Friday, November 23, 2007

Are you still alive?!

Well, you may be wondering what's been going on with DLDown in the last wee while... well, here's some idea of what I've been up to anyway...

• A spot of recording! - studio versions of Romans 7, Icarus and Missing are all at various stages near completion, so look out for one or two of those on myspace soon.

• A wee bit o' songwriting. I'm sure everyone has different ways of going about this. My method (for want of a better, less precise word) usually involves lots of scribbled ideas on lots of random bits of paper lying around in my room.

Sometimes, the whole song grows and expands out of a sentence or phrase that I've heard in another song, or have subconsciously picked up somewhere else, the obvious examples being Farther Up and Farther In (from a line in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle) and Icarus (which began as an extrapolation of a line I heard in a Phish song, The Squirming Coil). Others are an attempt at a different angle on a Bible story or passage, and still others are more closely related to emotions or circumstances I'm going through at the time.

Occasionally, some of these make it to the consolidation-into-something-coherent-and-singable stage, from which point the best ones pretty much write themselves, usually in the middle of the night when I really ought to be sleeping. Lilies & Sparrows is coming along nicely, and I'm hopeful that a couple more will be on their way shortly!

• Looking forward to tonight's gig - the first in a wee while. Should be grand!
J