to English purely for YOUR benefit.

You know… I hadn’t realised just how much I take for granted. Every situation I’ve been in throughout my life, my observations of my environment, however hidden, had been working ten-to-the-dozen, informing me with important context clues as to what was happening at that very moment. I’m a compulsive reader. And by that, I don’t mean I devour books on a daily basis (however much I wish that was the case). It’s more that, when there is English text in my eyeline, I will read it, quickly, and that information will be there hiving away in the background making me appear smarter and more informed than it seems I actually am. Remove those context clues (or rather translate them into another language) and it turns out, I’m actually as dumb as a quarry.

This opening ramble bears no direct relevance to the song I’m about to discuss, other than maybe the subject of communication but I’d been meaning to discuss my ongoing Dutch experience, either as a standalone blog or as part of something else. Here it is, part of something else.

So… communication eh? Open and honest communication! Maybe that’s the subject of this next song from Calendar - Chapter II. It’s called ‘Clear The Air’.

WRITING IN 2014

This is one of the Calendar songs that became a different song entirely from its 2014 predecessor. From my 2014 writing, I had 52 pieces of music to choose from. I took twelve of those for Calendar - Volume I, another twelve songs for Calendar - Phase III*, and divided the remainder up into categories…

• Songs which needed a little work

• Songs which need a lot of work

• Chord progressions I liked

• Lyrics I liked

• Ideas I liked

• Song titles that would need to rewritten into a completely new song

‘Clear the Air’ is one of the latter songs.

The original 2014 version was inspired by a message from a friend. We hadn’t fallen out in any way I knew but maybe there had been some miscommunication? Something misunderstood? Ideas can be so hard to convey to a brain that is not your own.

So it was in November 2014 when I received my friend’s message via text. It said something along the lines of…

“We need to talk, it would be good to clear the air.”

Up until receiving this message, I actually hadn’t known of any air that needed clearing.

Let’s consult my 2014 notes:

“Deadline: Wednesday 19th November 2014

Always wanted to write a song under a minute long. Here's one.”

So it also looks like I’d taken the opportunity to try imposing some rules on this one as well. I had indeed always wanted to try and write a song that was under a minute long. The economy and discipline it would require would surely hone a song into diamond brilliance. I would be forced to consider whether each few seconds of melody, each lyrical couplet was effective or beautiful or pithy enough to be there.

But… this was also November of a year in which I had already written 46 pieces of music** and as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, fatigue with the project had set in. Anyway this is the song I came up with. It’s actually called ‘We Need To Talk’.

WE NEED TO TALK (from 2014)

A punky Omnichord number with a heavy reliance on ironically delivered clichés. I took musical inspiration from the realisation that the model OM82 Omnichord had a ridiculously breakneck tempo for its drum machine. Way faster than other models. Then I cycled between chords until I found something I liked and hit record. The results are… far from enchanting. But it is under a minute long, at least.

MEANWHILE IN 2023

I had brought the category selection to show Lobelia as we worked on co-writing Calendar II. When we got to this subject matter, I expounded that there wasn’t much to go on other than the song idea was called ‘We Need To Talk’ and it was about ‘clearing the air’. Lobelia revealed she actually had an unreleased song she had been working on called ‘Clear The Air’!

I seem to remember the chord progression and melody for the Verse was definitely in place already. It had quite a 90’s alt feel to it. Our collaborations on this project had been so fruitful so far with just enough push and pull between two songwriters to guide the ideas into somewhere interesting. This was definitely the most fully formed idea that Lobelia had brought to this album and I admit, I feel like I struggled to really make my mark on it. This was a collaboration. Definitely one of the most open and rewarding ones I’ve had in my musical life but this was still a Granfalloon album and I wanted to try and ‘Granfalloon’ the song up a bit.

