#songwriting
i wrote a song about escaping reality
Full Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40ozF7LTj3c
i wrote a song about ghost pirates ☠️
youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SarGiFkbpFo
i wrote a song about two friends falling in love
youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAehy7GXIw
i wrote a song about my insecurities
full song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx59mZIixWk
i wrote a song about my insecurities
full song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx59mZIixWk
Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 3: Stop Time
Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 3: Stop Time
https://soundcloud.com/matilda-t-zombiequeen/stop-time
Song 17
Another surprise from May. I remembered writing this song about the park near my house when I was growing up. When my brother was a toddler, one of the first times he had a babysitter who wasn’t me (there was a family wedding), he was riding one of the metal horses backwards, and when he hopped off, it popped up and slammed him in…
Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 2: Liar’s Song
Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 2: Liar’s Song
https://soundcloud.com/matilda-t-zombiequeen/liars-song
Song 16
So this is also from back in May. Looking at my notebook, I had no idea what the assignment was, but digging back through emails, it was “Three verses and a chorus (or refrain)—NO BRIDGE.”
I hate writing bridges, so it seems as though I ought to have had a great time with this, but the notebook says otherwise. I started with a…
Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 1: Grand Scheme of Things
Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 1: Grand Scheme of Things
https://soundcloud.com/matilda-t-zombiequeen/grand-scheme-of-things
Song 15
So this is from way back in May, when I lost the thread of putting up these recordings and writing about writing.
This was the first song of a new session, and we watched an interview with Joni Mitchell talking about the emotions that chords evoke and we did a bunch of listening exercises to examine what emotional…
Write the Year 2022—Week 17: Stumbling In
Write the Year 2022—Week 17: Stumbling In
This is very glurgey and based on a self-prompt from a somewhat unexpected place.
Title: Stumbling InWC: 1000
At the risk of giving the impression that I do nothing but ineffectually stalk Paul F. Tompkins via his sadly defunct podcasts, I’ve been working my way through Spontaneanation. It’s kind of an evolution of the Pod F. Tompkast—it starts with a wonderfully rambling monologue, and it’s…
Write the Year 2022—Week 07: Tompkastawayed
Write the Year 2022—Week 07: Tompkastawayed
Title: TompkastawayedWC: 1100
I’m giving myself permission to ramble this week. I’m sort of giving myself permission to ramble. I just spent fifteen minutes trying to search WordPress to see if I have already rambled about something I want to ramble about. WordPress, a supporter of the ramble, it seems, will. not. be. searched.
Some time ago I was watching Chuck as my background show. This is…
These are the 100 thinkers—ranging from James Brown to Walter Benjamin—whose work and passion has changed the world as we know it.
Post link
When I’m working on new songs I’m always recording on the off chance I play a tune I like by mistake like this when I am working something out so I can do it on purpose the next time. That new intro melody was not what I sat down to write today lol
//Letters to YVYNYL//
Frail Jonny “What Happened to Your Coat”
/ Being connected to your own mind and remembering to feel through listening above seeing has shown to be fruitful for me. Perhaps that’s why it’s often one small tip they give you in meditation classes. When I’m listening to Johnathan Peter Wright’s music, I can grasp the deliberation of these sentiments that he feels through his music. Then I watch this video and think of, well, death. But in a funny way, it’s kind of comforting.
Dear Mark,
I’m here in a house in the mountains of Asheville, NC, lying on a bedroom floor with the afternoon light streaming in, and I’m confused. I’m confused about the way a single life can be divided and fractured into its chapters.
I’m confused about the way that the past simultaneously lives into the present and falls away into an untouchable, unreachable place. I’m confused about the future, and how it somehow stays future and never comes toward us.
It’s not that I always dislike confusion. Last year I finished a graduate degree in film studies up in Toronto, and my topic of research was the experience of confusion in film viewing. I loved it.
On blustery fall days, I loved taking apart films that puzzled me with their discontinuities and mismatches. But this year confusion is burdensome. It’s all-encompassing and too close to home. My stomach tenses and my vision tunnels when my mind begins to race.
Sound is confusing too, but a different kind of confusing. Recently, I’ve been closing my eyes at regular intervals in order to reduce my obsessive reliance upon sight and focus instead on other senses. When I do this, I’m thrown into a different space, swirling with dots and filled with sound. I listen and try to place each sound source. Still, it doesn’t feel like quite the same world.
Yes, being in the dark is different than reaching out with the endless arm of sight. But the swirling of shutting my eyes has a strange comfort to it because there is the possibility of accepting all that you don’t and can’t know. Accepting that you might never come to know it. And this is where music comes in: as the form of the invisible, as the acceptance of the ungraspable. To burrow down into a ringing tone, whether playing it or listening to it, is to cut away all that visual reaching. You don’t need to reach in order to hear. All you need to do is receive.
