more scrittles

I've been listening to a lot of Rock recently, and gradually am realizing that in some way, I'm going to do music with words again. There's an awful lot of things I want to do without any kind of text, but I've always liked what I come up with lyrically and, though I haven't had a songwriting idea in awhile, I think it's mainly because I haven't really given it time or opportunity to develop. One of my big regrets is not doing any songwriting from the time my first real band (Landscape Paperweight, more about them some time when I feel sufficiently sentimental) ended after high school until my second year at Berklee, four years later, when my band Ojas (more about them sometime when I feel capable of doing it real justice) starting needing words. For those years in between, I simply stopped paying attention to the little phrases I'd hear or couplets I'd think of at random times, which I used to scribble down on anything handy and keep in a box for later use. Ojas was a collaborative effort, and not at all traditional in its songwriting (or anything else), but when it came time to create some words I was able to step right back into it. After that band dissolved, I stopped again for another two years as I played sideman for Betty Moore...though this time I was really starting to feel the push to do songs of my own. When Maxwell Horse started in 1999, songs started to come together easily, and scribbles again starting filling my pockets. Currently, there's so much I want to learn about guitar, particularly the acoustic nylon-string, that the little time I have for my own music is kinda spoken for, but once I have a house and my studio is set up I have to see what place words might have again.

Thing is, words can't be spoken too well by a guitar (Frampton notwithstanding), so I'll need to have them expressed vocally somehow. Looks like that'll come down to me again...if there was one wish I could have granted it would be that I'd have a stronger natural voice. But such is not the case, and singing for five years (with voice lessons for a full year at the end) in Maxwell Horse didn't improve things by leaps n' bounds, so I feel pretty much stuck with what I've got; a limited, though potentially expressive throat. I'm interested in exploring a lot of harmonizing, doubling, distortion, etc. of vocals in the studio, and I think treating the voice as an instrument first can make it work. I'd say it's highly doubtful I'll sing again live, in public, as a focus of the music. But for creating recordings on my own, where I have all the time in the world and the awesome power to erase whatever sucks, what I've got is probably enough.