Mar 15 2012

Chasing Sunsets: New Indie Pop Song for Ads and Short Films

Posted in Indie Song, Pop Song, Rock Song No comments

Chasing Sunsets by benweldon


If you are on an iphone or an ipad, you can listen here:
http://benweldonmusic.com/music/chasing_sunsets.m4a

Someone once told me that the last 10% of any project is the portion that keeps most people from accomplishing that which they’ve set out to accomplish. That statement rings true with just about everything that I do musically. When I start a song, I am almost always able to record the main idea or hook of the song in an hour or two. As the song starts to develop around that main hook, the process slows down as I flesh out the details: the exact guitar sound, the perfect background synth, the most appropriate drum fill. These details are important and often give the song the atmosphere or a little something extra, but the meat of the song is in that initial idea. Everything else is simply gravy. These days, I’ve learned to catch myself when I’ve spent too long turning a knob an imperceptible amount, recording, listening, erasing, turning the knob another imperceptible amount, eating a sandwich, recording again, listening again, etc. This has helped immensely with me being able to complete projects before I’ve lost perspective. Chasing Sunsets is a great example. It has a number of garnish elements in the mix, but I didn’t let those additions take me too far from the initial idea and was able to finish the song in just a few sessions.

alaska sunset

Beautiful views like this one provided plenty of inspiration when writing Chasing Sunsets

 

The concept for Chasing Sunsets came to me when I was touring Alaska in September with Rose. Alaska was the last of the fifty states I needed to visit.  Naturally, I invite you to take a look at my Alaska photography from the trip. Because of the other projects I was working on at the time, I wasn’t able to start the tracking process until December and finished it up in February. I wrote and recorded the initial hook in one day. The rest of the song unfolded slowly over the following weeks. Writing Chasing Sunsets was especially tricky because as I was writing the song, I was simultaneously working on a short film comprised of footage I shot while in Alaska. I will be posting a link to the video next week. It’s a tricky thing trying to write a song to fit to footage that hasn’t been edited yet. I would essentially work on the song a bit, move to the video, return to the song, eat a sandwich, back to the video, etc. At six minutes, Chasing Sunsets is the longest song I’ve ever written and though I was wary of the length at first, I’m satisfied that it moves from section to section nicely and felt that shortening the song too much might strip away some of the character.  Enjoy the song and as always, please feel free to leave your comments below. Thanks!

UPDATE: I’ve just written a post that features my video Alaska in Fourteen Days.  I filmed and edited this video and cut the final version to my song Chasing Sunsets.

 

 

no comments

add a comment
link to this post
Feb 23 2012

New Pop/R&B Song for Ads or Short Films: You’ve Done Enough

Posted in Pop Song, R&B Song No comments

You’ve Done Enough by benweldon


If you are on an iphone or an ipad, you can listen here:
http://benweldonmusic.com/music/youve_done_enough.m4a

 

Inspiration can come at strange times. As is the case with a number of my friends in the artist community, I often find myself surprised by when and where an idea  comes to me. The idea for this song came to me while I was standing in line at a restaurant waiting for my coffee. Like a crazy person, I just kept singing the same line over and over as softly as possible (so as not to thoroughly creep out the people around me) and then had to ask for extra napkins so I could write down the lyrics before I forgot them. As is the case with a majority of my songs, the more I get written when the idea initially comes to me, the quicker the entire writing, recording, mixing process goes, and more importantly, the happier I am with the final product. When I don’t allow myself the time to overthink and overanalyze a song, it almost always ends up being a better experience for me. I can’t speak to whether or not the end product is actually a better song in those instances, as I tend to be way too close to my own work and thus not a good judge, but I am definitely more satisfied at the end.

The vibe of this song is a departure from other songs I’ve released by myself or in my bands, but is very much in line with the some of my favorite songs from other artists. Like Let It All Come Out, this is a slower tune that allowed me to push my pop sensibilities, though You’ve Done Enough has a more r&b sound and is slightly less straight pop. The lyrical concept for my songs are typically scattered. In fact, much of the time, as was the case here, a key line will pop into my head as a melody and then in order to flesh out the rest of the lyrics, I build the concept for the entire song around that line, applying the lyrics (often loosely) to some experience I or someone else has had. This trick helps keep me from obsessing about lyrics to the point where they become more important than the melody  (a songwriting faux pas as far as I’m concerned). This song started with the chorus line and I decided to write the lyrics about my wife Rose (at the time that I started working on this, she was my girlfriend). Rarely do I like to talk about the specifics of who or what a song is about (often because the lyrics are comprised of a mixture of different experiences and ideas instead of one single topic). In this case though, I thought she deserved the credit =) We ended up dancing to this song at our wedding this past year. Enjoy and as always I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section or on facebook!

no comments

add a comment
link to this post
Feb 10 2012

New Rock Song for Ads and Short Films: The Search Party

Posted in Indie Song, Pop Song, Rock Song No comments

Here is a link to my new song for short films and ads: The Search Party

The Search Party by benweldon

If you have an iphone or an ipad, you can listen here:

http://benweldonmusic.com/music/the_search_party.m4a

 

