I'm back again folks!
Hope you are all well and having a reasonably good time on this clown world.
It really is like a Freak Show!!
That's not why the new track is called Freak Show by the way.
So, how did this come about?
Well, it sort of started with me watching a live clip of, I think it was, Arctic Monkeys, where I noticed that the majority of the guitar was just power chords.
It though, ooooo, I thought, that's interesting!
So, I grabbed the guitar and began playing about with power chords. A power chord, in case you are wondering, is a two-note chord, with no major or minor quality to it. This is because power chords are just made up of the root and the fifth of the chord.
It took on a sort of thumping, heavy and darkish hue.
Eventually I had a chord pattern that was interesting and so I recorded that on my phone and kept it, just playing it every now and again.
Then, as is often the case, I walk about the flat humming it, while I'm making food in the kitchen or whatever, and then some words appear.
The first lyrics were the first line "She's got a body in her basement."
This was interesting because it could means literally she has a body in her basement, or it could mean a skeleton in her cupboard- meaning she has secrets that she would rather not get out.
So then I went about thinking about rhymes. What can you rhyme with basement?
It was during this I chanced upon nascent, a word I was unfamiliar with before, which is also quite cool to expand your vocabulary by writing.
The rest of the lyrics fell into place for the 1st verse.
The clincher came when I got to "she's a walking Hotel California".
Hotel California is quite a creepy number. It has often been discussed just what it was supposed to mean lyrically. I'm not sure there is a real, definitive answer, but we are all agreed whatever it was, it wasn't good!
This immediately turned the song into a track about some dark, unspoken horror.
I started to think Horror Genre and began writing down: slasher, jump scare, cabin in the woods, freak shows, the Texas chainsaw massacre etc. They were the things I wanted to try to get into the song lyrically, or at least that feeling. There is a reference to Silence of the lambs, except brain was served on a plate. There is also a reference to Sailor on the seas of fate, the Elric book by Micheal Moorcock. The rest of the song sort of wrote itself from then on.
I became a genuine pleasure to come up with lyrics that could convey that dread.
The fact that it turned into a song about toxic femininity and women that prey on men, as in Hotel California, was not really intentional, it just sort of happened. But I'm quite pleased with that too. It probably cropped up because of the MGTOW movement (Men Going Their Own Way), a movement for blokes who are looking after themselves as opposed to feeling they have to pander to women to get a partner and then be leached.
The pleasure continued when it came to recording. I realised I could make it a kind of musical pastiche of the horror genre too. So, I used some Psycho sounding strings and panting and a phrase from the Death March, screams and manic laughter, including (again) the wail copied from Scary Monsters by Bowie, the last weird voice in that series of strange manic voices. It is also in Kingdom Come (I think).
The vocals were originally sung with a kind of melody, but it sounded rubbish. So, I just sort of spoke them and instead of adopting the usual mid-atlantic accent, I stuck to doing it in my own Scouse.
The video was meant to be filmed in a club here called Freak Show.
In fact, the very origin of the song was- Naomi telling me about the inside of the club, which is quite groovy and freaky and has lots of grotesque decoration. I said it would be cool to have a song, maybe named after the place, so we could make a video there.
This was just a mad idea and long before the track was written. It just shows you how some things stick in your head. I wasn't consciously aware of this when I started writing it.
Anyway, the club refused us, so I had to come up with another solution. Frustrated at having so many songs for videos and not being able to get them done or be reliant on others, I decided to do it myself and came up the video ideas you see in the video itself. I filmed them all in a day and then spent tooooo long cutting it.
That is the track and video you can see on the channel.
I hope you enjoy the track and the blog.
I am a collector of song stories. I love to hear about how songs developed or how ideas for tracks came, whether by accident or design.
This is the reason I do the blogs partly.
Don't forget ( I know I always say this but it is really important) to take the few seconds to LIKE, SHARE (that's the only way it will get heard and seen!!), COMMENT and SUBSCRIBE. If you SUBSCRIBE you will be informed when a new video goes up. Press the little BELL and you will be notified. Seeing as I am wanting to get rid of Facebook this would be a good idea as you will no longer be informed via Facebook.
Hope you are having a funtasic weekend!!
Love Rob.
Lyrics below, as usual, and press the picture of me to open Google translate, just paste this directly into translate and you can read it, if you are not an English speaker and having difficulty.
Peace!
FREAK SHOW
She's got a body in her basement. You'd better not get too complacent.
I thinks she's seeking a replacement. All of my deepest fears are nascent.
I only really want to warn ya, she's a walking Hotel California.
Watch out! There's something creepy in the corner. And I don't want to have to mourn ya.
She comes and death goes running. Her sense of cunning's cunning.
She's a freak show!
She just appears out of nowhere. She's like the mother of the jump-scare.
She's got that- I won't let you go- stare. You'll wake up tied up to an armchair.
She's going rogue like a commando. She's going to land you with a death blow.
I tell you man the girl's a no-go. She wouldn't even stop the blood flow.
She comes and fear starts screaming. @ Can't wake up you're not dreaming!
She's a freak show!
It's only you assuming, the girl is even human.
And though outside she's picturesque, deep inside there's something grotesque.
I think you might have left it too late. You've bitten off much more than you can chew mate.
Your stranded like a sailor on the seas of fate. She'll serve your heart up to you on a plate.
I can't stand the fucking tension, the suspense it much more than I care to mention.
But necessity's the mother of invention.
You need to do a bit of death prevention.
Don't bother trying to calm her.
This girl just feeds on drama.
She's a freak show!!
< Go to Google translate
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