PSRSotwNotes04.08-02

Peter's Song of the Week Club!

8/2/04

We're Gonna Rock (in a minute or two)

Peter's Comments:
Two sources converge here:

1. At the excellent SongFight! Live showcase in Austin a couple of months back, there were about ten or twenty artists playing in a given evening. This meant lots of set changes. So people would change around instruments and fiddle with wires and test out the drums while a cheerful waiting crowd occasionally shouted "Woo!" and "Rock!" and occasionally "ROCK!" The title came to me then, and the song follows pretty straightforwardly from the title.

2. Several months ago, a friend of mine suggested I try writing a song in the style of the Magnetic Fields. 1

So in the last week or two, I finally pushed the song through to completion. The results are about average -- neither better nor worse than the bulk of my songs -- but I'm glad I wrote it. When I try to ape another artist, I rarely succeed, but I always learn something because I have to diverge from old habits. So this time I was singing in a weirdly low tessitura, with the guitar capoed high (because I don't have a ukelele). I also had to simplify, and pull back on my usual wordy/nonrepetitive vocals and Gratuitously Peculiar Chords.

All in all, a fun little exercise. On to the next song!

Footnotes

1 There was then a small, spirited discussion of whether 'Magnetic-Fields-style' could mean anything, given the genre-hopping tendencies of Stephin Merritt.