Comment section is pretty funny too...

When I first started writing songs, I felt a certain affinity for song structure. I always had a sense of understanding form and seeing how it could be manipulated out of its verse/chorus patterns. Partly, if not mostly, I think this came from Led Zeppelin, who never felt it necessary to supply a chorus with vocals (When the Levee Breaks, The Wanton Song), or having new/different lyrics for each chorus repeat (The Rover). My songs from 1993 all the way to 2016 would often tweak the standard song form: suddenly inserting the upcoming bridge riff between second and third verse before the second chorus (Oh Joyous Song), bringing in the guitar solo after only the first chorus (I can Feel), shortening a song to just 2xVerse/bridge/chorus/verse/guitar solo (Coattails). Helmet were another band who had an obvious influence in this department. A typical Helmet song structure is: verse/verse/chorus/bridge (or solo)/chorus - bringing songs down to bare necessities and never overstating their point.

Learning about Sonata Form in my composition studies from 2004 through to 2006 allowed me to take a brand new look at the verse/chorus structure, but flipped around in an A/B form, with the development section replacing what I understood as the guitar solo section of a song. While my first two symphonies were mostly failures (the third movement of the first pushed way beyond my capabilities by attempting a Sibelius-like composition), they did teach me a lot about sonata form and how to use, reuse, and develop each theme. 

I even took this straight into a guitar composition that I wrote in 2013's 'A Minor Sledge'. Another tweak: here I start developing the second theme during the repeat of the exposition, and it is this early development that transitions the themes into the new key for the "official development" (the coda transposes the last part of the development into the original key). The jazz guitar piece 'This is Yours' (2014), uses standard sonata form (although, a slight tweak, in that it develops, mostly, one particular section of the second theme instead of the first theme).

Back in 2004, I was having issues with a musician friend who couldn't commit to band work, and I dramatically proclaimed that I was going to quit music because nothing ever worked out for me. My guitarist friend who I was starting a rock/metal band with, laughed, and said "You can't quit music. Even if you tried, I'd come over and visit, and you'll be scrawling notes and ideas onto your bedroom wall." 

Years later, I did quit music. When I had no more songs to write, I really had no more to give to music, and put the guitar away for about five years, and only really played occasionally when I walked into music shops. Of course, my bandmate was right: I did always go back to musescore and see what i could make of some ideas. Usually the results were atrocious, and the pieces got filed with titles like 'Mr Stubbs sucks, again', 'the reason why you don't do this' ... etc. Last year, while writing The Falling City (finished and soon to be released digitally, if no publisher can be found), I did stumble across some ideas and wrote a piece for a chamber sextet, with Bassoon as lead instrument. It's okay, not great, but it serves as a completed piece. 

I have since been playing guitar again for the last three years, realising I should never have put it down - I lost all my thumb strength and much of my shredding speed (although I never mastered sweep-picking, I was pretty quick with multiple hammer-ons), and have only got both back in small doses now. This String Duo here, like the cello theme from the third movement of Three Orchestral Scores (2006), began on guitar. A simple, but interesting idea, that, even after the key change, I could not think of how to develop it further without it just being looped (I don't have a loop pedal). So, I transcribed it to string quartet, starting with cello, and then adding the viola part. However, it seemed pretty contained within these two instruments, and I soon deleted the two violins. Although I'm not a fan of Mozart's String Duo's, I had dabbled a little in Duos with other instruments, but never completed anything with any true degree of success. I actually feel like this Viola and Cello Duo is a success (whether people like it or not, is another issue...), and it takes the sonata form again, and tweaks it by not repeating the exposition, but repeating the development only, while also adding a transitional third theme. 

I am now working on a fugue for this duo as the second movement, using two themes that have come out of this Allegro movement. 
 

• 14/03/26, Ōhaupō 

"It's too dark to see the landmarks..."

26 Years ago I was living in Auckland living out the worst days of my life. Clinical depression had destroyed every sense of self and made me a victim to all that I believed life had inflicted upon me. Proving myself a failure at life, I even proved myself a failure at trying to commit suicide, and sunk into a void of what felt like endless repetitions of depression, going to work, coming home again, rinse and repeat. 

I had nothing to cheer me up, but I had this album to keep me company through it all.

Thank you Mark Sandman for your beautiful visions, words and music.

And thank you always to the wonderful musicians who helped create the Morphine sound with Mark: Dana Colley, Billy Conway, and Jerome Deupree.

"You're a bedtime story,
the one that keeps the curtains close.
And I hope you're waiting for me,
'cause I can't make it on my own."