Category Archives: Self-Retrospect

And now for the second installment of Self-Retrospect, where I look back at my silly younger self, the often silly songs I wrote and the inspiration behind them.

The first edition of this series dealt with ‘Breaking’, the earliest song I chose to include on the Projects compilation. That song was special to me as it was the first time I’d put real, honest emotion into a song. The second earliest track I put on Projects was ‘Never Knew Your Last Name’, a simple three-chord song written and recored in August 2001. This was, I think, my first ever attempt at a narrative song, recounting a holiday non-romance from that summer.

The story itself was also quite simple. Again, this was the case of me liking a girl, but then not getting anywhere (I wonder what proportion of all songs have been written on this theme…). Unlike the tortured yearning-from-afar that underpinned ‘Breaking’, though, this was a far more lighthearted, fleeting affair. The whole story took place over the course of a few hours.

That summer, I was invited by my friend Andrew and his family to join them on their annual trip to France. The invite-a-friend strategy was Andrew’s parents’ attempt to get him, now 17 and having pretty much outgrown the family holiday, to come. Andrew himself was quite surprised (disappointed?!) when I accepted the invitation. The bulk of the vacation was spent at a resort in the south, where we spent most of our days at the pool and evenings drinking. Fairly standard, but enjoyable, holiday fun.

We had travelled by car, so the distance was definitely too much for a one-day journey. We stopped off for one night at a place near Paris on the way down and on the return trip, we stayed at the same place for two nights. The first of those nights, we got to know these two Dutch girls. They were both quite attractive, but somewhat aloof. There certainly weren’t any sparks flying for me anyway, so I didn’t pursue anything.

It was the second night at this place – the last night of the whole holiday – that the events depicted in the song unfolded. Andrew and I were in the bar, playing pool, something we did a considerable amount of on the trip (and in general, during that period of our lives). There was a Scottish family, who had just arrived, sitting at a table nearby. I noticed that the daughter of the family was about our age and was very cute. She also appeared to be a bit bored. I obviously needed to intervene. So, I headed over to the table and asked her if she wanted to play pool. I think I also spoke to her parents, explaining that she’d be in safe hands, etc.

In retrospect, this was a fairly ballsy move on my 17-year-old self’s part. I must have been at least tipsy at this point. Regardless, we weren’t seen as a threat (more likely seen as idiots) and she joined us for a game. She and I flirted a bit, although she did mention that she had a boyfriend back home. I’m not sure if the Dutch girls were around at this point. They may have been. There were definitely, however, two Danish guys who showed up and joined our little party. This kind of threw a spanner in the works, as they began to compete for her attention.

Did they have an edge? I’m not sure. I think the fact that I’d had a head start of an hour or so gave me a slight advantage. There was the hand-holding action to prove it! In the song I say “I stumbled just to hold [her] hand”, which sounds a bit too ridiculous to be true. Did I actually stumble? Stumble might be a bit of an exaggeration, but, yes, I did actually engineer some kind of slight tripping incident, which resulted in me grasping her hand for support. I know it was silly, but I was young – give me a break! I’m sure it was not at all as subtle or as smooth as I thought it was going to be and, ok, it was somewhat manipulative. But the important thing is that, in spite of the fake fall lasting a split-second, in spite of the Danish presence, even though I gave her every opportunity to relinquish the bond, she continued to hold my hand. And to slightly drunk 17-year-old me, that meant everything.

Ultimately, though, that one bit of physical contact did not lead to anything further. Our night was cut short when Andrew’s mother came to tell us we needed to get to bed soon as we had an early start the next morning. I may have placed the blame on this interruption at the time, but deep down I knew it was a lost cause. What went wrong? Well, the Danes were starting to gain more ground as the night went on. But, naturally enough, it was the boyfriend at home that was always there, standing in the way. In fairness to her, she did notify me of his existence early on in the evening – and shame on me for trying to get in there anyway. Still, I can’t say I wasn’t hopeful that something might happen.

Regarding the last name: no she didn’t tell me what it was. But I never asked, so that wasn’t a big deal. The song just needed some kind of lyrical hook! We didn’t exchange any details at all. I left her with the Danes and was gone early the next morning. That was that. I’ll I had was a lingering memory of holding her hand. And a first name, of course.

