I learnt a lot about streamlining the creative process between creating my first album, which took 18 months, and making the first Vorstand Circus album, which took 6 months.  For “Sworn In…..”, I decided what the album was about thematically, decided on the instrumentation, decided roughly how long it would be and how many tracks it would have.  I then sat down and wrote the whole thing before I went anywhere near a computer to record, arrange and produce it.  I had learnt that getting absorbed in the endless possibilities presented to me by creating on a computer was what wasted most of my time on the first album.

I honed the writing process that works for me while creating “Sworn In…..”.  It has three parts.  The first part is generating material.  I do this in three different ways:

• Writing words on paper with pen which I then sit down and improvise music to.  These words are usually pretty stream-of-conscious.  I’ve started doing this on the train on the way to work to wring every available minute of creative time out of the day.
• Singing random words and melodies into my mp3 player’s voice recorder which I then transfer in to the computer and add music to.  I often do this while I’m on a long walk, reacting to the environment around me.   I used to do this with a micro cassette recorder.  The mp3 player is much faster.
•  Sitting down with keys or guitar, a microphone and my laptop and improvising.  This is how I’ve been generating most of the material for Melbourne Beauty so far.  Most of the time, I’m singing complete gibberish out of tune over a chord progression or riff I’ve just made up.

These become individual tracks with their own shorthand names in their own folders.  I’ve got 40 little folders of this stuff sitting on my hard drive as of now.  I’ll keep going until I feel like I’ve got enough, and then I’ll move onto part two of the writing process, which I refer to as the “sketch” phase.  There’ll be a post devoted to that when I get there.

 So here’s what these bits of material sound like.  I feel pretty naked and embarrassed letting these out into the public domain, but I said I was going to share everything.  Some of these snatches of improvised material will be worked on further and may eventually end up in a song; maybe the melody, maybe a lyric, maybe a chord progression, maybe a sound.  Maybe.

a_delicate_place.mp3 (808 KB)

i_can_be_your_razor.mp3 (698 KB)

laughing_in_matchbox.mp3 (1.01 MB)

six_eight.mp3 (819 KB)

I’ve got a 9-to-5 job in a large company, which I got 6 months after returning from three years in Switzerland.  I had the privilege of working full-time on my music in Switzerland.  I released two albums, one under my own name and one as The Vorstand Circus. I’m now writing the second Vorstand Circus album, which I will write, perform, record, mix, master, release, promote and perform live entirely by myself while working my day job.  This blog will chronicle how I do it, why I do it and the reason behind every creative decision I make along the way. 

So let’s begin at the beginning and then go on until we reach the end.  Let’s start with the first decision I made; the decision to make an album and what to call it. 

I catch the train to work.  I can’t begin to tell you how important this is.  I listen to music on the train; this is how I keep up with all the great music out there and keep myself sane.  I also use the train to work, but more on this in later posts.  For now, let me just say – take public transport to work; it makes your life better. 

I also walk past Melbourne’s Sandridge Bridge every weekday on the way to and from work.  The bridge is dominated by a large-scale installation by artist Nadim Karam called “The Travellers”.  That’s a photo of part of it on the header of this blog.  Ten huge figures made of stainless steel make up the work.  They symbolise the different periods of settlement and immigration in Melbourne.  

 One day, while traveling to work, I was listening to Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over The Sea”, which, on most days, is my favourite album.   As I walked down Southbank Boulevard, the track “Oh Comely”, the emotional melting point of the album, was playing.  This track never fails to either send a cold chill up my spine or bring tears to my eyes when the twin narratives of Anne Frank and Goldaline collide in Jeff Mangum’s incredibly fertile imagination.  As the line “Goldaline my dear, we will fall and freeze together” played, I was looking at “Melbourne Beauty”, the female figure in “The Travellers” that represents the gold rushes of the 1850s to 1890s (see image at the top of this post).  Something happened. 

I’d been through a lot of change; moving countries, finding a new job, finding a new place to live.  I’d also tried to put the “Sworn In On A Stack Of Dictionaries” line-up of The Vorstand Circus together; keys, drums, bass, accordion and me on guitar and vocal.  I couldn’t make it happen.  I hadn’t written anything since almost a year previously, since “Sworn In…..” went into the production stage.  In my defence, I had been busy.  But I had to figure out how to write, record, release and perform again.  This is what I want to do full-time. 

It hit me all at once around that moment; write the album to be performed solo; use your lunch hours, your laptop, your time on the train, your mp3 player’s voice recorder, a notebook, a pen. Change the music you write, how you write it and how you play it.  And write about it while you do it; not one of those arch, abstract, flippant musicians’ diaries of their album recording sessions, but explain how and why you make every creative decision.  

So that’s why it’s called Melbourne Beauty, though it won’t necessarily be about Melbourne.  But it will be written in, infused with, nurtured by and performed in Melbourne, so maybe it will.