Next Greyn gig: Saturday the 25th of February at: Maison de la culture de Tournai / d'hiver rock festival
More details to follow when we have them. In the meantime, make sure to mark that date in your agendas and visit this site and http://www.greyn.net again later…
Now about new songs and rehearsals...
I just can’t keep this blog up at all! The Face The Day one is enough for me! Two blogs – that’s too much. So I’ll just check in here from time to time. In a perfect world, I’d be able to write a real and good journal about the daily musings of my band Greyn. That would be great – not for you, the one or maybe two people who might read this – but for me! It would be a good way to capture these years I am busy with Greyn. But life doesn’t allow time to have more than one or two hobbies! Being in the band is already enough! To find time to write about it just isn’t even an option at this point! So when I have time and want to record some thought about Greyn and what we are up to, I’ll use this site as a means to do that. When I have new Greyn photos, ditto.
Last night, Greyn’s rehearsal was pretty good as rehearsals go. Of course, one band member wasn’t there. It’s really rare to have all five of us there at any given time these days, which I find pretty frustrating in terms of the lack of momentum it causes and all – yet still, we do tend to accomplish good stuff no matter what so I guess it’s not really that big a deal if all 5 of us aren’t there. I just wish we all had more time for Greyn during rehearsal and at home alone with ourselves. But again, life doesn’t allow all that free time. I guess unless you are a professional musician, you just have to make do with the time you have!
Last night we made do. We worked on just one song. There was time to break the structure down and practice it and make lyrics for it and practice it again. I liked that experience. I think our reward for making that time will be a very good song. We have so many songs, well bits and pieces of songs really, floating around and unfinished. That’s not a big deal in itself. I just like the feeling of putting the finishing touches on something. It makes it easier to practice and to sing in my head and to learn it. It gives me a kick to have something nearly complete to play around with. It’s like at work if you have a thousand almost finished things you can be very distracted and stressed out. There’s nothing like the moment of satisfaction when you have completed a project or filed something once and for all or even just cleared up your desk or cleaned out your inbox. Completing a song is much the same to me. It allows me some motivating pride in something done well and pushes me on to the next good thing.
Greyn’s song styles are changing nowadays. We’re not so heavy on the drama and emotion anymore. My lyrics are so far away from my own experience for the most part that even my voice has changed from it. It’s not me singing anymore. It’s various characters. It feels that way. The words I’m using are about imaginary people and situations. Somehow that’s freeing up my vocals. It feels good to detach from myself that way. In some ways it feels even more creative this way. Starting from scratch instead of pulling something out from inside of me. So often I imagine myself a man in a song. I feel like a man when I sing it. There are two new songs now, however, that are about woman getting revenge on men. I have no idea where those ideas are coming from. One, called Loose, is about a whore and how she knows very well what she’s doing while the man is living in a fantasy world. Another song, called Unarmed, seems to be about a woman who has an obsessive guy coming after her who always fights with her and then plays the hero and probably beats her up then loves her then hits her again. These topics are nothing new and have nothing to do with me. In a way these songs are just easier and more obvious. The lyrics and topics are simplified. There’s another song called Armor about a man who fell in love with a crazy woman but didn’t know it at the time – the thing he fell in love with was her craziness until he realized it was craziness and not spark. Now he’s screwed because how do you stop being the caretaker when you love someone and know they might die without you but you have to save yourself in the meantime as you see yourself living only for them. There’s also a new song called Simon Says. That one is about something I experienced. But it’s become more of a story about someone else. It’s about going to a therapist every week for years and years and how while driving there you want to crash into trees on the road and how leaving there you want to avoid the trees and how learning to drive is like learning to live and how we all take orders all the time and need help to find direction. We’re also in the process of making another song which will be about Sundays. How Sundays can be so spooky and can send you into loneliness and existential thought. How you can almost stay in bed all day and never want to get up again. How you have to clean up and prepare for the week ahead? How every Sunday can be a new start or a tired end. How Sundays can be so sleepy. And about the things you see when you wake up – all the things you have. And how granny always said nothing was boring. Not even Sundays.
There are a bunch of other songs we’re also busy with – those are the bits and pieces ones. One is about wanting to be loved by an outsider but also wanting to keep the familiar love in your life—about wanting it all but knowing you have to make hard choices. About being spoiled and about human consumption. That one is called All You Can Eat. I cant remember the other songs we’re busy with. But we have lots of good ideas.
Now only to tie them together and finish them up. Can’t wait for that!