AND a photograph. The line in the song, “I took a picture of us both” – that happened. Well, I didn’t take the picture myself. Andrew probably did. It must be somewhere in my room in my mum’s house in Bray. I haven’t seen it in years. I should have looked for it for further research purposes when I was digging up the handwritten notes in these pictures. If I remember correctly, it’s the two of us sitting on a wall or fence, smiling. I think I might have had my arm around her shoulder (so there was more physical contact!).

As for the music… Well, let’s have a listen: 

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[download 'Never Knew Your Last Name' mp3]

As I said, it’s just three chords. Pretty simple stuff, although they were three 7th chords (ooh, fancy) and I used a capo on the guitar – the first song on which I used it, I believe. I don’t think anything more complex than that would have suited the song and probably would have ruined it.

There were a few other firsts on this song, too. It was the first song on which I used my (then brand new) ukulele. My friend Steven, whom I talked about in my post on Fugazi’s The Argument, got me into the whole uke scene. The uke definitely fitted in with/added to the playfulness in the song. This was one of the first songs I’d arranged where the bass part wasn’t just the root notes of the guitar chords. It was mostly improvised, too, including the little solo about a minute in, after the not-at-all-improvised guitar solo. I was quite pleased with how it turned out. Finally, it was the first song in which I’d attempted any kind of harmony vocals. I’ll admit the vocals were still pretty terrible, but at least I was trying to embellish them a bit!

I still quite like this song, even if it also acts as a reminder of how pathetic I was back then. It’s pretty cheesy, but it knows it’s cheesy and doesn’t shy away from it. It has a bounce to it. It’s fun. It has a ukulele in it! What’s not to like?!

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Welcome to Self-Restrospect, in which David looks back on and writes about music he has recorded, knowing that most people don’t really care about it, but secretly hoping that one or two might.

From summers 2001 to 2006, I maintained a site named davidsprojects. On this site I, put up almost every single bit of music I created in the “playroom” of our family home in Bray. In all, I think I put up about 180 tracks, consisting of original songs, experimental pieces, with a couple of covers thrown in here and there. The decision to end the site (in that form) was simply due to the fact that I was emigrating to Japan. So, on 20 June, 2006, I posted a goodbye message, along with a .zip file.  The .zip contained ten songs I had selected to represent the life of the site – the Projects compilation [which you can download here, if you wish!</plug>].

The ten songs are not very literally representative of the full body of work. Representing it accurately would probably have involved choosing a few more feedback collages and recordings of me wedging different household objects under the strings of electric guitars. No. Instead, the ten songs were, well, songs. They had structure, words and meaning. The music was quite unsophisticated in many ways, almost poppy in some. Hell, there was even some melody in a couple of these tracks! I suppose, in a way, compiling these songs was me hoping that, somewhere amidst all that messing about with alternate tunings and chains of effects pedals, I had managed to record some songs that people would actually want to listen to – perhaps even more than once.

The ten songs were arranged in chronological order. Track one was ‘Breaking’.

I wrote ‘Breaking’ – and recorded a now-lost version of it – on 11 April, 2001, almost ten whole years ago. It was not the first song I’d ever written. It wasn’t the first song I’d ever recorded, either. But it was possibly the first time I’d successfully captured what I was feeling in lyrics and music.

I suppose it helped that the feeling I had was quite a simple one. The phrase “unrequited love” makes it sound very grandiose and romantic. I was seventeen years old. I was not at all capable of grandiosity or romance. It was a lot more straightforward and adolescent than that: I fancied a girl. And there was absolutely zero indication of any possibility that she might have even slightly fancied me.

How did I feel that I could express these sorts feelings in a song? This was coming off the tail end of my Pixies obsession and during the beginnings of my Sonic Youth one. Considering both of those bands’ lyrical output, you’d find it hard to believe that they had been the inspiration. Up until that point, I was writing songs about forklift accidents, songs pretending that my friend from Limerick carried a knife around, songs mocking pretentious rock stars who thought they were great. I was more concerned with being wacky and obscure than about pouring my heart out.

