Song of the week #30
Curious Idea
The song:
A friend asked me to write a song for her. That, simply, was the spark which lit the creative fire for this track.
The opening line came to me easily. The second line was originally “I’m convinced they’re shining for me” but I quickly saw that a more wistful effect could be produced by turning it into a question: “Could it be they’re shining for me?” I liked the rhyme of “eyes” with “what I surmise” and used it in other verses where it doesn’t rhyme but the hook line is strong enough to bear repetition. (I used “what it implies” as a variant of this line). This resulted in the type of verse which can easily be transformed into successive verses by altering a word or two, with the focus of the lyrics linked by the senses: seeing, hearing and tasting, respectively.
I then played around with alternative meanings of the word “curious” for the middle section of the song. In the verses, it means “strange” but in the middle eight section it takes on the meaning of “inquisitive”. This section took only slightly longer to write than it does to sing; I have never known a middle eight arrive so easily. As soon as I sang the line “if you string me along” I knew the section would end with “sing this song” with a pleasing double rhyme. The section also includes some of my favourite alliterative phrases in “founded on fact” and “sing this song”. This is not something I consciously work at but I acknowledge them when they arrive.
The instrumentation for this album was something I borrowed completely from Paul McCartney’s Wanderlust – an unjustly neglected Macca masterpiece. On that track, the conventional band of piano, bass, guitar and drums is augmented by the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble – specifically two trumpets, French horn, tenor trombone and tuba – and I have used that exact instrumental line up for Curious Idea. I used the style of brass contrapuntal writing found in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, before valves were invented for trumpets and horns.
If the sound of the piano on this track seems vaguely familiar then it’s because it is! I used a virtual instrument based on the Vertigrand piano from Studio III at Abbey Road Studios. The list of tracks the original instrument was used on reads like a litany of Beatle music from 1966 to 1970. Here goes:
Tomorrow Never Knows, Penny Lane, With a Little Help from my Friends, All You Need is Love, Magical Mystery Tour, Your Mother Should Know, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Lady Madonna and Martha My Dear. Oh, and some band called Pink Floyd used it in the mid-70s when they recorded their Wish You Were Here album!
This was the first track on which I used my Variax bass guitar; previously I had used virtual basses. I had also been using a Variax 6-string at gigs for the previous 12-or-so years as it can emulate just about any electric (or acoustic) guitar you could imagine. When the focus of my musical life turned to home recording in 2016 my Variax came into its own. My Variax bass would, and still does, continue to be a mainstay of my home recording setup with its ability to emulate just about every bass guitar ever used (including an upright acoustic bass).
The remade version
Curious Idea was one of those songs which, to my mind, always failed to live up to the sound I had in my head. So when I began revamping my earlier songs in 2024 this was a prime contender. I tried updating the piano sound but when I listened back to the original I found I liked that version better so I left the piano part alone. Likewise the bass guitar had nothing wrong with it but I did add a plug-in to increase its clarity. I augmented the original strummed acoustic guitar by recording four different guitars - two of them on my Fender acoustic and two on my Variax six-string.
I used the same AI effects for voices that I have used on recent remakes. In the original version I sang it in octaves with a low bass part growling away in the depths - just like Peter Gabriel used on Mercy Street. In the remake I altered the mix for this low part so it's not quite so prominent.
I also remixed the brass parts so that each instrument is prominent when it should be. I often describe the creation of my songs as me wearing several hats in turn: songwriter hat, arranger hat, performer hat, recording hat and so on. But here in the remix I was using my conductor hat.
The video
Initially I tried asking ChatGPT for ideas based on my tentative thought of using animated versions of pictures in an art gallery. The AI engine suggested using classic portraits such as the Mona Lisa, The Girl with the Pearl Earring and Klimmt's The Kiss. This sounded fine in theory but didn't work in practice as the images felt detached; I wanted the images to be animated in a way that the coldness of AI still fails to achieve. So I turned to the website Videezy which I have used in the past for short non-AI video clips. I found videos to match “sparkle in your eyes”, “laughter in your voice” and “taste the sweetness of your lips” and then set about making still portrait versions of these videos. It is much easier to turn videos into still images than the other way round.
For the brass section, however, I couldn't find any suitable videos so was surprised and delighted by the (free!) website ImageFX which produced unlimited copies of images of brass players for me. I was trying to reproduce the feel of the Robert Palmer Addicted to Love video here so I used the following text prompt:
An elegant long-haired woman in a long flowing black dress and red lipstick playing a
trumpet (or French Horn, trombone or tuba) on an empty stage - close up shot.
It was about this time that I realised what the song was really about. It is a retelling of the Greek myth of Pygmalion which has been the inspiration for countless artists and musicians down the centuries. In the myth, the sculptor Pygmalion makes a statue so lifelike that he falls in love with it. The story was the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion and for the musical My Fair Lady which was based on it. It also inspired Tony Banks of Genesis to write Anything She Does which was based on pin-up calendars. In the original story Pygmalion's love for his statue was so strong that it came to life and this inspired the story of Pinocchio where the puppet eventually turns into a real boy. Pygmalion can also be seen, in a modern context, as a commentary on Artificial Intelligence.
I needed something special for the closing seconds of the video so came up with the idea of the four portraits hurtling down the gallery corridor and bursting through the doors to escape their confines.
The video took me two months to make, largely because I was feeling my way in the dark not really knowing what to do next. Now that it is finished I am very pleased with the result. I hope you like it too.
Click on the link below to watch the YouTube video.
Curious Idea
Ev’ry time I see the sparkle in your eyes
Could it be they’re shining for me?
And if that sweet look means what I surmise
What a curious idea that would be!
Ev’ry time I hear the laughter in your voice
Could it be you’re calling to me?
And if that sweet smile means what it implies
What a curious idea that would be!
But I’m curious to know if that idea of mine
Is founded on fact or if it’s pure moonshine
How would I ever know if you string me along
It’s taken all my courage just to sing this song
Ev’ry time I taste the sweetness of your lips
Could it be they hunger for me?
And if that sweet kiss means what I surmise
What a curious idea that would be!
Ev’ry time I taste the sweetness of your lips
Could it be they hunger for me?
And if that sweet kiss means what I surmise
What a curious idea that would be!
But I’m curious to know if that idea of mine
Is founded on fact or if it’s sheer moonshine
How would I ever know if you string me along
It’s taken all my courage just to sing this song
Ev’ry time I see the sparkle in your eyes
Could it be they’re shining for me?
And if that sweet look means what it implies
What a curious idea that would be!
What a curious idea that would be
But stranger things I have known.
