Two songs up now.  It's strange, I suppose, how different they are to one another.  It is just chance that this is the order we've been producing them in, there are songs a lot more like the Happiness and some more like Writing In Pencil, and as we put more up I guess we'll see where it takes us!

I can't listen to the second one too much, I find myself picking holes in the cello part, simple though it may be, I found it quite difficult to record the cello. I sort of feel like I know how to sing into a mic because of the years of practice, but I have much less experience with amplified cello.

(Although I remember the first time I ever played with a mic I was fifteen and playing the end bit of a cover of Radiohead's Karma Police, which was awesome fun.  I seem to recall I was wearing very tight trousers and had just sung my heart out on Don't Speak. Who knows why those details would stick in my memory.)

Anyway.  Ike and I are now working on some more of my tracks.  Also I'm very excited about doing some co-writes with Amanda Hunt-Taylor.  I've sent some bits and pieces that have been floating around in the murky recesses of my brain over to the US and she's going to see whether there's anything that resonates with her.  If she's appalled I'll blame my schooling or my parents or something, and it'll be all fine...

A MySpace blog, how exciting.  I feel terribly hip and down with the kids, although I suspect I might have just negated my hipness by using the word 'hip' in the first place, which everyone knows is reserved for people watching MTV in their nursing homes.

Nevertheless, here I am, navigating MySpace armed only with my immense capacity for being rubbish at technology and my child-like enthusiasm, writing a post in my new blog.

I am looking forward to this weekend immensely.  Ike and I are going to finish off Writing In Pencil, which will be my second self-penned song to be up here.  It is very different from Happiness, partly because it's quite sad, but also it has a totally different feel from the steady walking bass-iness.  A couple of weeks ago we laid down the main vocal line and a cello bass line, and this weekend we're going to play around with changing the cello part; lifting it in places and dropping it in others.  Unlike Happiness the backing has to be quite sparse or it will overpower the vocal. Ike has been working on a guitar part for it as well, which is ace: I really like the combination of vocals, cello and acoustic guitar. 

In the last couple of days I've written two more songs, which seems a bit enthusiastic of me, really.  One of them is another slow one, in three/four time, and the other is a quick, fast paced one.  I imagined a fast tapped high hat on it and then the vocals all syncopated.  I sit there and think of things then record them on the 'my sounds' function on my mobile phone before I forget them, trying to do it quietly so that nobody can see me and thinks I call people up just to sing strangely at them down the phone.  Although I wouldn't say that is something I would never, ever do, ever.  (Nobody who reads this is going to be answering my calls for a while.) 

I will wrap up this tentative first blog entry now, before I accidentally start telling people what I had for breakfast (cereal) and how much I heart Robbie (not at all). Perhaps I am not so hip after all.