There was, in fact, one key influence. Around this time I was in a sort of band. There were three of us: me; Bebhinn, a girl I knew from a summer camp I’d attended; and Chris, a guy I had been in Scouts with. We never played any gigs or parties. We never played in front of anyone, actually. We never had a name. The three of  us just got together for a jam once, enjoyed it, did it every weekend for a couple of months and then stopped.

Even though that all sounds incredibly unfocused and unproductive – and in many ways it was – I can’t understate how significant those sessions were in my “musical development”. The three of us were all very inexperienced when it came to playing, but with that came that naïveté and innocence that allowed us to explore quite freely. When you have no idea what the rules and conventions are, it’s a lot easier to break them.

Between the three of us we had quite a wide array of instruments, traditional or otherwise. We had drums, a bass, an electric guitar, a violin, a keyboard, turntables, a rain stick thing. We alternated among the instruments, though our default set-up ended up being Chris on drums, me on either guitar or bass and Bebhinn singing. Playing the sole tonal instrument was great. The guitar didn’t have to be in tune! As long as I kept in time with the beats, I was free to play anything. There was no need to worry about sticking to a key or complementing any other instruments. And Bebhinn was adept enough to sing over anything.

It’s funny. Later, I would learn about Beat Happening and fall in love with them and wish that I could be in a band that worked like them. But I kind of had been!

Hmm, I went off on a bit of a tangent there. What was relevant about my experience in our little trio was how it influenced me with regard to writing lyrics. As I said, it was usually Bebhinn who sang. When she did, she would sing about things that were personal and real. This was amazing to me. Revolutionary, even. Of course, the artists I had listened to growing up sung about things that were personal and real to them. But I didn’t know those people. They were distant and famous. Their personal and real feelings were on a different plane altogether. They were the folk who were able to pull off that whole grandiose and romantic thing. This was completely different. This was someone I knew. Who was in the same room as me. Singing about her own feelings.

I didn’t realize we could do that!

In one of those sessions, I came up with a set of lyrics for a song (called, at different points, ‘When She Talks To Me’ and ‘Miss Today’) that was a kind of precursor to ‘Breaking’. It was never fully completed and no serious attempt was made to record it. None of its words or phrases were carried forward to ‘Breaking’, but the subject matter (and subject) was the same.

Reading the lyrics to the song now, they are not quite as naked and raw as my 17-year-old self probably thought they were. There is a lot of hazy vagueness going on. And there’s that repeated use of the pronoun “it” as a dummy noun, which I’ve had issues with ever since I wrote it. Likewise, the one-word chorus always felt like a bit of a cop-out. But it, like the dummy its, fit and stuck. A few months later, on 21 August, when I came to record what would become the “canonical” version of the song, the lyrics were unchanged.

Wait, that’s a lie! The beginning of the second line of the second verse was changed! “(There’s) hidden answers…” became “I’m giving answers…”.

The chord progression and song structure did remain exactly the same. It was still based around four power chords – all played by barring the strings, which were in an open D5 tuning. As I said, this was the beginning of my Sonic Youth phase, which had huge implications for how I would tune my guitar(s) over the next couple of years. This tuning was quite tame: DADAAD.

The verses and “chorus” are quite mundane, really. The bit I’m most proud of was the bridge/middle 8 – something about its position in the song: before, rather than after, the second chorus; as well as the lead into it, where that one chord is held out before it slides up… works really well, I feel.

The original April recording was very bare. Two tracks of electric guitar (actually Bebhinn’s guitar, which I’d borrowed, not owning one at the time) and one vocal take. The August version went that one step further and stripped it down to just one guitar (my own new one) and one vocal:

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[download 'Breaking' mp3]

Listening to it now, one may be struck by the incredibly bad recording quality, or the lack of enthusiasm I appear to have had when singing the song. As such, one may question how I was able to choose it as one of my top ten songs of that time (“The rest must be terrible!”). One might also question how self-obsessed I must be to be able to write well over a thousand words about it.

I’m a bit concerned about that myself.

But in spite of its faults, I don’t believe the song itself is bad. And, again, although it wasn’t the first song I recorded, it was the first time I really put my true feelings about something personal – as trivial as that something might seem now – into music. This, I’m quite sure, is a decent enough reasons to consider it significant in the context of my modest musical history.

And so, till next time…

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