Over the past year I’ve been dealing with some things (ha! an understatement for most of us), things both from the past and the future. These things get muddled and mixed into the present, and pretty soon all my tenses are shot to bits. In those times, when I’ve picked up a guitar, or a violin, or stooped at the piano, and closed my eyes and pressed into the instrument, there was a release. A tearing free of the things I know and want to know and feel that I need to know.
This is not some gnostic tearing free from the body, but tearing free from the visual structures that surround me like ghostly cities, the visual mausoleum of the past, the half-abstract visualization of a multitude of futures, and the disembodied flashes of internet wastelands.
Music can cut through this. For months I struggled along, battling a simple dichotomy of sight/knowledge/desire and sound/ release/ acceptance. And I’ll probably continue the battle for years to come because I don’t see an easy way out of this predicament. Giving up on the former seems pragmatically impossible, and giving up on the latter sounds to me like signing myself over to self-destructive drives.
Music is what has given some ballast to my swaying ship. Because even in the darkness of sound, there is form. And while there may not be a strict right or wrong in the world of music, taste, balance, pattern, and movement act as guiding lights.
All this sounds conceptual, I’m sure. Maybe you’re thinking, “what does any of this have to do with your actual music, the music you share?” What I’ve been telling you is the story of the music, one of its stories. Here’s another way to tell it: I went into a room day after day, night after night, and made noises while sitting on the floor while pacing while lying down. These noises I then recorded. These recordings I shaped. These shapes I call songs. These songs, together, I call an EP, Afterlives, Vol. 1. Which is the truer story? Listen for yourself, what do you hear?
I hope this music gives something to you.
Sincerely,
Frail Jonny
…
Support YVYNYL, an independent music project here! Got a story to tell? Submit it to Letters to YVYNYL.
//Letters to YVYNYL//
ALMA“#naturanaturans”
/ While they’re touching dream pop in other tracks, this raw statement of a song comes off a lot like a new Mountain Man poem (who, coincidentally, released a new single covering Fiona Apple’s “Not Knife” on the same weekend). Musicians Alba S. Torremocha, Lillie R. McDonough, and Melissa Kaitlyn Carter have put together all the feelings about “put down your phone” in one lovely folky song. Here’s a little bit about how and why they made it.
Dear Mark,
We are a dream pop trio based in NYC - usually. The pandemic has separated us and we’re releasing our debut album during a time that is anything but usual. We’ve released our entire album behind the computer screen and via social media. It’s wonderful to have this privilege, but it also hurts. Not being able to be the social human beings that we are. Not being able to hug, to touch, to sing together and find the harmonic waves on our chest. That hurts.
Our newest single, #naturanaturans is tied to this experience. It’s a DIY anthem about the trials and tribulations of social media. Directly translated as “nature doing what nature does,” it explores the irony of how our natural choice is to not be natural when we have the chance, and how we lose ourselves in the scroll shaping our identities based on how others see us online.
The song came to one of us while we were chilling at home, scrolling through instagram. A targeted ad popped up, using female empowerment and body positivity prompts to sell… well, a corset. It was equally hilarious and infuriating to think that they didn’t even see the irony behind this choice. Just another attempt to make us feel like we should choose to be unnatural, no matter how painful or pointless. And that somehow we’re being empowered by doing so.
We started working on this project a year ago, before the pandemic. We wanted a song to perform live that would allow us to be truly raw and natural — just us, our bodies and our voices. #naturanaturans at its core invites us to feel into our own inherent completeness that exists beyond all of the likes, comments, and follows. There’s nothing that this song is without and the same is true for us as human beings. Then the pandemic hit and the song became the quintessence of ironic karma: we created a song to connect at a raw level, to be together, and suddenly we could only see each other through a screen.
For us, music IS medicine, you don’t need to purposely use it as such. It’s like going to sleep every night: you know you need it, and you don’t want to see what happens if you stop doing it.
With Appreciation,
Melissa + ALMA
Support YVYNYL, an independent music project here!
Got a story to tell? Submit it to Letters to YVYNYL.
//Letters to YVYNYL//
Ian Steinberg - Feeling the Light
/ A lot of people who read this blog seem to fall into a certain amorphous group of individuals. Many, if not most, are people who are looking to use songwriting as a method of healing, grace, and purpose. Ian is an artist who sent me his music last year around this time and I’m just now getting to publish some bits of a record he put out online in the spring of 2019. Now, he’s worked on some new stuff from his base in Vermont. It is a piece he recorded in what appears to be his pretty chill bedroom. Have a listen while you read the inspiration in his letter below.
Hi Mark!
