this song is the first time I wrote, composed, arranged and played live a song on my own
I want to thank PETITBAZARTS, Mauro, Aïko, Emma, Vincence, Noa, Finke, Luna, Kaat and myself for it
This was the third night we played our set list made from original songs of our own in front of a public
I would also like to share parts of the story of this song with you :)
I started writing fragments of lyrics around last november inspired by a movie from Bertolucci "Sheltering Sky".
I was amazed by its colors, images, scenery, music but also the story and the main actress.
Little by little, I started adding more personal sentences, words; in a perspective of really writing a song with it.
In the end, around begin February, where I focused on it for the first time; the lyrics were much more related to me in a sense of a general feeling and not specifically literally.
I continued with the idea of something very visual, like pictures of scenes, decomposing the whole focusing on pixels
This sentence came very naturally and is the essence of the whole song
"The grains of the images multiply
The colors blend and I love to see
The way I end up seeing reds in shades of blue"
Then I had to find chords and a melody line for the voice.
I had two days left to do it.
I just sat at a piano at the conservatoire, and started trying out stuff, recording with my dictaphone, listening again and picking out parts I loved to fix them.
It was very hard in the beginning before I actually started doing it, because I tend to accumulate lyrics and conceptual ideas for songs, but putting them concretely into music all by myself is a step I found hard to make sometimes.
Anyways, after those two days where I spent 3-4 hours working on the song, it was almost ready.
A week afterwards I started puzzling with parts in my song to make some transitions more fluid, because there was something missing, because of the many elements and parts in it.
I started to feel frustrated with my own song and had no fun playing it anymore.
But then I just let it go, and it all settled down.
My class and friends were also very encouraging which gave me the energy to keep on believing.
We then had three weeks to share our songs with the rest of our class, arrange them into multi-instrumental versions, with different dynamics, parts etc and to learn to play them on instruments we had just learned to play
Those were though weeks, we spend many nights and hours in our room 434, but it will always be one of the more special parts in my life
There I tried to communicate the arrangement I saw for my song, finding it's sound, groove etc
Again, it was something heavy emotionally because it's not always easy to be responsible for a whole group of people when everyone needs to know what they need to do, when I didn't know it either for them
But again, they were so supportive, wanting to bring life into my song, even though it was one of the hardest songs to arrange and play because of it's time/scale variations
4 days before our first live performance, we finally had the final version of Reds in Shades of Blue in a Sheltering Sky
and from there, all was smooth :))
thank you
at @royalconservatoireantwerp
with PETITBAZARTS
4 окт 2024
