By Chris Moore:
Well, it’s been a while since I posted a music video, so I figured I’d better make certain my YouTube account was still functional…
This week, instead of recording a cover song, I felt that it was time to kick off The 2010 Project music video series I’ve been planning for a while. You may be wondering, what exactly is The 2010 Project? It is the working title — and, based on a recent conversation, very possibly the official title — of my forthcoming album.
Thus far, as of April break, I’ve chosen the thirteen songs that I plan to record and completed the writing of both music and lyrics. Since then, I’ve recorded acoustic demos of each song and begun listening them in order to help me think of and decide on arrangements and various aspects of how I’d like the final products to sound. I’ve been experimenting with GarageBand drum loops, and I’ve been practicing the songs quite a bit since April. Every weekend since then, I’ve taken an hour to sit down and play through the album in order.
As with any big project like recording an album’s worth of material, anything’s liable to change by the time the final product is ready to be heard. That being said, I plan to string together thirteen installments in this music video series, each featuring one of the aforementioned songs. And, understanding that anything can change, I’ll be releasing them here on the blog in the order I plan to sequence them on the album.
The first song up is “No Lights, No Sound.” Laptop Sessions regulars may recognize this as a video I’ve already recorded and posted over a year ago. However, this is the finalized version, with some slight lyric changes and additional verses. This song is a rare case of old lyrics re-emerging on a new song. The story here is that, a few months ago, I came across the lyrics for an old song that I never really committed to, but had always liked a few lines from. I thought they might fit nicely into this song, and with a few alterations, I think they do.
In a lot of ways, this is one of the simplest songs on the list, a tune that started as I walked around my room in the dark almost two years ago. I was home alone, my capo on the second fret from having played another song (which I’ve since forgotten), and the first line sort of came to me: “The lights are off; there’s no one around…” I wrote this and the first chorus, but that was it for a while. It wasn’t until months later that I added the middle section and new verses. Then, this past April, I deleted a verse and added two more in.
“No Lights, No Sound” is a song that has weathered several phases in my recent life, a track that has been conceived, shaped, and reshaped by these phases and survives in its current form with a scheduled slot as the opening track of The 2010 Project.
I hope you like this one. For some reason, even though my allergies haven’t been hitting me as hard as they probably will soon, my voice wasn’t at its peak today. That being said, I feel that worked for this solo acoustic performance.
So, without further ado, here is the first installment in the series — hurry back every day this week and both days of the weekend for new posts!
See you next session!