seb_7

I love this little story. It's the very tiniest bit autobiographical, but spun on its head and put in a different context. I'd write a dozen songs like this if I could.

Most of the music is pretty random. Partly machine generated and manipulated? I can't remember. Certainly it was thrown up in the air, spliced and diced and toyed with until it worked. But to my ears it really works.

What the hell genre is this???

Is this a half decent disco track? Don't know, it's definitely one of my preferred ones though. Why does this work and the others don't? Probably because I didn't intend for it to be disco...?

A bit odd lyrically. Probably one of those songs which is autobiographical, but twisting things so it doesn't feel like it is. These things don't start out as being about my own experience, and actually actively try not to be. But I guess it's always there.

I can't remember where this one came from. Quite experimental. Actually a bit Bowie-esque. I like the trancey bit at the end. Not enough melody to take you through the earlier parts though. But I like the boldness of it though.

A lot of my songs at this point were kind of to do with discovery and escape, this one seems to be about the existential threat that that poses.

I love the stark rawness of this. Hard cut edges and blank spaces. Short, but not sweet.

I also like the blunt honesty of the lyric - knowing that everything is going to shit but not quite being arsed enough to do the heavy lifting of emotions required to do anything about it.

I was listening a lot to Beck's 'Morning Phase' and this was my attempt at occupying that kind of mood and sonic space. It turned out quite different, but still a song to be pleased with.

I re-recorded it as Stephen Ellis, but this version has an emotion to it which the later version lacked a bit.

Lyrically its about the often seeming impossibility of having authentic and heart felt conversations with your kids, but equally how wonderful it is on those rare occasions when it actually happens.

I think this one is about the return of a way of seeing the world that coincided (cause or effect?), with me writing lyrics again. It's not always a pleasant or conducive way to see the world tbh, and this song reflects on that.

Achieved an amount of sonic space here which is affecting. And tuned the bass drum I think rather than adding bass. All pretty simple but effective stuff.

Prob my best disco track? Something disturbingly Robbie Williams about it though....?

Lot of fun on this one. I used some freebie software to do the guitar effect. Think the song was just born from me messing around with that.

I never did go to a reunion though, not high school nor any other variety.

This was the first song I did that genuinely felt like accomplished song writing to me. I felt this one.

The production is pretty rough and ready, but arrangement is actually pretty complete.

I felt it when I was singing it too. It was the first time that I'd let go vocally, and you can really tell that I'd not used my vocal chords in that way for quite some time.

I got very close to re-recording it, and even thought about resurrecting it for live performance. But it's a bit too heavy to lift. And I'm not sure I have more to offer it than is already there.

I heard this drum loop and liked it instantly. Brutal. The lyric is just riffing on the idea of someone who is cool "as" fuck. Nothing complex going on here...

Cheekily sampled Tim's guitar on top, which works nicely and was rather fun.

Listening back the main thing that strikes me is how comfortable I was with having long instrumental build ups and sections back then. More recently I became increasingly wary of boring the listener.

First and only song with Trap hi-hats... I'm surprised that I didn't bin this one off tbh. It's not got many redeeming qualities.... I think by this time my creative juices had dried up a bit, but I still wanted to make sure I was outputting something, which probably paid off in the end, but this song is not good at all.

I had an old ratty guitar that I wrote this on. But I'm pretty pleased with the guitar sound actually.

I was trying to rip off the riff in Jubilee Street, and obviously ended up with something totally different.

The lyrics were a pretty accurate reflection of the best parts of my family life at the time. But the deliberately jarring instrumental bits seemed like a necessary and relevant counterpoint to the otherwise sunny outlook.

This song felt different somehow, when I did it. A bit more serious. A bit more hard won. I think the initial flurry of songs was done and out there too, so this felt like it was a clear statement that, to myself and others that I was just going to keep doing this stuff.

Lyrically it centred around an image in my head of a lynching. So quite dark.

This was an attempt to do a full-band-sounding song, my first attempt I think. I was still surprised and a bit freaked out at the fact that I was writing and recording and singing on songs again. This was an attempt to see if I could do something which sounded like I might have done with a band, back in the day... It really doesn't. But also it kind of does?

A laudable, early attempt. Deeply flawed. "Not his best work". Etc.

Lyrically it's about Eastenders. True.

As the title says, this was the 4th song which I wrote after my hiatus. Super super simple. Oddly it was one that seemed to resonate with people, even though it never has with me. Maybe cos I know that the "mandolin" line doesn't mean anything - it just came to me and I couldn't replace the word with anything which worked as well. Which is annoying because I hate mandolins!

The bridge lyric is stolen from 'Baby I'm Shattered', an old Spectators song. I was clearly trying to form a bridge to the past there.

Before I was writing and recording songs I'd been playing around with computer based music for years. I didn't publish any of it and so it's all lost, on a hard drive in a municipal dump somewhere. But the instrumental backing of this song was the last thing I did before starting seb_7. I liked it and figured I could do some vocals over the top. It just about works, sort of.

The lyrics are all just strung together headlines from Closer magazine.

And the backing is mainly bits of Bowie's 'Fame', sampled and cut and spliced into a rhythm track.

I was listening to the World Service a lot on the way to and from work. It was all a bit bleak after the 2008 crash. Little did I know that Brexit and far-right populism was just around the corner, but at the time things seemed pretty bad and we'd been massively let down by our politicians.

So it was a good time to have writing songs as an outlet.

This one loops and builds and I just riff over it lyrically.

I love the fact that I accidentally mis-edited the vocal and cut off half a word but couldn't be bothered to correct it! I was more relaxed about such things back then!

This song is about those existential moments where everything seems predictable, repetitious and mundane, but then something breaks through, the simplest of things, and in an instant, the world is transformed into something rare and beautiful.

But more significantly, this song is the first song which I'd written in 15 years. In what felt like a lifetime.

I'd tinkered with music production on my computer in the years since leaving The Spectators. But I never shared what I made and most of the pieces I produced were ideas that I played with for a few days, but never actually completed. Most significantly though, I never created vocal lines or lyrics. I never tried and never wanted to.

And then Tim released a song to Soundcloud, a song which he wrote and on which he sang. There was something about this act which made it feel possible for me to do the same. I guess at this point that urge to do something myself became not only a possibility, but almost a necessity.

That's not to say that I ever sat down with the intent of writing a song. Instead, I was tinkering away one day, putting a simple organ chord track on top of a simple drum beat, nothing special. When all of a sudden a vocal line came into my head. I was quite taken aback. I stood up from my seat and took a step back from the computer. I stopped what I was doing and busied myself with something else for the rest of the day. And then returned later, with growing curiosity to what was happening.

I couldn't even sing the song out loud at first - too embarrassed at being over heard by Dani and the boys. And I had no microphone to record it with.

I wrote 2 more songs before concluding that this was "something". Something I should lean into. That meant declaring to Dani that I wanted to buy a microphone so that I could record some songs. I think she was a bit perplexed.

I then had to wait for a day when she was out with the boys, and I could close the curtains and setup the mic on the stand, and sing.

I was relieved that it sounded ok. Good enough, even. Good, even.

And since then, I've been a songwriter again.