Southward - Original Instrumental/Idea Generation (2008)
This song started as three separate songs. (2008)
Believe it or not, as dark as the intro is, I came up with it while practicing a song I was asked to play on the piano at church.
The second movement/main part was originally a reggae song idea I came up with while playing around on the keyboard in highschool band while everyone else was out practicing marching (I played bass guitar and did not march). It was originally in G minor, a much slower tempo, and intended for guitar.
The bridge portion was just another chord progression idea / an experiment in changing keys from relative major to relative minor (in this case Eb major to C minor). I later realized that I could change the key of the reggae song idea to Cm and all three parts would work together as one cohesive song with 3 different movements. (again, I was in band at the time and was trying to really push my knowledge of music theory to write stuff with techniques from classical music).
So, I ended up with this song concept. I had some melodic ideas and kept hearing the words "I'm heading southward" in my head to accompany the melody. I didn't really know what direction I wanted to go with the lyrics. A few months later, I started college, anytime I had a bad night at the bar, the emotions of this track really resonated with me. I eventually came up with some lyrics and a fairly cinematic video concept that was rather dark, yet vulnerable and honest. I even cleaned up some of the harmony, added a prechorus, and recorded a demo with vocals. I tried recording the vocals a few times, but could never get them to sound good. That plus the video concept being way too ambitious to actually film and the nature of the lyrics feeling too exposed, I kinda just burried this song.... idk might use it one day.. might not... learned a lot about arranging from it though.
The recording here was the original demos from when I came up with the parts. All sounds come from a Novation XioSynth, a Boss DR-670 drum machine, and a cheap strat plugged directly into the MR8HD.
Shot with BMPCC Sigma 18-35mm