matt.west.co.tt

50/90, or 50 Songs In 90 Days, is the less photogenic and slightly more intimidating cousin of February Album Writing Month, running throughout July, August and September. The idea is to write fif- oh, you worked that bit out already. This year FAWM supremo Burr Settles donated the song-posting infrastructure to 50/90 (previous years were run through a Yahoo group) so it became a natural off-season hangout for FAWM veterans. Me, I wasn’t planning on taking part, but since I ended up writing a couple of songs over that time period for one reason or another, it would have been silly not to crash the party late on and participate in a laid-back, not-letting-it-take-over-your-life sort of way. And here are the results.

Everything Is Relative

This started out as an instrumental track laid down at Shucon 2008 on TDM’s GarageBand / MIDI setup, which came back to bite me as a nasty bit of vendor lock-in. (I figured that since GarageBand took MIDI input and stored it as MIDI-like note events, I’d be able to export it to a .mid file, right? Silly me.) Luckily I managed to salvage / re-record enough of it to work on it some more and develop it into a proper song. Spurred on by some particularly eclectic music competitions at Assembly, I decided to try my luck at entering it at Evoke, just to see what would happen when it was thrown in against a whole load of D+B and trance tracks. Not surprisingly, it failed to qualify. But having done the rounds of more or less the entire summer demo party season, it found a home at Sundown 2008, where it got 4th place. Score!

The lyrics were actually sparked by the train journey back from Shucon – at the seat in front of me, I saw that someone had drawn some initials in a heart on the window. This made me think “eww, that’s a bit tacky. Oh, hang on – whoever did that drew it on the outside of the window but did it in mirror writing so his girlfriend on the train could read it. Aww, that’s like the most romantic thing ever!”

Edgware Road

A slightly more obviously train-related song, written to immortalise that enigma of the London Underground where time stands still, and add to the repertoire of songs about tube stations. Lyrics were mostly written on the Eurostar (hence the namecheck in the bridge) and the recording was done a-cappella stylee in the cabin of a sleeper train on the way back from International Vodka Party. Naturally, this was a horrible painstaking process of waiting for the moments when the train wasn’t making an absolute racket, but it had to be done for posterity. How many other songs have been written and recorded entirely on public transport, eh?

Cabbage Soup For The Soul

Written for Hoopshank as part of intense negotiations (not really) over contributing to another as yet unannounced musical project. He demanded songs of cabbage… I answered the call. I added a self-imposed constraint that the song had to have a mostly-serious message, so I came up with the idea of cabbage soup for the soul, as being something like Chicken Soup for the Soul but not as pleasant, and better for you. And suitable for vegans. And with that, the song just wrote itself. Or, more accurately, was written on my behalf by my alter ego, fictional Scottish indie band Glencoe Horse.

At The River (slight return)

OK, scraping the barrel a bit here. But you can’t really blame me for having a sudden bout of obsessive-compulsive disorder on realising that the lyrics to At The River by Groove Armada consist entirely of a half-sentence that trails off unsettlingly without completing its train of thought. “If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air, quaint little villages here and there,” – then… what exactly? Clearly, this had to be fixed. So I did.

(All songs downloadable from the not-very-pretty music.matt.west.co.tt – lyrics available from my 50/90 profile)