Certain songs stick in your head forever. Commercial and ad songs are the worst for me. Perhaps it’s because there is an added stimuli of a visual concept to go along with the music, but for some reason there are certain commercials that I am sure, I will be able to recall word for word on my death bed. Though there are quite a few commercials that fall into this category, The freecreditreport.com (now freecreditscore.com) series of commercials immediately spring to mind. I am obsessed with catchy melodies and those commercials definitely fit the bill. I had an opportunity to visit The Martin Agency in Richmond VA last year. The Martin Agency has had quite a few commercial series you would instantly recognize including Geico’s myriad of spokespersons and the UPS guy who drew on a white board. While at The Martin Agency, I was chatting with a few creative directors, I mentioned my love/hate relationship with the freecreditreport.com commercials and it turns out, one of the creatives I was talking to just happened to be the person who wrote the jingles for their freecreditreport.com commercials. This man was my jingle-writing hero and though I have on occasion cursed him as I found myself softly singing “free cause it’s how it oughta be my brother, credit cause you need a loan for one thing or another…” I was thrilled to be meeting him in person. I told him how impressed I was with his ability to take a fairly mundane concept and continually create catchy thirty second melodies and I was pleased that I got a chance to compliment his work as I’m sure he doesn’t get a lot of recognition for what he does. Interesting side note, the original freecreditreport.com band was actually a real band from Canada but the singer was lip-synching (quite obviously in some of the commercials). If you ever hear his thick French-Canadian accent in an interview, it would blow your mind.

I bring up catchy tunes that you can’t get out of your head, because my good friend and bass player in our band, Dan La Porta showed me pieces of this song, The Search Party, back in 2009. Unlike the previous song I posted, Let It All Come Out, this song is more typical of the types of songs we would write as a band. We worked on the song a little bit but before we could finish it, our band came to an end, relegating this song to the file cabinet in my head where every catchy tune I ever heard lives and occasionally sneaks out to drive me crazy. I’ve read that the solution to stop the endless loop caused by a song like this is to listen to the song in its entirety. Unfortunately, this song had no entirety, it was just bits and pieces that we’d worked on for a few weeks. So in an attempt to cure myself, and perhaps to share the melody with all of you, I decided to put the bits and pieces of this tune together. I especially love the use of the lyric “December 22” as I think that little quirk makes the melody even catchier. As with all the songs, that I am revisiting from a year or two ago, piecing this together took longer than it should have because I’ve already thought way too much about the song and am constantly second-guessing my instincts, but I’m happy with the final product. I’d love to hear your opinion in the comments below!

no comments

add a comment
link to this post
Jan 24 2012

New Indie Pop Song for Short Films or Ads: Let it All Come Out

Posted in Indie Song, Pop Song, Rock Song show hide 1 comment

Let It All Come Out by benweldon

If you have an iphone or an ipad, you can listen here:

http://benweldonmusic.com/music/let_it_all_come_out.m4a

 

Here is a link to a new indie pop song I just finished called Let It All Come Out. I actually started this song back in 2009 when my band (The Classic) was still together. A quick non-sequitir: When you have a band that is starting out, there is a constant struggle to find the balance between the type of “product” (for lack of a better term) you want to produce and the type of product that a fan base wants to “buy” (again, apologies for debasing my musical story with businessey metaphors). As an artist you want to create something that satisfies your artistic side while still satisfying the people who will be buying your albums, coming to your shows, and basically helping you make enough money to eat. In our case, we found that the best barometer for gauging the quality of our songs was our live show. Internet comments are great and make you feel warm and fuzzy inside for a few seconds, and of course they drive additional traffic to your music, (please note the comment section below) but there is no better way to evaluate your success than the visceral reaction a crowd gives off at a live show.

In the beginning, when were first learning how to write together and would audition new songs, we began to base our opinion of the song entirely on how it went over at a live show after we played it just once or twice. There were essentially two categories: The “that went over well” category or the less appealing “I think I heard crickets when we were done” category. Onstage, we had put together a live show that featured a frenetic mess of jumping around, microphone swinging, and call and response vocals that got the crowd singing along. It was no accident then, that our songwriting started to evolve to a point where the songs we stuck with were mostly upbeat, aggressive tunes with catchy vocal melodies as it was these types of songs that, when combined with our onstage antics, elicited the best reaction from our live audiences.

Meanwhile, despite our Pavlovian conditioning to write high-energy songs, we were each writing more diverse tunes that pulled from a wider array of musical interests and got pushed to the back burner. Though we didn’t think they fit with our “brand” (yikes! another business term) we still wrote them and sadly, squirreled them away for another time. Now that my life has stabilized somewhat (read: photography career, marriage, house-buying), I’ve wiped the dust off of about fifteen of these songs that I, or one of my band mates, had started over the past two or three years. They are all in various stages of done-ness. Some were simply a melody idea that I loved, where others are complete songs that I or we recorded demos of but never released and the song just needs some final touches. As I finish each song up, I will be releasing them here alongside the newer tunes I am currently working on.

Ok….and back to the present. So this song is called Let it All Come Out. As you can imagine from the title, the lyrics have to do with the damage that holding emotions in can do. I came up with the final bridge of the song first and wanted to develop an arrangement that built into that bridge. It’s rare that I can write a tune whose arrangement and lyrics are so well aligned and perhaps that is why I have a special affection for this song. The verse and chorus went through about five different tempo changes (for non musicos, the tempo is the speed of the song), and if the final version included all the instruments I incorporated at one time or another as I was working on this song, you would probably need multiple orchestras. Fortunately for you (and my computer ‘s processor), I culled the number of instruments down to exactly what the song needed and nothing more. A quick thank you to former Polymer/The Classic bandmates Bryan Hassell, Matt Fonda, and Dan La Porta whose guitar and bass playing (respectively) saved me hours of recording. Enjoy! (and since I have no live audience, I’d love to hear what you think via that comment section below!)

show hide 1 comment

add a comment
link to this post

© 2013 benweldonmusic | ProPhoto Photography Theme by NetRivet