International

Concept

Album

Month

All this traveling, over all this water...time to capture the vibes.  This project will unify around the theme of nautical and island travel, with songs inspired (in part) by a 2024 songwriting workshop on a tall masted sailing ship in the Hebrides Islands, with ocean stops in Reunion, Madagascar, Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore.

Mission accomplished, and within the standard guidelines as far as I can tell.  I revised one song, "Your Shores Are Calling Me Home" by making significant edits to lyrics I had written a couple of years earlier.  Similarly, I revised a song that in February I completed for a FAWM song challenge, and expanded the lyrics and the instrumental break for InCoAlMo.  Finally, my sole instrumental was also recorded in February for FAWM and fit my concept album for March so I included that as well (Dream Galloping in Donegal).  There are a couple of new (to me) sonic experiments this time around and I suppose they offer some contrast and texture.

In the Portuguese language, an important and inscrutable word dominates part of the national psyche -- "saudade."  While there is no exact counterpart in the English language, "saudade" refers to a deep sense of wistful longing, soaked in yearning and melancholy.  "Several Songs of Longing" will explore various traditions and experiences of our collective urge to seek, while never quite finding, an emotional desire just beyond our reach.

This was a good opportunity for me to develop some ideas around memory and loss that I've been studying recently and finding to be interesting.  I borrowed two melodies from songs that I wrote for FAWM the previous month, reworking them lyrically to fit the theme for the InCoAlMo album.  One other song, "Solastalgia," was largely written during the winter, and I re-wrote it and set it to a different arrangement for this album.  I also took a basic guitar riff that I used for a FAWM song two years ago and expanded it into the song "Samba Sung Blue" (the title of which is sort of a play on words regarding the old Neil Diamond song "Song Sung Blue").  If anyone listens to this album and as a result decides to check out Portuguese fado music on their own, the effort in making this collection will have been worth it.

This will be a concept album inspired by, and making reference to, my second trip to Aotearoa New Zealand -- this most recent trip having been a 30 day excursion in the Fall of 2022.  I attempted to write some lyrics while there, but they are currently on the shelf.  I imagine there will be a fair amount of nature imagery in the songs supporting this project.

I believe I adhered to The Rules again this year.  There is a chord progression throughout "Queenstown Farewell" that mirrors the Van Morrison song "Ancient of Days," but it's not a complete rip of the melody and lyrically of course it is different.  I rewrote and repurposed "Lean In" which is a song I wrote after a trip to another island, but it has new lyrics appropriate to this new album, so it meets the Rule in place for composing the majority of the album in March.  All the recording was done in March, using my still primitive understanding of GarageBand.  I've been in something of a creative funk as regards songwriting for a number of months now, so this effort was more perspiration than inspiration -- although the 2022 extended trip to Aotearoa New Zealand was plenty inspirational.  As always, I'm grateful for the chance to participate in this yearly event.

Starting in 1960, on a black and white television, I started watching -- and loving -- the Vikings.  Reruns of movies like "The Vikings" (1958) and "The Long Ships" (1964), followed by the TV serial "Tales of the Vikings" (1959) taught me how to play, with imagination and an attention to detail, as a Viking warrior child.  I never recovered!  This album will explore my "Viking Dreams," with an hommage to these television roots, through a lifelong obsession with the Vikings and their adventures, and my eventual travels to Iceland and Scandinavia in search of Viking museums and inspiration.

I have some mixed feelings about this year's record, but overall I'm pleased with my effort.  The negative first:  (1) I don't record very much in general, so I needed to relearn the basics of Garage Band once gain.  So, even though I used GB last year for InCoAlMo, having forgotten how to use it, it was all new to me again; (2) I was on track to use the whole month for the project, but some emergency travel plans had me leaving my stuff from March 14-31, so I decided to push hard and get it done by March 14.  So...yeah...rushed! (3) Probably a weak excuse, but I got sick around March 10, and completed two songs with really froggy vocals at the last second, around March 13.  Yes, I can go back and fix these -- my stuff is on Bandcamp, so it is easy to fix if I want -- I'm just not sure I want to go backwards at this point.

On the positive front, I think I realized my "concept" fairly well, with all the songs reinforcing my Viking Dreams and aspirations.  I also really like singing a few of the songs, which is always nice.  There are some in there that I will be adding to my current rotation for open mics, etc.  My research led me to learn more than I was aware of previously about certain parts of the Viking sagas.  In reviewing old movie reviews of films like "The Vikings" and "The Long Ships," I found that my infatuation with these movies was largely around the action and the costumes, and less on the silly plot lines.  Not exactly a revelation, but it helps me understand how some who watched those movies might have experienced sub-standard Hollywood entertainment, while impressionable, aggressive kids in inner city Buffalo, New York might have experienced them quite differently.

Finally, I'm grateful to Joe and to this InCoAlMo group for the chance to dive deeply into these kinds of projects, stumble through how to record the damn things, and otherwise get inspired by not only my own activities here but by what the rest of you come up with.  I don't spend much time with Discord, but I do pay attention to your work, and my listening is the better for it.  So, thanks all!

A salute to several records that changed my life and how I think about living.

I enjoyed this album challenge.  It was the first time I forced myself to (1) think about recording an entire collection of music in album format, and (2) posting it to Bandcamp for others to check out.  It is highly unlikely I would have pushed this project through to completion in the absence of the InCoAlMo challenge.  My skills in both music performance and recording are quite primitive, and I scratched the surface of what GarageBand can do in creating this album project.  I'll likely participate again, because the challenge forces me to concentrate time and attention on these things that otherwise I appear to lack the self-discipline to engage with left to my own slovenly devices.