Extra drowsy Formula

Within a few months, we had gone through maybe ten people in and out of the band, and it was down to me and daja, the singer. We changed the name to “drowsy” and quit looking for other people. I switched from drums to autoharp (being incapable of playing any “real” string instruments) and bought a drum machine.

We played a few shows like that — autoharp, drum machine, and vocals — and after a while I bought a keyboard and an old Roland sequencer. This allowed me to write keyboard parts and have them play automatically, with the sequencer telling both the drum machine and the keyboard what to do.

Eventually daja moved out of town and now I do this by myself. I haven’t played live in years and frankly the idea of playing a show solo, accompanied by pre-programmed backing tracks, strikes me as simultaneously terrifying and absurd.

Nevertheless, I’ve been writing songs and recording myself ever since. I have very little stuff that I feel is “finished” — one of the purposes of starting the site and this blog is to shame me into putting the finishing touches on some stuff and finally putting it out there into public.

Anyway, that’s the last ten years in a nutshell.

I haven’t figured out how to get this on the main drowsy page — I’ve only just started trying to figure out how to make web pages and, obviously, I’m not very far yet. But let’s kick this thing off anyway. (That way, when I do figure it out, I’ll have an “archive” all ready to go!)
This is going to be my songmaking journal. I am using the term “songmaking” for two reasons:

1) I can’t imagine calling myself a “songwriter.” It sounds so pretentious. I don’t do it professionally, or frequently, or particularly well, so it seems like gilding the pig’s ear a bit too much to call myself a “songwriter.” For that matter, and for similar reasons, I must abstain from calling myself a “musician” or a “recording engineer” or anything else like that. (More on that later.)

2) I want to encompass the stuff that comes after the writing part — the performing and recording — and the stuff that comes before — the experimentation and the inspiration. I want to talk about the creation of a song as a physical object.

I’m going to be posting experiments in songmaking — tactics for spurring creativity and getting out of ruts. I’ll be posting songs in various stages of completion as well, so we can all marvel at how these tactics will almost inevitably fail.

I’ll also be posting interviews with other songmakers of various stripes, covering these topics and more.

So welcome — please stick around, read, listen, and comment, even if you don’t play music or if you don’t think you know anything about it.