It's been a busy time at High-Rise Casa Jaysmith, and thus is accounted for the fact that I completely forgot to blog last week. This week I didn't forget so much as deliberately not do it because I was shattered.
The short version is that this weekend we rented a car and spent Saturday shopping, mostly at Ikea, and then Sunday driving up the coastal road to Squamish. Squamish is a weird, weird place... a small town on a waterside plain, completely surrounded by mountains. If I thought life in Vancouver was like moving to Halo (or Ringworld, for you oldies, or an Orbital for us Banks fans) then Squamish is like life inside a Dyson Sphere. It must mess with people's heads, being born there. But we survived our daytrip. Sarah is very happy after spending 24 hours with a car. I must admit we did get a nicer view of whatever we were driving towards than we'd have had on a bus.
We now have, courtesy of Ikea, three sets of shelving units, which are my next building project. As usual their delivery options were incredibly inconvenient (even more inconvenient than Bosco's Inconvenience Store). I still don't see why you have to select the items you want (bulky as these may be) and take them to the checkout before you can ask for home delivery - which they can only schedule within the immediately following 48 hours because they don't have much room to store the items you've picked out. Why can't you hand over a pick list at the checkout and have them pick out the items the day before you want the stuff delivered? Imagine if Ikea Delivery was actually helpful, in other words.
The other big reason we're exhausted is because we've been being creative. Ever so creative! Sarah was offered a solo spot in the Afternoon Delights concert coming up next Thursday. And Ieva (the conductor) suggested that, on account of Sarah being a composer - she knew this because I talk Sarah up to everyone at every opportunity - she should sing one of her own compositions. Sarah squeaked at the prospect but cautiously suggested to me that we should write a new song very quickly, suitable for singing in an old people's home... so nothing about "dancing in the shadow of death" or "we've had a great life but it's nearly over", for example. So last Thursday night we knocked around some ideas for a while. I have a tendency to try to figure out "high concepts" for songs, whereas Sarah thinks of titles - mostly because all my suggestions for titles are disgusting! So eventually we ended up with When You Smile as a title, and we proceeded from there.
Our working method seems to be that we discuss what we want to say and how we want it to be said, and then I work out a verse and chorus, for which Sarah duly composes a lovely melody and some chords. We then figure out either another verse or the bridge, sort out the overall song layout, and tighten it up. So that's what happened. Over the course of Thursday evening, in five hours of very hard work, we ended up with everything except a melody for the bridge. (And Sarah was a bit uncertain about the melody for the end of the chorus, but she couldn't sleep so she got up at 4am and sorted it out.) Bizarrely, when I went to get supper from the kitchen at 12:30am, an entirely different song called Velvet popped into my head - an entire verse, chorus and tune - so we got a bonus for the evening. Presumably once you start songwriting you just can't stop. Needless to say my song is, if not disgusting, certainly somewhat raunchy. Justine, you'll have to cover your ears ;)
On Saturday Sarah was able to demonstrate When You Smile to Ieva and the rest of the High Spirits tenors when she came to collect me after the tenor section rehearsal. It seemed to go down well and she'll be performing it on Thursday. However, that's not the end of it! On Monday we got another request from Ieva, this time for a song of Sarah's which Ieva could sing at a friend's wedding. Now the obvious, if perhaps too 'special' and quirky, wedding song of Sarah's is the one she wrote for our wedding, and Ieva loves that, but we thought it would be interesting to try to write the definitive 'wedding' song, just as I think we wrote the definitive 'friendship and love' song in the form of I'll Rescue You. So last night we hammered out, with again a lot of hard work, the chorus, chorus melody, and three verses for a song called All You Have To Say. Today Sarah sorted out the verse melody, and tonight we've sorted out the bridge lyrics and melody. And I think we've achieved our goal. You'll have to decide. We'll try to put up recordings of all these songs on a secret Posse page later this week, assuming Squeaky Bunny sorts her voice out or I can sing it in a suitable range.
This then is why no blog posts, and this now is making up for it. Any questions?
NB I don't know what happened to the photos from two posts ago. Dan pointed it out. I'll sort it next chance I get.
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