“When We Were Small” has been kicking around for several years but I could never get around to finishing it. Then I bought a marimba and a vibraslap and it finally mostly came together.
There’s also autoharp and various percussion — fingersnaps, rolling dice — and Sue sings the la la las.
At the very end there’s a Pling Plong, which is a sort of do-it-yourself music box.
Words are over here.
Most of the songs I write tend to have a I-IV-V chord progression. I write songs away from any instument at all, at when I pick up the autoharp, hey! it turns out that it’s I-IV-V. I’m well aware that this is a limitation.
To combat this, I bought a book called Chord Progressions for Songwriters — it’s a list of tons of chord progressions, and it gives examples of songs that use them and classifies them — “folk,” “blues,” whatever.
I flipped through it and found a “Doo-Wop” chord progression — I-VIm-IV-V — not too different, but the addition of that VIm chord, sure enough, sounds like an old Doo-Wop song. So I started playing it (in this case, F-Dm-Bb-C) and making up silly words about sock hops and stuff. And one of the things I sung was the line, “when my baby was mine.”
That, I thought, has to be the name of a song already. But I couldn’t find evidence of it existing. So I figured I should write it. Here it is.
I would normally never write a song called “When My Baby Was Mine.” But this messing around with a — for me — totally new chord progression tumbled me in a direction that I would normally never go. I deem this Experiment #2 — force yourself to find a new chord progression. See where it leads.
Instruments include autoharp (one fairly clean, one distorted and pitched down an octave), drum machine, and a Q-Chord during the bridge. Words are here.