Stuck

About a year ago, not all that long after the release of Deathly Hallows, I was on a four-hour bus ride, in the dark, just listening to my iPod, when one of the songs on my playlist suddenly grabbed me. It was “Till it Happens to You” by the beautiful Corinne Bailey Rae. I knew instantly I wanted to filk it, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

Literally within minutes I had changed her chorus “It used to be like heaven / Used to feel like May / I used to hear those violins playing heart strings like a symphony / Now they’ve gone away / Nobody wants to face the truth / But you wont believe what love can do / Till it happens to you” into “I’m only one of seven / Only one of many / I can’t believe that you could possibly notice me beside Harry / And so I’ve gone away / And now I feel like such a fool / ˜Cause I don’t know what I’d do / If something happened to you”. It’s a song about Ron, when everything is getting a bit too much for him in Deathly Hallows. Under the influence of the locket Horcrux all his insecurities suddenly hit him like a sledgehammer: he’s never been good at anything, he’s never been special, he can’t hold a candle to Harry, and now they’re wandering aimlessly in the wilderness, he’s cold and he’s hungry, he feels left out of the bond Hermione has with Harry and he just wants to go home.

Before the end of the bus trip I could hear what I wanted the final product to sound like in my head and it didn’t take me too much longer to get the rest of the words down too. I even went ahead and started to record it quite soon after I got home. It was all going swimmingly until suddenly… I got stuck! Terribly, hopelessly stuck. No matter what I try, I just can’t go on. It is highly frustrating. I seem to have hit a major snag. You see, the problem is that even while still on the bus, before I could go on the internet to try and source a backing track, I decided to make this one an a capella filk.

Whatever possessed me.

You know, I’ve done it before, making an entirely vocal filk. Twice, even, though one doesn’t really count: “Chasing the Dream” was my first a capella filk, but I just copied Messrs Crosby, Stills and Nash. They’d already done the arrangement, I just added lyrics. Not that I am any less proud of that one, on the contrary. I even won a Filky award for it! But I didn’t actually do anything out of the ordinary for it, except just sing three different parts. No, what I mean is completely making your own arrangement, which is what I have done once before with “Out in the Cold“.

I had never really intended to make an a capella filk. In fact, before Bandersnatch did his “Prophecy” I had never even thought of it as a possibility. And even when I heard Prophecy, I never once thought “I can do this!” ’ no ma’am, most certainly not. That just seemed way outside of my capabilities. My musical talents have never stretched beyond just copying what someone else has already done, be it Bach, Bernstein or Buckingham (Grieg, Gershwin or Gilmour?). Making a whole new vocal arrangement for a song is too much like actually writing music, and that should be left to the professionals (though remind me to try and get to Stevie Nicks’s bedside should she ever die ’ I want to be there to absorb all that talent that would be re-released into the wild). No, not a bone in my body believed that making a vocal arrangement would be anything I could do. Until one day I happened to run into one of those awful situations of having a finished filk and no backing track.

Who could have ever guessed that there are any Carole King songs out there for which there are NO karaoke versions available! And the song I had filked was even on her Tapestry album ’ all the songs from Tapestry must surely be karaoke standards! Yeah¦ well¦ maybe not the bonus track that was added to the 1999 re-release of the album. So there was nothing left for me to do but attempt to do a Bandersnatch (yes, that is an official filking term, so you know) and just sing the whole blasted thing.

Problem was, I literally had no idea what I was doing, or how to approach it. The only thing I knew was that I have quite good “isolated hearing” as I call it, which I have always used to pick out harmony lines from a song. I “scan” the music with my ears until I find the sound I’m after, for example he bottom line of some harmonies, and then I focus on that sound, that voice, and follow it with my ears, trying to exclude anything else. Usually, the top harmony line is quite easy to hear, and the bottom one often is relatively simple too. The middle line I can’t always pick out by listening, but then I just make that one up ’ it’s all to do with basic chords. It may take a couple of attempts, but when you have had some musical education and have a little bit of feeling for it, you will know when it sounds right. I’m sure I am over-simplifying it, but as I have had some musical education, it does seem pretty straightforward to me. A chord is a chord.

So I decided that, in stead of just focusing on a human voice, I could maybe do the same for the guitar, the piano, the bass. And lo and behold, that actually worked! Ok, so I was still just copying the music, but still, at least I was a whole orchestra. It was a mighty messy process, mind you. Not to mention amateurish as anything. It wasn’t as if I could just go and sing the entire rhythm guitar part for a whole verse start to finish. Good grief no. I could do about four bars at a time, tops. Sometimes only two. I would listen to a small section of the song over and over until I had picked out one line of one instrument for that section, and then I quickly recorded it. Then I’d go on to the next line of that instrument, then the next instrument, and the next, until I had covered all my bases for those four bars. And then I’d move on to the next bit. I quickly realised I was better off copying and pasting all those little segments into just a hand full of tracks because before I had even finished the intro Audacity already threatened to crash on me.

But messy, amateurish, clumsy and labour intensive or not, the end product actually sounds like I just got a group of singers together and we sing the whole thing start to finish in one go. Not that a close harmony group would be able to actually sing this together all that easily¦ unless there’s about fifteen of them, each singing a different part¦

So, my confidence bolstered by my previous success, and believing I now knew what I was doing, in my own awkward way, I had been keeping my eye out for the next song I could… um… rearrange. The Corinne Bailey Rae song seemed the perfect option. Especially at the start of the song, all the instruments are quite easy to discern individually, and on that bus ride I had already figured out the intro and a bit of the first verse. And I was going to be systematic this time, too. In stead of having five million tracks of little segments of unidentifiable instruments I was going to have three tracks for the “Hammond”, three for the “guitar”, three for the harmonies and one for the lead, and that was it. Clean, tidy, organised. And I started off quite nicely, too. I did the intro, did the whole first verse, half of the chorus¦ and then I hit my snag. Somehow I can’t figure out what to do next. The mojo’s gone. I just can’t seem to wrap my ears around it! Whatever I try, it sounds rubbish. I am completely, utterly stuck. Every so often I will open my Audacity project again and give it another try, but to no avail. I am beginning to think “Out in the Cold” was just beginners luck. Maybe it helps when you don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know.

Anyway… Maybe one day I’ll finally manage it. Maybe I’ll one day get my mojo back and nail it. Here’s hoping. Or maybe this is another thing I’ll just have to leave to the people who really know what they’re doing.