A week ago, I realized something: I’m scarily productive and creative first thing in the morning. After brewing a cup of coffee, climbing the stairs to my studio, I enter beast mode. For me, that means churning out words, notes, melodies and harmonies like a monster. It started out by observing that my mind races from one thing to the other when I sit down to my desk. Normally, that would result in going down YouTube rabbit holes until it’s been four hours and I haven’t done a single item on my to-do list. Instead, I thought, why not channel that into doing the most taxing creative work I have to do? Sometimes that’s writing words, other times it’s writing notes. Surprisingly, it has worked really, really well. So well, in fact, that I don’t have anything to do the rest of the day. I guess I need a part-time job now where I can work afternoons?
Yesterday, I focused my energy on making beats for this one interlude of my show SELFIE. I’ve been dreading doing this because I really suck at percussion. One day I’ll take a few lessons to understand what’s going on, but for now, I’m relying on my ear and a lot of rap songs. The song comes at a part in the show where I’m recounting days of memories past and how and why I left opera. In fact, it comes right before “Memory Lane.” So I chose one my favorite songs to sing, “Les cloches” by Debussy. It has this hypnotic motif at the beginning that feels like life swirling around around you. It feels like…a snap beat. I listened to a few snap songs, and thought, all I need are snaps, and some bass reinforcements. Which brought forth this, with my skit-skatting on top of it:
Yas! I can work with that.
Now, I just need to come up with the lyrics. But that can wait until tomorrow morning…