The past few months have been quite productive for me creatively, and I've been sitting down to write music as often as I can. When we were camped just outside Nashville for a week, I got a chance to record a few demo tracks. By some random chance, Jenn clicked a Facebook link that revealed the meaning of our last name, and now my music is packaged as Son of the Fox.
It's strange — before I had a name or made up a logo, it felt like I just had a few songs sitting around in a notebook that I could play around the campfire. Now that I have a name and a website, it feels like a real thing. So, yeah, I'm working on an album and you can listen to it as it's being written at sonofthefox.com
Writing the music
Typically I'll just fool around with a few chord progressions and record them into my iPhone voice memos where they gather digital dust. Occasionally I'll have some sort of melodic idea to go along with the chords, and even more rarely I'll get a lyric idea right away and start working it into a full song.
For whatever reason during the months of April and May all the songs were showing up more or less complete each time I sat down to write. That's rare, but it's my dream scenario: start playing, start writing, and end up with a complete song in an hour or two.
About the songs
These songs are weird. They are in styles I've never written before. One I wrote completely on a piano. One is totally country. One came to me in a dream. More than once I woke up at 3am with lyric ideas that I typed into Evernote with one eye open. The main thing I've had to overcome is the idea that I "should" write in some particular style, or sound some particular way. After that it's all procrastination vs productivity. Show up and work on music, and the muse might show up too.
The track Outta Here is sort of a redneck vacation song that was finished in about 5 minutes as I was sitting on the shore of the lake with Jenga. The last one, Freedom, is a more contemplative life philosophy type song I wrote after reading Bruce Lee: Artist of Life. Everything in-between is a mix of life songs and love songs.
I'm learning that inspiration will strike whenever it wants to, and if I'm not ready to capture it I'll miss out on a great experience and possibly a great song. I keep thinking about all the times I've watched a movie instead of writing music, how many songs have I missed? Here's to not missing any more music!
—
If you're interested in the gear I used to record everything, I wrote up a little page about that on the SOTF site. Enjoy!
