The Main Thing – Song and a Chat

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:37 — 21.7MB)

Episode #10: The Main Thing – (Song at 7:35)

This song, number 515, traces the trajectory of a (musician’s) life and marks the points where he prioritises his goals as he goes through a series of transitions – which pretty much sums up a lifetime. Along the way, his definition of the main thing keeps changing.

I’m loving archiving these songs and I hope you’re enjoying them too.

Alfred, the Labrador, makes another appearance this week – the Labrador we were looking after kept me company as I wrote the song, 19 years ago.

As a lyricist, I generally write from an ‘I’ perspective. In this case, I wrote the song as a ‘storyteller, this time in 3rd person. It started off with a true episode that happened when a girl was young and moves on through her life, then it becomes equally – or more so – about the man she eventually meets – and their relationship down through the years.

There’s a saying ‘being in the zone’ …not blowing my trumpet here, but there was something about the songs, the demos from this particular fortnight of house sitting.

Writing lyrics really flows for me. I don’t work on these lyrics for months. These generally come together in about 20mins – and the music generally happens in about the same amount of time.

I’m looking forward to recording an album of these ‘demos’. Recording these podcast episodes is proving to be a useful sorting process for me. Also, it’s very much a time of discovery, as I discover things about the songwriting process as I talk about this.

I welcome your feedback about what I’m up to on this podcast. I’m very much finding my way.

I’m enjoying analysing the lyrics and exploring the song from more of a composing point of view towards the end.

I find these episodes entertaining and informative. I hope you do too.

There’s nothing like some new music, too. I hope after listening to this episode, you feel a bit like you’ve been to gig, heard the story of the song and maybe even picked up thing or two about songwriting and arranging – which is certainly an ongoing learning process.

If you’re tuning in and finding you’re enjoying these episodes, you might like to hear more at www.petepascoe.bandcamp.com. There are a selection of my albums here, including 2 piano/vocal singer/songwriter style, along the lines of the songs on this podcast.

Also you’ll discover my other albums and styles there – which I’ve touched on in previous episodes: Piano solo, Rock, Folk rock, etc.