We jammed and jammed***, and via our wonderful push-and-pull method moved the song into the Chorus, and onto a potential instrumental passage as well but some of the chord choices didn’t sit entirely satisfactorily with me and I wanted to experiment with the rhythms. Lobelia was definitely open to this, in theory. I remember I stayed up late on that first evening working on the song and watching an old live performance by one of my favourite bands, Love.****

I reworked what we’d been working on into something very Love-sounding. Let me see if I can dig out the demo I recorded…

Alas I cannot find it. Unusual for me not to archive something like that but I did find a version of me and Lobelia playing the song through the following day. I believe it incorporates some of the chords I’d come up with for the B section the night before but I’d envisioned a much more sprightly pace, I was hearing something bouncy, with those droning high open strings and those Mariachi-infused horns that populate the Forever Changes album. Here’s the inimitable Arthur Lee performing a Love track ‘Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark and Hilldale’ live and the demo of Lobelia and I playing ‘Clear the Air’…

MAYBE THE PEOPLE WOULD BE THE TIMES OR BETWEEN CLARK AND HILLDALE

CLEAR THE DEMO (with Lobelia)

From the demo, it feels like we’re pulling in opposite directions… I’m trying to speed up, Lobelia trying to maintain the slower tempo. I think I’m also trying to smooth out the ambiguity of the Verse melody where Lo was deliberately wanting to leave the major/minor key open to interpretation.

It happens… To my mind, Lobelia had put too much work into this song already. Maybe the ownership she felt fought against the instincts I was bringing to the piece and I cannot begrudge her that. But this song remains the song on Calendar II that feels the least like a Granfalloon song. I still like the song but to my ears it’s more of a Lobelia song that I gladly helped arrange (and had a lot of fun doing so). In hindsight we could have shelved this song for a more Lobelia-oriented project but for better or worse, I was feeling conceptually tied to the 12-song format of the Calendar albums. Simultaneously I didn’t want to strong-arm her into accepting my ideas. That’s the nature of collaboration. Lo is one of my closest confidants and dearest friends and I think I know her well enough to know that she’s probably going to be mortified or at least, mildly hurt when she reads this.

However the point of these blogs is to examine the processes behind the songwriting honestly. Sorry Lo! I still love you and I still love working with you!

I also most definitely got a lot out of arranging the strings for the instrumental section in the back half of the song. Calendar II was the album where I really stretched out and discovered my passion for doing these arrangements. I turned that bouncing horn part I heard into a pizzicato string part to fit the smoother style, and worked around some wonderful guitar work from Lo, both melodically and in the form of a harmonics part.

LYRICAL WAX

Lobelia’s lyric “Keep passing open windows” originates from a John Irving novel. I believe it’s something of a mantra for coping with loss.

There’s also a Queen Song by the same name [‘Keep Passing The Open Windows’]: Apparently Freddie Mercury wrote the song for the 1984 film version of The Hotel New Hampshire using the novel’s mantra. I’ll turn this over to Lobelia to explain in her own words, as the chief lyricist for the song:

LOBELIA:

“I had no idea about the song for the film! I had actually seen this film ages ago but didn’t clock that at all!! I used to be a very big fan of John Irving as a teenager/20 something and this was one of his first books that I read.

I was really struggling with everything going on personally - and this is really about that. As an empath I really want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt - but at that point I couldn’t stay quiet/mostly to myself.”

CLEAR THE AIR (album version)

SIGN OFF

There’s always a sense of connectivity to everything I do. I’ve been theorising for a while that it’s the very connections we look for in our lives and others that form such an important part of our work as songwriters that we can’t help but compulsively, retroactively (and maybe spuriously) apply those connections to everything in our lives.

I began this blog entry discussing communication and the recent struggles I’ve been having with it, and then moved to miscommunication with a friend, through to a songwriting process where both Lo and I might have done better to communicate with a more brutal honesty. Tenuous connections? Surely. But the song exists, the blog exists, this little victory has been won and we live to write another day. Air cleared.

FOOTNOTE CORNER

*The reason that CIII had its 12 songs decided before CII was because Calendar III was meant to BE Calendar II but the album was taking too long to record so I bumped the Lobelia co-writing album up to CII. Clear, Non?

 **Complete guess.

***Read: played through the chord progression.

****Mentioned at length in other blog entries here. Listen to Forever Changes. Now. You’re welcome.

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