Jan Krüger's blog

Creative Engineering and randomness

Song Fight: Interesting Times

· Read in about 3 min · (483 words)

Good news! A couple of weeks ago I found the Song Fight website. Song Fight works like this: a song title is posted. You write a song for that title within a week and submit it to the fightmaster. When the week is up, the fightmaster will publish the list of all entries on the website. Visitors can now vote for songs until the songs of the next fight are published. The winner of a fight gets to brag… and not really anything else. Apart from a serious boost in creativity and musical skills when you make it a habit to participate, that is.

Yesterday (going by the local timezone) I submitted my first Song Fight entry for the title “Interesting Times”. It will be up on the Song Fight website shortly, and it’s now available here.

Download

Interesting Times (3:18, 5.4 MB)

Creative Commons License Interesting Times by Jan Krüger is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://music-jk.net/.

All the gory details

The idea came to me on Sunday evening. I had already known that I wanted a song in 5/8 time and, if possible, with lots of gratuitious time signature changes. On Sunday I was randomly strumming on my steel-string acoustic guitar when I suddenly found a nice combination of rhythm and chords. Seconds later I knew the tune of the chorus and I knew that it was going to be what I then thought to be a mix of 8/8 and 5/8 (but is probably more accurately described as 13/8). A general idea of the lyrics and overall melody developed over the next couple of minutes. I also wrote most of the lyrics that evening, and some parts on a bus ride to the Netherlands on Tuesday.

I started recording on Tuesday evening. Some time in the middle of the night I had finished everything up to the end of the second verse (though with considerably less tracks than the song has now). After a few hours of sleep all the rest followed, including more work on mixing and such (which I always start doing while I’m recording individual takes). Total estimated time of working on the song is about 12-14 hours.

WIth this song, I put a lot more thought into the mixing. I think it shows. On the other hand, I’m still far from as proficient as I want to be. Same goes for the actual performance, of course. Neverending journey and all that.

Hope you enjoy the song. Feedback is appreciated. Thanks!