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Ben Saunders Creative Honours Project

Intro

For my Creative Honours project I am creating a concept album based on the themes and events depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatbsy. Each track on the album is inspired by a particular idea from the novel, although there is very little direct quotation of the work – one of my goals is that the album should be enjoyable as a work in and of itself, not strictly requiring the context of an intimate knowledge of Gatsby in order to simply put on and enjoy.

Project Research/Process

So, for project research, obviously one of the first steps is re-familiarising myself with the book, so I’ve been listening to the audiobook on train journeys and jotting down any ideas I have or any quotations that jump out at me. I’ve then been discussing the book extensively with my collaborator, Mark Shankland, who writes the majority of the lyrics to our tunes (with my input), as I provide the music. We have had many productive hours discussing the ethos of the novel and coming together on a general direction and ideas of what we want each track to be about. We want an opening track about embarking on an adventure to a new world and all the excitement and possibility that entails. We want tracks about Gatsby and Daisy Buchannan’s relationship from before the time of the book, and about their first meeting and the events that ensue. We want to touch on the innocence of the Gatsby character, the disillusionment, the naivety, the hopelessness, the slightly toxic nature of the relationships, and the eventual death of Gatsby and his dream, and how the world moves on after it all goes down.The way the writing process works is I will generally get myself in the headspace of a particular emotion invoked by the book and try to come up with some music that encapsulates that, after which I will bring it to my collaborator with whom I will discuss the feeling and scenario, for us to try and write some lyrics around. Two of the tracks are sort of repurposed older compositions which I thought fit the vibe we were going for, and for one of the tracks Mark actually wrote the lyrics first and then challenged me to place music beneath them.

Evaluation

The most challenging aspect of this work so far has been, honestly, relying on an external collaborator to help me with the lyrical side of things, and the vocals. I really should learn how to write and sing for myself in future, but my singer is very talented and comes up with some great stuff, the only issue is he is a busy man and getting a hold of him can be quite difficult. We are just about managing it, but it’s definitely a squeeze as we get closer and closer to the project deadline. I had to make a decision on going with him for this project or crafting my own instrumental work instead, however I felt that the quality of the work would be superior if two heads struggled over it rather than just my own, and it would be more interesting as a whole with vocals on the tracks. Another challenge has been adapting prose to music; we decided early on to avoid trying to quote directly from the book and make everything really wordy, and, rather, to simply take ideas, feelings, themes and emotions from the book and apply them to our music making process.Over the course of the project I have found that The Great Gatsby is an extremely rich and potent well from which to draw inspiration, and was definitely a great choice to work from for this concept album. I can see myself continuing to be influenced by Fitzgerald’s writing long after the completion of this project, and I think we have come up with some pretty good stuff based on his work. A fantastic choice of inspiration, but the reality of actually reading and analysing an entire book and writing pieces based on them in just a few short months has definitely started to set in as we reach the final stretch.

A link to some demos: https://soundcloud.com/user-978399726/sets/ben-saunders-creative-honours-project-expo-demos

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bensaundersposts-blog · 5 years

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Wednesday 14th November 2018 Sat down with my collaborator to discuss the upcoming project. I had already decided on doing a concept album based on The Great Gatsby, as we had actually started work on a song with such a concept a few months prior, titled Buchanan Street. We chose this source of inspiration because we both love the book and have great reverence and understanding of it, and we know it is a deep well from which to draw inspiration.

Wednesday 21st November

Had our first songwriting session dedicated to this project, repurposing a song we had started earlier in the year as I thought the mood and lyrical content of the piece fit with the direction of the project nicely. The lyrics evoked to me an image of Gatsby and Daisy Buchannan on their first night together, talking things out late in the evening after the excitement had died down, picking apart each other’s minds and motivations, and trying to peel away the layers of pretence surrounding their personas. The music is melancholy and atmospheric and suggests the beginnings of the disillusionment of Gatsby’s dream as he is finally presented with the object of years of his desire, only to find it imperfect and something that could never live up to the dream.

Wednesday 28th November

Continued work on the aforementioned song which we decided to entitle Behind Dark Glasses. Also started a new song, Sins of the Father, following a discussion on how nobody ever really thinks of the events of The Great Gatsby from Daisy’s perspective, focussing instead on Gatsby and Nick’s feelings, so it would be interesting to look at things through her point of view. As such, we began to think how she would view the situation, torn between an unhappy-but-stable marriage, and the distant promise of a potentially better future with the man she had all but given up on years prior. We also thought about a concept brought up in the book of the cycle of negative behaviours and how they are learned. Daisy is, in essence, as we all are, simply acting out based on her surroundings and upbringing - repeating the sins of her father, as each generation tends to repeat the same mistakes as the preceding one, because it’s how they’ve been brought up, and all they know.

Wednesday 5th December

Decided to potentially do Sins of the Father as a duet, with one verse from Daisy’s perspective and another from Gatsby’s, with the two of them singing in harmony by the end. To accomplish this we can get our singer’s sister to do a guest vocal spot. This was an idea from the mind of my collaborator, who noted that the vocal harmony part I had devised for the end of the tune would lend itself to this approach.

