Thursday November 4

Maja:

Yesterday was amazing. But I really went overboard with my voice so I have to rest it as much as possible today, so today I’m as silent as I can possibly be. We even do a silent rehearsal where Mark plays the guitar and we just sing the song in our heads. I am trying to memorise all of the lyrics. I know them somewhat by now, but I am a bit afraid of forgetting them.

Mark:

After this we go through the song ideas we’ve accumulated in our Cubase recording notes section. This takes almost two hours and we uncover and rediscover quite a few things we really quite like, including a song tentatively called Hanging In The Place, and another that could be called Shine, or something.

We talk through a few ideas over dinner, and then generally hang out, and then, as the clock ticks past midnight, Hanging In The Place suddenly starts to take shape as we each add lyrical ideas until we have a pretty cool A Capella song which we’re both singing. I make the crazy suggestion of performing this tomorrow and Maja does the crazy thing of agreeing. So that’s it. In the set it goes.

It’s the most scarcely worded song I’ve ever been involved in writing. Apart from the chorus, it has just 22 words and one of them is sung eight times. I ‘write’ the first verse with just the word Hello. ‘Oh, says Maja. A one letter verse. Cool.’ It is of course a slip, but I take up the challenge and proceed to rise to it, ‘writing’ a third verse of just I. With a little cheating ‘I’m’ to finish. One of the things songwriters often talk of is the challenge of writing a one chord song. I don’t think the one word verse gets nearly enough attention.

Now we have a chat about exactly what we’re going to do when we hit the stage. How much talk, and when? Everything’s up for grabs, but we do make one solid decision which is that we will not talk before the first song. No introductory preamble. People just want you to get on with it. We also decide we won’t talk after it. Just straight into the next one. 

Maja:

Mark wants to go to an event about the history of town today, but I won’t go. 

Mark:

It’s not just a talk about the history of the town. It’s a story of the history of the town from the Goodbody perspective. Ahhh. You see now. No? OK. We live in the house that used to be lived in by the manager of the mill. Or something like that. And our whole back garden is the mill works. The two big ruined buildings, the courtyard where trucks used to come out, complete with those big industrial garden gate doors. And the river at the end of it all. It was all constructed and run by the Goodbody family. We live in it, so tonight’s talk is literally about what’s in our back garden. Yes. I really want to go. But…

Maja:

My voice is too weak and I want to be at home. If we’re out tonight, someone might want us to perform, and I am not ready for that. I need to save myself for tomorrow. Mark reluctantly agrees that this is the best plan and we have a nice night staying in together. 

And as we do, enjoying some celebratory whiskey at two o’clock in the morning, magic strikes us. A new song is born. We call it Bang Bang, and it goes in the set tomorrow.  

Mark:

To be fair, Maja’s all up for me going out on my own. I wouldn’t massively be against that myself, but tonight it just doesn’t quite fit. So yeah. We stay in. And bang bang happens. It’s the name of the song!!