...adding a little Something Something

SO... after a summer hiatus from playing, due to schedule conflicts and other jazzy stuff, the Ben Bowen Project - or "BBP" as the kids like to call us - is coming (with a vengeance) to a club near you to begin playing again very soon. We will feature a whole whack of new music I've been writing (including stuff I actually had to lift after having recorded it... my writing process really got turned on its ear), as well as sporting a new guitarist, the world-weary touring troubadour, Paul McDougall, most famous for his work with the Afrobeat band, Mr. Something Something (who have at long last returned from months on the road, killing it on New England college radio, with a truckful of groupies whom they promptly dumped off at Toronto harbour to catch the ferry back).

I'm very excited. This was the original incarnation of the band (at least in my imagination) way back when all this music was still just lines and dots on various bits of oddly-sized paper, and now it will finally come to life, my own jazzpop Frakenstein. It Lives.

hiatus hernia

I took this summer off from playing, pretty much. Initially I was forced into it by a number of factors, but once I saw it coming, I figured I could use it as a chance to work on my recording skills and get a ton of stuff down.

In fact what happened was that my entire writing process changed. For the longest time, again due to necessity (endlessly long TTC commutes, for instance), my writing was all done stright on to paper: melody would come first, then chords, then arrangements ideas. Instead, over the summer, I would sit at the computer, turn on the keyboard, and play a couple of chordal ideas. Then I'd sequence some drums for it, re-record the keys so they were in time, and maybe add a bass line or some guitar. Eventually, I'd get round to picking up the horn, and it would be like walking into the studio with someone else... like all the pop gigs I do where I haven't heard the music beforehand. I'd take a few passes at it, recording all the time, and over time piece together a melody I thought worked. Or, and this happened just as frequently, I'd get everything but the horns done, have the tune stuck in my head for a couple of days, and start hearing what should go over it. Then, by the time I got back to recording, I just had to play what I'd "heard" already.

It's also meant, due in part to my limited skill on the keys, that my songs have become infinitely more poppy since May, when this whole thing started. So whereas I had previously written a lot of stuff like The Vicarage, now everything has a melodic, hooky, pop-based aesthetic. Even 3 Blind Mice, which I reworked on paper and then brought into the studio six weeks ago, seems to have shifted away from its less harmonic and /or diatonic possibilities into something much more generally accessible.

So this leave I took from playing has really meant my writing has exploded out of the sheath I thought it had sort of defined for itself, which is very exciting. My stuff is closer than ever now to what I always thought my music should and would sound like.