My Best Work (In My Dreams)

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The line “I do my best work in my dreams!” had been kicking around on scraps of paper, with various rejoinders scribbled in the moment, waiting for inspiration to strike.

Although life’s too short to wait for inspiration, a couple of things happened that prompted me to get started seriously on this.

The first thing was, a wonderful old 1960s pop song came on the radio: “Bend Me Shape Me” by the American Breed. The chorus is, of course for a sixties chart hit, sing-along catchy, but the verses are as well, and the chord changes are interesting. The verse chords are all major, a block of four repeating C, Eb, F to Bb. This sequence in itself is really catchy, but then the the vocal melody hits an E flat over the C major chord just before it changes to the E flat major chord - a beautiful major-minor dissonance that acts as a leading tone, and to my ear this is very hooky.

I decided I was going to use those chords (in a different sequence) and somehow use that hooky Eb-over-a-C major in my new melody.

Singing and jamming over those chords gave me a tune for my title lyric. I cobbled together some placeholders and then finished the chorus with “But I really wanna wake up in your dreams”. I noticed something interesting - the notes making up the first and last lines of the chorus melody were A#, A, G# and G. Just four notes, a chromatic run, each a semitone apart from its neighbour. The God of Semitones had smiled on me again!

Then the second thing happened: I watched (for the second time in maybe 15 years) Lenny Bernstein’s Harvard lectures from 1973 where he discusses his theories about a musical grammar or language facility that he believed was innate in humans. This was based on his reading of the the theories of the linguist Noam Chomsky.

At times during these lectures, he sits down at a grand piano and rattles off a musical piece that illustrates a point he is making (these bits are pure gold!).

But then he goes on to analyse works by a few great composers, in terms of his theories, and what struck me was how some very large complex works have, at their very core, just a handful of notes, transformed by certain rules of structure and semantics.

So I went back and looked at those four notes I had at the core of my tune, and applied some of these so-called transformations. The results were surprising and fascinating. For example: the opening 16 bars of the track act as a signpost for the chorus melody, but they do so in half-time, and back-to-front. Then, in the ‘middle eight’ (AKA ‘the bridge’), and again at the outro, there is a hypnotic, cascading guitar riff in 16ths consisting only of those four notes. In other places, the semitonal movement between these notes is used to create interesting major-minor dissonances.

What was exciting about this process, as the song grew and took shape, was that I would never have arrived at some of these parts with my usual songwriting procedures.




MCM on BANDCAMP 


MCM on SPOTIFY


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