Wednesday 12th December

Decided to employ some of my reharmonisation skills in an attempt to make Behind Dark Glasses more musically interesting. Perhaps a symptom of having spent so much time playing/listening to it, the simplicity of the chord progression was starting to get to me. The song is in 7/8 and alternates meter with 4/4 several times throughout, so is interesting rhythmically, and structurally, but I still felt I needed to spice up the harmony a little. I went from a vi-IV-I-V progression of Am-F-C-G to a vi-ii-I-iii progression of Am-Dm/A-C-Em, which I felt was significantly more interesting and slightly less predictable, and the inclusion of the E minor especially lended a darker, sadder tone to the overall piece.

Wednesday 19th December

Again continuing work on Behind Dark Glasses, I looked at the B section of the song which modulates from A minor to A major and features the progression Dmaj7-E(7). I liked the way the E7 acted as a turnaround chord back to A minor via its appearance in both the A major and A harmonic minor scales, but suddenly realised that I could use the Dmaj7 and E7 as bVI and bVII chords respectively to modulate to the new key of F# major, which sounded extremely triumphant and lended itself to a big, bombastic final “chorus” section for our song. Initially the two A minor and A major sections were already in contrast with each other, one dark and brooding and the other more uplifting and catchy, but this third section really elevated the song to new heights, soaring and really giving the song the kick it needed. How exactly the lyrics would progress into this section after being about such a somber topic for so long, we were yet to discover.

Wednesday 9th January 2019

After a short (ish) break for Christmas, we got right back into the swing of things by practicing the two songs we had written thus far, making slight alterations to the lyrics and melody. We then re-began work on the song that started it all, Buchanan Street. We already had a vague idea that this would be a more general, retrospective look at the events of the novel, mentioning things like he green light, the expensive cars and the valley of ashes. We also had a line for the ending of the song, “Don’t know where to go//Got to go my own way”, which we felt encapsulated a feeling of wanting to move on after the life-changing events of the novel, albeit being unsure of exactly where or how.

Wednesday 20th February

Contact with my collaborator at this point had become very sporadic and it was becoming increasingly difficult to actually get any work done with him. In his defense he had a couple of good excuses - his uncle died, then he had to attend the funeral, then his family went away on holiday, then his grandma got diagnosed with dementia and he had to help out in the purchase and renovation of a property close to his own house to which he and his family members could easily travel to look after her, etc etc. Every week he had a new excuse and every week I began to get more and more anxious over whether or not I would be able to make the May deadline for our project, and it was my degree on the line, not his. I don’t really blame him for circumstances outwith his control, but he has also proven to be somewhat unreliable on occasions prior and since. Due to all of this, during discussions with my lecturer we elected that I make a final decision on whether or not to proceed with the collaborative side of the project, or just do it all on my own, most likely completely instrumentally. Feeling that our idea had a lot of potential and that it would be a shame not to attempt to push forward with our project as initially planned, I decided to carry on with the collaboration, but really start to drill into my partner just how important this is and how little time we have left. Perhaps I could have planned things a little better, met up with him more than once a week and had other avenues available for myself to explore should our partnership give way, but I was a little one-track-minded on this idea and hoped everything would work out well.

Wednesday 6th March

We decided from this point on to really get a move on and to try and get one studio rehearsal session and one at-home writing session per week, in order to work on vocal melodies and lyrics respectively. We found that writing at my house was great for coming up with lyrics but bad for trying to come up with vocal melodies as we couldn’t be as loud outwith a studio, so decided to combine approaches. Continuing to work on Behind Dark Glasses, Sins of the Father and Buchanan Street, I had by this point created MIDI demos with some recorded audio tracks in Logic, nailing out structures and sounds and other minutia of our songs, coming up with vocal melodies and harmonies, etc. I had also started music for two new songs, tentatively titled Sailing (Track 01) and Oatabix.

Wednesday 13th March

At this point I had noticed something - all of our songs thus-far are mostly mid-tempo, ballad-y sorts of songs, which are great in isolation, but a good album needs variation. Look at my favourite concept album, American Idiot, for example - it has a nice blend of short, punky songs (American Idiot, She’s A Rebel), longer, more operatic songs (Jesus of Suburbia, Homecoming), and slower ballads (Are We the Waiting, Wake Me Up When September Ends). Noting this, I decided to make our opening track Sailing a faster, more exciting, more direct and more simple, back-to-basics rocker, and attempt to come up with at least one other new song in a similar vein, as Oatabix was another slow-burner.

Wednesday 20th March

Finding it very difficult to come up with more exciting songs than the ones we have already, we turned our attention to first tidying up the lyrics we had written thus far, and then finishing off all of the lyrics for Behind Dark Glasses, Sins of the Father and Buchanan Street. Noting that is was getting very close to April, the month in which we had initially planned to begin our recording process, we chatted briefly about recording avenues, and decided to record at West College Scotland’s Greenock campus, as we know Andrew McDermid who works there, and my collaborator guaranteed that we could get in. For the recordings I decided I am going to re-amp all of my guitars, meaning I will get perfect performances recorded at home into my computer which I can then bring into the studio to be re-recorded through amplifiers, in order to save time in the studio. I am going to do guitars and bass and program any synth parts, and Mark is going to do all the vocals, and we are going to get my friend and longtime collaborator Jake Fisher to do the drums.

Wednesday 27th March

Another week of no correspondence from Mark, I was beginning to get very stressed. However, we arranged to meet up in a studio on the upcoming Friday and hopefully blast out as much as we possibly can in the three hours allotted.

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