The best way to sum up my experience with music is with the famous quote by Nietzsche: “Without music, life would be a mistake.” For me, it is not so much a matter of why I do music, rather than I must.
I’m not sure I would be able to find life enjoyable without my personal pursuit of music. The sense of purpose it fills me with is a sustaining force. That is part of why I write, to fill an ineffable part of my existence that otherwise would be lacking. At least, that is how I’ve viewed most of my experience. However, as a part of my healing process, I’ve been able to find a lot of joy outside of my own work and recognize the love that is around me, which has been extremely helpful.
Songwriting itself is also a healing process. Beyond processing my thoughts and experiences through lyrics, it gives me the space to get my emotions out in a constructive manner. Songwriting, and performing more specifically, connects me with other people’s experiences as well, allowing me to process my grief by listening to others’ stories when they approach me after shows or write to me. I hope that it gives those who hear my music the space to do that as well.
My name is Ian Steinberg, a Burlington, Vermont based indie-folk singer-songwriter. I’m writing to you to share a new song I wrote for my Tiny Desk submission as well as the last album I made that carries great significance to me called “Guidance.” Entirely written, produced, recorded, and mixed by me, “Guidance” is a true indie product, with a clear arch and catchy melodies.
A quick note about “Guidance:” The album is the aural journey of my descent into and rise out of depression. It takes place over the course of many years and catalogs my emotional states and experiences in song form.
While I would prefer not to dive too deep into some of the stories behind this, as it’s pretty painful to discuss, even with close friends, I will try to provide some insight into the journey that the songs layout.
The album is collected into four blocks of songs all separated by instrumental (ish) interludes. The first block is three songs that lay out some of the fundamental causes of my unhappiness, including substance abuse, loss of love, and a sincere self-doubt built upon a lack of confidence. The tone of the songs are relatively light, but the lyrical content shows how I truly feel in those moments. The songs express an ability to put on a façade of cheerfulness while internally processing difficulties.
The next block, starting with “Pieces…Pieces…” is the true descent. A shift in tone and content, this block of songs shows some of the most difficult times in my life. “And Now…” (video live from the Wishbone CollectiveinWinooski, Vermont) describes the loss of one of my best friends to a drug overdose. “How Can Our Fathers” describes my dealing with what, for lack of better terms, was a betrayal by my dad (just a note that we have a good relationship and that this song is processing, not a lingering resentment).
The third block, beginning with “Stuck Inside the Water Basin,” is my realization that I need help. That I can’t be alone in this struggle any longer. The realization that I am loved. This in some ways was much more difficult to write than the previous section, because it is relinquishing a sense of independence and the idea I can figure it out on my own. The block contains the eponymous song of the album, and how I’m pleading for guidance, needing help. "One Foot One Knee" is an ode/anthem/chant to perseverance and recognition that we need to move one foot in front of the other.
The last section starts with “Fatima.” This contains a passage from Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” when the main character sees the love of his life for the first time. This is a bridge between a sense of destiny/place in “One Foot One Knee,” to processing losing what I thought was the love of my life in “At the Risk of Coming Off as Trite.” The last song, “Sunshine,” is a message of thanks, and that I’m working through this still, and that I’m grateful for the things around me despite my mental state.
I guess maybe I dived deeper into it than I was expecting, but I hope you enjoy listening with this context.
I’ve also released a video of me and my lead guitarist performing the track “And Now…” live from The Wishbone Collective in Winooski, Vermont.
Thanks for your time and consideration. I hope you enjoy the album!
Best,
Ian
Support YVYNYL, an independent music project here!
Got a story to tell? Submit it to Letters to YVYNYL.
Fear
Is this the fear
that I never be the same again?
And I’m so scared
That all my demons take my place
History repeats itself.
Damn this fear
Makes me do some things I can’t take back
I’m afraid Time’s still a thief
Of all we never did right
~‘Cause the time steals all chances to make things right~
Tears make me see in red
And every good choice just fades away.
Keys in my knuckles, let’s pray they won’t choose to stay
Save your breath, don’t talk if you have nothing good to say.
we love ourselves so much
we can’t believe in it all
and we give up our own intuition
I’m dreaming of a place
that I can exhale into
breathe into
find my own self that’s intact
that won’t fall through the pieces of mind
give me peace on a shrine
give me some kind of artifact
that’s pretty and
ancient
too delicate
to keep in my home
in a box
out of sun
to never see
it again
that’s what we do with our things
to preserve
then forget
what is inside our boxes
and inside our homes
bulldoze it all
and just start over again
it’s all impermanence
We recently released our song Driving Song - the opening track from our EP - as a single on Triple J Unearthed! ✨ Hit the link to stream, leave a review or grab yourself a free download. We hope it makes you dance as much as it does for us!
