New Day
New Day was a kind of experimental bonus. A song is to be comprehended by the force of its melody. We hear music. This was something I hadn’t even considered when writing anything previously. I approached it rather like an English essay for an exam. I sat down and thought out a topic, an area of interest. I needed to feel good. I paced solidly around the dining room and hummed a melody over and over until I felt that its tone, feeling, rhythm and progression spoke honestly – ‘I need to feel good’. I sat down, this time at the baby grand piano in the dining room which is a little out of key, but a piano that has the most warming depth and sustain of any I know. I played the simplest chords I could find suitable for the melody as I sang. The song progressed as music in this way. I practised the rough arrangement until I felt it seemed right. This was the first draft of about five different versions.
The words were written quite quickly for the first two verses and chorus. I visualised, for the first time, the scene that I wanted to demonstrate. But this time I wanted to demonstrate it to whoever would receive it – the listener. The words reflected the feeling of walking out into an icy, dull day, rain pelting down on my head and resenting having to face my errands, face myself and face the decisions of moving forward. You know those days when you wake up on the wrong side of sleep.
The third verse unfortunately interrupted me during office hours of a Thursday at four o’ clock when I was drawing up an excel sheet for a bill of quantities to construct a road. However, this song writing experience was the first time I created something that made sense to me. Anything else I had written I then set about stripping down to its basic elements in the same way. I now focused on speaking through the song but delivering the abstraction of its meaning through the music itself. I felt good then.