Piece This Star Together – Song and a Chat

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Episode #205: Piece This Star Together (Song starts at 4.45)

I find it endlessly fascinating, thinking about where a song might come from. ‘Piece This Star Together’ came from something my grandfather, Harry, said. My mum passed it on to me, when I was a youngster (bit of wisdom, I think):

‘We’ve all got a little piece of the star within us all and we’ve just got to piece this star together’.

It resonated in me and it remained in me. Years later, in Melbourne, Australia in 1998, the phrase/ concept popped into my mind, and I thought ‘Aha ! I’ll write a song about this’. It became song #437.

Having fun is such a key to getting into the creative zone. As I record these episodes, I find my ‘entertainer self’ switches on. An ‘up’ sort of a vibe happens. To be creative, you have to believe you can. The key is to have fun and see where the moment takes you. This is ‘being in the moment’.

This is the sort of feeling I had as I let my hands wander on the keys in 1998, As I looked a the lyrics of ‘Piece This Star’ and composed the music.

I had in mind a sort of ‘up’ acoustic guitar driven band song. It can be a tricky thing to come up with on the piano, but if I get a feeling to go down a certain track along the creative way, I don’t block the idea.

I’m glad I didn’t block it. ‘Piece This Star Together’ is an up, happy song.

The demo on this episode was 1 of 14 songs, which I recorded with Paul Dredge and Earl Pollard, in Earl’s garage, in NZ one afternoon in 1999. We recorded the songs back to back, using minimal gear.

It was such good fun. We’d never rehearsed these songs together. This demo remains the one and only take. I’m glad we recorded it.

I will release the 14 songs as an ‘archive’ sort of album. (I did a small release of 100 CDs back in 1999, but it ‘wasn’t quite there’, so a few years ago I re-recorded the vocals – there were too many squawks from my mother’s budgies in the original recording. Not that there’s anything wrong with budgies, but they have their place. They can be noisy birds at times! Perhaps, more to the point, your mother’s kitchen may not be quite the place to record vocals for an album!

I’m an optimistic sort of bloke. In my 20s I was hoping to make a positive difference by releasing my art and music into the world.

That basic plan hasn’t changed.

My art and music has helped me so much along the way. In fact it has turned out to be the way.

This podcast is a great vehicle to give some songs a bit of air, it’s an opportunity to talk about how a song might come together – but more than that, it’s turning out to be a lot about: how ideas all seem to come out at once, some seemingly unrelated, but if we I’ve them a voice, a chance, often they’ll turn out to be interrelated and suddenly you discover and underlying theme or purpose and away you go.

The creative process is a mysterious like that. It’s doesn’t necessarily unfold on a timeline as you’d expect.

On this episode you’ll hear me winging the beginning of a song, I didn’t block the feeling. It seemed right. I’ve listened back and I think there’s definitely something there, something to knead like a piece of dough, a bit more, nudge it gently into shape. It’ll be a song – I can tell – if I give it a bit more time and energy.

I can talk. Let’s face it (there is now more than 100 hours of me talking about creativity, the art of song writing, the art of being human on this podcast), but sometimes the best way to illustrate a process or a concept is to just demonstrate it. So having my piano at my finger tips as I chat really works for me.

Ok, here we go: another fully ‘winged’ episode. I never have any show notes and before I push the record button, I have no idea about what I’m going to focus on. The song leads the way. As I’ve mentioned, the entertainer within me comes to the party. Each episode is a half hour performance, like an online ‘songwriter speaks’ sort of gig,

Ok, let’s have look at how ‘Piece This Star ‘ came together (and I came together by: just playing, being open minded, having fun and looking to connect…not a bad general plan, perhaps!).

Enjoy.