#1 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
How I approach names
Someone asked about how I come up with names, specifically in the absence of lyrics.
When I save a project on my computer I have to give it a name, but that almost never sticks. It’s usually just reaching for some random association from what’s happening in the day and honestly might be influenced by things like “man, I keep saving files with names starting with G, let’s not.” Maybe surprisingly, Also, title track of my last album was one of the exceptions – it was just a quick project name on the day that slowly grew to fit the music. Which leads me to the fact that often I find an after-the-fact justification for how a name fits.
I have zero memory where the phrase “patience and glue” came from, but it was on my list of possible names and I invented a way it made sense. This track took forever to reach its final form, with elements coming from different places and times (years!). This kind of matching of name to music could be about the resulting music, the process to get there, or just some intuition that this goes with that.
Ridiculously, this project was saved as “eggs for my evening meal”, a spoken phrase I sampled off a tape probably 30 years ago, but which clearly stuck in my head. At the time I probably thought it would be like something Aphex would have in a track. It has nothing to do with this one.
Isn’t it about a Taiwanese soy drink, though?
An old friend sent me a phone recording that I dragged and dropped into this track early on. It’s a guy on a 2-stroke motorbike inviting you to buy the classic soy milk drink “dao hui” (Taiwanese / Fujianese pronunciation of 豆漿).
You can first hear it from just after 1 minute into the final track, but it’s pretty buried under electronic squelches. I like it best almost as a background detail.
If you read this and have a weird voice note on your phone, feel free to send it my way!
Anyway, eggs? Soy milk? Something a bit queasy-making about it all. I didn’t want the name to be food related – depends on your attitudes to glue, I guess.
This track started with the chords
I think, before the vocal sample, this song started with me pushing myself to make something I liked with a chord progression that’s not strictly diatonic harmony (all in one key – think only white keys on a piano, as an example).
I’m a clicker, as I’ve heard AG Cook / PC Music put it. Mostly I make my tracks with (computer) keyboard and mouse, drawing notes on screen. Nowadays touch screen comes in a bit more. In this way of working it is so, so easy to pick (or identify mid-way in) one key and build everything from there. Heaps of great music, including many pop songs, actually doesn’t do this. If done successfully, a normal human won’t find it weird at all. I think the techniques I ended up using make the track more “pop” than when I just hover about on a single chord or two (pretty classic ambient moves) and that might have contributed to being uneasy with early drafts of it – but also partly why I felt like it was an album opener.
Modal interchange
So the main chords, right at the start and through most of it, are I’d say in B. Maybe the relative minor, because I’m playing the same note (G#) in the bass under every chord. It starts on a C#m7 which isn’t the tonic of either.
The simple bit where I deviate from the key is at the end of the phrase, where I go for an Em7. It should be a major chord to stay in key and especially with that minor 7 on top it’s introducing two notes that are not in the scale we’ve been in.
Apparently this is called modal interchange and is a very Beatles move.
Then I briefly play the opening chord again at the very end of the phrase, so we’re back to the opening C#m7. This descent of the same chord shape down a minor third (E->C#) is pretty easy on the ears, for some reason.
Bass pedal with a chromatic descent
In the bass, having been pedalling along on G#, I descend chromatically on the last two chords – G under Em7, F# under C#m7. Again, this kind of stepping down by semitones is strangely accessible. And both of these notes are the 3rd note of the respective chords, which might make it sound easier too.
How much was I thinking about this stuff while I was working? Actually, in this case, probably a lot. Other times I fall back to theory only when I’m stuck and reaching for tools to get me unstuck.
Defensively, I’ll say it might seem very robot meep-morp dry to start a piece of music with this kind of formal puzzle or challenge, but that might also be why I filed the thing for a couple of years, because I want to be confident I really enjoy the results too.
A take from 2022
I’ve said this track sat for ages. (I think super normally) I hold on to tracks until I think I’ve got enough that fit together as one release. So when I do release an album the music on it was written over 2 to 3 years – some will be older than most of the material on the album that came before, and so on.
Just for curiosity’s sake, here’s how this track sounded when I thought it was done in 2022. I didn’t love it, but revisited it in 2024 and reworked it – and now I’m happy.
Yeah I played with the sounds and such a fair amount, but the main change to my ears is that the descending piano riff does the same thing over and over and over. In the 2024 version I basically muted most of it, unmuting different bits each time around, so it’s just picking out occasional notes. It never plays that whole descending line intact.
2022 piano, from when it first comes in:
2024 piano, from when it first come in: