[Song of the Week is a "weekly" feature which is supposed to update every Thursday Friday, but almost never does. In it, Drew records a song, or attempts to record a song, or gives up and writes another movie review.]

"Sad Today":


First and foremost, I'm not actually sad at all. I just liked the way it sounded.

Second, this week's song probably went through more changes of mind than any I've done. First I was going to do a cover, then I was going to do two covers. (These two sentences are good examples of the difference between "than" and "then".) Then I had a great idea for an original song, this sort of kickass hard rocker. I practiced it so much I got a blister on one of my fingers. So then I wasn't going to do a song at all. Then my finger got better. Then I decided that my hard rock song* didn't really work without some kind of drums. So we were back to nothing. I kind of thought about taking a break anyway, so I can figure out how to make these songs downloadable, and also to remix and play with some of the older songs so they could be worth downloading. But I didn't want to just do nothing, so I thought I'd just do some kind of piano piece, since I thought I'd been doing too much guitar-focused stuff. But as I was practicing my piano playing I kept thinking about something I had read, about blah blah E minor chord (my memory of the rest is kind of funny, but that part was sticking with me). A guitar, as if by magic, flew into my hands, and I started playing with an E minor chord, and very quickly this song came out.

Stylistically, this reminds me a little of my earlier song "Duel", which also featured a picture I'd made as the background (I drew this one in Fireworks and liked it so much it's been my desktop background forever). Something about the way the guitar sounds, though with this one it's a lot quieter, more subdued, and there's less focus on the guitar and bass parts. Oddly enough, the other song this remind's me of is Spike's song from the "Buffy" musical. I'm not quite sure why.

Lyrically I wanted to keep things simple-- this song almost had no words at all, but I thought they were funny so I kept them. They're just so inane and simplistic**. I'd always wanted to write a song that was just one verse, as few lyrics as possible, because I figured it'd be easier to remember the words that way. But just in case, they go like, "I'm sad today/ 'bout what, I can't say/ I'm sad today/ Tommorow, I'll be OK".

Musically, this one's pretty easy to explain. It just switches between E minor and A minor, or E and A on the bass. Mostly I like the tone of it, which I achieved by playing my guitar through a bass amp, which was probably completely unnecessary but worked out OK. The solo literally just goes up and down a major scale (do-re-mi...), and I can play the whole thing on the E string. The only digital productiony stuff I did with anything was I made the solo a little louder.

*It's called "Them" and I swear on a stack of Bibles, Korans, and whatever it is Buddhists use, that you will hear it some point.
**Originally, I wrote that they were meaningless. But the more I thought about, just because something 's a little simple and obvious doesn't mean it doesn't have meaning. Think about "Everybody Hurts".