Junior Project 2020 (Cornish College of the Arts)
My cornerstone project examined and magnified many of my insecurities in relation to my creative output and process. The easy part was the creation of the lyrics and melodies of these songs, using my favorite puzzle-piece songwriting method. The hardest parts were realizing each song’s full potential through recording, and creating full arrangements and editing samples.
The first song, Halloween, sprouted out of last semester’s songwriting course, and also my love for the holiday and all things spooky. I wrote this song while creating and piecing together several others, and so I felt that, like many of my songs from last semester, Halloween didn’t get what it deserved arrangement wise. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and I have very fond memories associated with Halloween-related movies, so I knew I had to include them in the project somehow. Usually my arranging process involves at least 3 other musicians, and lots of loud guitar and bouncing ideas off each other, and arranging samples in a DAW by myself was very difficult for the first version of the song. I started hunting for dialogue that reminded me of Halloween, or was spooky, or made me laugh. I found several theremin sounds that are pretty buried in the final mix, as well as a small boy who plays the theremin and then says “thanks for watching” which you hear in the song as well as his “Hello!” intro. I also found a video of a man playing a theremin sonata that Amy and I cut up for the end of the song. Then I dived into dialogue, most of which hails from the wonderful 1993 Disney film Hocus Pocus. I put samples like “dazzle me, my darling!” and “lets brew another BATCH!” into the interlude of the song, so they could act as some sort of textural chorus, and eventually added “afraid.. Of nothing” from the haunted house disney ride that I found on youtube as well. You hear the interlude a few times in the song, and the last time you hear the samples they are a part of what I call a train-crash-ending, where I combined the samples, some found sounds used as percussion, and some lightning and yelling sounds also from Hocus Pocus to create an atmosphere that almost feels like the song is falling apart, but also becoming something new. Overall, making Halloween opened a lot of new doors for me musically, and gave me a lot of inspiration for the future to make more strange musical collages.
Old Hollywood Charm is one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written. I created this song out of my hatred for the film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino, and especially the ending. I hated that he took real life characters and events and changed both the characters themselves and the timeline of the events that take place in the movie. This song touches on themes of time passing and control as well as lying to ourselves. The verses follow different characters from the movie and their choices and the chorus touches on the “charm” that Hollywood puts over people and situations and how that applies to a bigger idea of general cloudiness and loneliness in life. I am a huge fan of soundscapes and ambient noise, and sense this song doesn't have nearly as much space for samples, I added some ambient crowd noise and talking at different levels and sonic locations throughout the song, and when we do hear specific dialogue samples, they are nestled in the verses few and far between, or at the end to create another overwhelming ending. I found a lot of these samples on youtube as well, most of which are Marilyn Monroe in various interviews, like “I don't know quite what you mean by that” and Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn saying “you’re the worst kind there is!”
Sifting through interviews and movies and finding samples that evoke a similar feeling as a song i’ve written is my new favorite way to sonically explain my intentions with a piece and I can tell I will be doing it for a long time. Both of these songs come out of a super personal place and having this quick timeline from idea to recorded to released gave me a new sense of control over what I create, and is going to allow me to create new songs from an honest place while not getting too attached to the process.