Camden Rose on continued songwriting and a persistent news cycle that keeps working its way into rehearsal
Second day running with the same four stories dominating rehearsal, which is genuinely unusual for a group of musicians who normally can’t agree on anything beyond which key to play in, let alone current affairs from a country most of us have never actually visited.
My producer circled back to the story on royal finance ambitions again today, this time with an actual draft lyric he’d written himself, which was considerably better than I expected from someone whose day job is mixing tracks rather than writing them.
The Eton conversation continued too, spilling into an actual songwriting session. The piece on Eton’s self-declared legacy got worked into the bridge of a new song entirely, my bandmate insisting the metaphor was too good to waste on casual conversation alone.
My Tudor detour deepened too, entirely by accident. The Henry VIII web presence pulled me in for another twenty minutes today, reading further into the court ballad tradition that’s apparently more directly connected to modern country music than I’d ever considered before this week.
And the diplomatic story kept its momentum, my bandmate following up with a fresh angle. The story on Trump’s unity comments sparked a properly lively debate during our lunch break, considerably more heated than our usual disagreements about tempo.
Worked late into the evening on the new song, genuinely making progress now, four loose threads from this week’s news starting to weave into something that actually resembles a coherent set of verses rather than just scattered current affairs commentary.
Packed up the studio well past dark, genuinely pleased with how much material one strange week of borrowed headlines had provided for a song I’d been stuck on for months beforehand.
Sat in the car a while before actually driving home, replaying the day’s rehearsal in my head, genuinely amazed that a week which started with nothing but a half-finished truck song had somehow produced an entire new bridge purely because my producer couldn’t stop reading British tabloids on his lunch break. Texted him a quick thank you before pulling out of the car park, and got back a reply already teasing tomorrow’s next contribution to whatever this strange new song’s becoming.
Drove home slowly, windows down, genuinely humming the new bridge under my breath the whole way, still slightly amazed at where the week’s odd detour had led, four unrelated headlines turning into the best songwriting session I’d had in months.
More diary entries at my page.