Dave Bradley

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/interview--sting-how-we-mock-our-most-serious-star-our-national-friend-of-the-earth-shouldnt-he-be-a-protected-species-or-at-least-a-respected-one-2320343.html- about Big Brother, surveillance and control, the ultimate stalker!

But, yes, not many people knew EBYT was about a stalker. I Have the Touch from PG4 has a similarly esoteric meaning beyond the obvious reference to "wanting contact...with you"

Melody trumps lyric..has to be true, when you look at how Bowie and various others used to/still cut and paste (literally) put rhyming couplets together with Sellotape on a sheet of A4 etc. Plus, I remember hearing Neil Peart saying the music was always far more important than the words. Meaningless words abound and Michael Stipe famously wouldn't publish lyrics on early R.E.M records simply because he wasn't singing real words half the time and they were reverse engineered after the fact. Indeed, lots of us writing songs do ad lib nonsensical stuff over our music just to get a melody down and then edit in real words and meaning after...stream of consciousness and all that. Of course, Sting is well known as keeping notes of stuff he thinks of (as does Peart) and borrowing allusions from literature, philosophy, science, psychology, art etc. E.g De doo, doo, doo, de, daa, daa, daa (I think that was in the pilot for The Teletubbies or was it the Flowerpot Men?)

I have an obsolete M-Audio device "Fast Track" it's simple, works well, except if you unplug it when your Windows computer is still running it causes a Blue Screen of Death crash. I'd like to move on up a couple notches for better sound and an extra microphone input at the least. Soon.

I don't have a process as such. Usually, I'm thinking of something melodic when out walking the dog, ad lib a few words and either record them on my phone or try to remember what it was I was singing when I get home. I then try and see if I can figure out the chords to fit what it was...but...usually I can't so I approximate, record a guitar part against a beat and then sing roughly the same words with roughly the original melody and see if it works. First verses are almost always just stream of consciousness stuff but I can usually pick apart some kind of idea from them and the chorus and second verse etc I'll write separetely with a finished idea gradually in mind...but...not always ;-)

Of course, of course, it's the subtle things that seems to make timeless tunes, well, timeless. A simple chord inversion here, a variation on a word in the lyric, adds to the interest. The countless cut&paste pop songs that you hear once or twice will not be the songs that will bear listening to in 50 years. Even the simplest of "standards" from the middle of twentieth century have more texture than a single listen will reveal to the average listener, but it's the subtleties that make them immortal

This is an interesting quote from SOS exactly 10 years ago: "The first thing to say is that, generally, headphone monitoring is almost always only a 'second best' option. The vast majority of recorded sound is intended for listening via loudspeakers and it is important to recognise this fact." Hmm...I think things have changed somewhat, I reckon the vast majority of music is now listened to on mobile devices whether with headphones or on the tiny speaker on a phone or tablet... Does this now change the perception of whether headphone mixing or speaker mixing is best I wonder...

I've been waiting to read this, just back from a short trip! Looks and sounds great, yet more remixing for me to do on my recent songs I think!