In an effort to celebrate the official launch of djphillips.com, challenge my songwriting/ recording abilities and to take my own swipe at a 30 Day Project I will now post a new song idea every day for the next 30 days. These are not necessarily finished products. They are not necessarily fantastic pop nuggets. But they will be new ideas (written at least within the last few weeks). They will be (pretty much) on time. And they will be original.

I'm putting these out there-- warts and all-- so let me know what you think! The songs that get a good response will be the most likely to be included on a future release.

Circle

I have felt like crap all day, so this was a tough one to come up with. For the first time in this project, I decided on an idea, started working on it and then abandoned it halfway through. I still think the idea is good, but the melody is at the top of my vocal range and just the thought of singing that high makes my head hurt even more than it already does. Wah.

So instead, you get an instrumental. I thought I would try something minimalistic using only two chords and see what I could make happen. It's one of those pieces that's better if you close your eyes. I didn't really have a deeper meaning for it at first, but as it was coming together I thought it would be an interesting musical metaphor for a life cycle. We're born alone, we die alone and lots of stuff happens in between but all under the same survival routine of eat, sleep, breathe. Maybe it only got that heady to me because I'm tired.

I started with three similar guitar parts and then eventually layered on bass (baritone guitar) plus strings, drums and piano all using MIDI patches from Logic. The piano sound is great, but the rest sound pretty fake-ish to me. If you imagine they sounded real though, it would be pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with the parts themselves though, considering my keyboard skills generally amount to little more than the knuckle song.

Hope you enjoy! Here's to a headache-free tomorrow!