That's for visiting my page.
My name is Nick and I like to think of myself as a songwriter.
I get asked a lot about the songwriting process so I thought I would share some of my songs and go into detail about where the inspiration came from, how the melody was formed, how to arrange and produce and many other aspects.
I'd love people to get in touch if you have any questions too.
The lockdown brought out the best in some people, and the very worst in others. I think it damaged friendships as some people, out of frustration, expressed their misguided views on the situation.
Misinformation was everywhere and conspiracies were rife. Some fell headfirst into some very dangerous rabbit holes.
Failed journalists were popping up everywhere offering the ‘truth’, and promised even more revelations if you only supported their channel financially.
I had a chord progression which was a bit ‘James Bondy’ that I liked but was really struggling for words. And then it suddenly hit me. I had all the material I needed on Facebook. I made metal notes of people’s crazy posts, their attitudes, circumstances, and demeanour. From here, the song pretty much wrote itself.
However, that was not the end of it. I had to come up with an arrangement to compliment the rest of the song, and that’s where the fun really started.
It was important to me to build a soundscape, a journey as it were and to somehow convey the madness of paranoia which the world was seeing on a daily basis. This was a big production and one which I threw everything at. I even think there may be a kitchen sink in there somewhere.
Because of the nature of the song and its arrangement, I do know this was not easy for Matt to mix and I have lost count of how many different mixes there are. He’s added things, taken them away, resampled snare drums, mixed in sound effects. You name it, he’s done it but I can tell you that this finished version was well worth the wait.
Sometimes a song writes itself and this is very much the case here. I remember picking up an acoustic guitar and strumming the chord sequence and actually making up the first verse in one take. That was it. It was like the first verse already existed.
It felt very ‘Britpop’, so when it came to the arrangement, the drums followed a familiar pattern which was matched by the rhythm guitars and bass. The piano filled in the gaps and as Matt always says ‘you can never have too many backing vocals’ so I layered them up a plenty!!
It was clear to me that with the right direction, this could be a crowd pleaser if I ever got to play it live, so that was very much in my mind as I finished the song both lyrically and in the arrangement.
I played it to my good friend Steve, and he said that if this had been released in the mid 90’s, then we’d have been playing it on the main stage at Glastonbury!
I remember writing this with a smile on my face and doing my best to make it as ‘feel good’ as possible.
Writing songs on a piano is so different to writing songs on a guitar and vice versa. However, whilst this song ended up being recorded on piano, it actually started life on the guitar.
I’d been playing around with a chord progression which included several diminished chords as they add tension and drama to the sound. The first line seemed quite haunting - ‘that photo in the hall, it seems so long ago’. It sets the scene for what is a heart-breaking subject matter for a song. Once upon a time, things seemed perfect, but whilst it is going to hurt you badly, now is time for me to go…… and by ‘go’.... Well, take from that what you will.
I wanted the arrangement to sound intimate and heartfelt. To this end, I asked Matt to mix it in such a way that the listener felt like they were sitting on the same piano stool as the singer.
I also had to make sure my vocal performance delivered, given that for the most part it was just vocal and piano.
Strings were introduced to add some drama and tension, but then taken away just before the end to resolve the piece.
To date, there have been three cover versions of this song, which is lovely knowing that others think it good enough to want to record themselves.
Religion is such a strange thing to me. My brain cannot accept an extraordinary claim without extraordinary proof to back it up.
I remember a street preacher shouting that the only way to get to heaven and eternal paradise is to believe in god and that for all those who don’t believe, they would go to hell. My mother had recently died and she was the nicest person on the planet, and an atheist. So I asked him if she was going to hell, and he truly believed that she was.
If god did exist (which he clearly doesn’t), then why would he be so utterly cruel and discriminatory?
I do not swear much in real life, so it was a difficult decision to leave the F bomb in the first verse, but on reflection it was the only word I could use to express the sentiment. I do not apologise to anyone if it has offended you.
I’d got the first line in my head for several weeks. ‘Dear God I want to ask you why you let my loved ones die”. The minor chords were obvious to me and I knew what they were before I even picked up the guitar.
Now that I had the theme for the song, I started writing lyrics down whenever they popped into my head. This happened at random times but mostly when I was out walking the dog. I think it is important not to try and force songwriting. For example, I never sit down and think ‘I’m going to write a song today’. It just happens when it happens. Creativity cannot be forced in my opinion.
I’ve so many notes with lines of lyrics for this song, and most of them didn’t make it into the final version because they were either not good enough, or they didn’t convey the message. As it turns out, there are only two verses in this song, but I think that's enough. It could have been so much longer but that would risk boring the listener.
Musically it is not that adventurous. Whilst it has a couple of ‘jazz’ chords, for the most part it is standard minor chords. I wanted to have a section which lifted, and this was where I sing ‘Dear God you’re not that great’. The chords rise and then fall creating a sense of drama and dread. Similarly, the arrangement amplifies this with the strings, backing vocals and percussion. Dynamics are important in songwriting. The listener has to be taken on a journey.
The arrangement for this came together really quickly because I could hear it in my head before I’d recorded the first note. Whilst I wrote it on guitar, I knew that it had to start with a piano. Instruments were added as the song progressed and I think there’s even a kitchen sink in the bigger sections.
I do not feel like I am that good on lead guitar as it is not my main instrument, so I really had to work hard at writing parts which sounded good and complimented the song. In the end, to me it sounds a little Pink Floyd and I was pleased with the end results.
As the song was developing, I was aware that it was becoming quite dark, so I attempted to throw in some dark humour. I’m particularly fond of the lines;
“I want to thank you for the pain, Dear God please don’t do that again”
And
“Dear God this is not a joke, the logic disappears in giant clouds of smoke”
It's funny that when I released a demo mix of this on YouTube, several people contacted me to say how much they liked this song as it resonated with how they felt about religion. In fact, I’d say that this song has attracted the most interest in that sense out of all the songs I have released so far. Even some of my devout religious friends took the time to comment, although not everyone was impressed by the F Bomb.
This song was anchored on and around the bass line. It's a simple minor blues pattern and I was thinking about some of the dirty politicians which gave me a loose theme and starting point for the narrative of the song.
I love the first line which goes “get out of this dirty town” and then “it goes a bit like this”, as if to say, I’m just starting the song, and it's kind of like this but it might not be. I think that was just a throwaway line at the start that I was going to change, but in the end I liked it so much it ended up in the finished song.
I mentioned politicians earlier and whilst I do not reference anyone specifically, at the time this was written, Donald Trump was president and Boris was our Prime Minister.I think most songwriters are guilty of using metaphors and that’s certainly true of me on this song. I think it's good to let the listener try to work out the meaning behind a metaphor and to this end, I won’t go into too much detail about each line.
It hung around for a while as I wanted to get a bridge section nailed down, and that took a couple of months before I had something I was happy with. I was half planning for this album to be a kind of concept album, and the title I had in mind was ‘The Great and Secret Show’, and this is why there’s a line in the middle section which refers to ‘the great and secret show’, but ultimately this wasn’t the direction I ended up going in. There’s also the line ‘could this be a movie now’, which was a reference to the song The Man With the Camera.
The quiet and slightly psychedelic section in the middle was stolen from a song I wrote in the 90’s which never really went anywhere but sounded a bit ‘Beatley’. It adds dynamic to the song as a whole and because it is almost ethereal, the solo section has a big impact when that comes back in.
For the solo section, I was torn between a dirty synth sound or a guitar solo. So I recorded both hoping that Matt would choose one or the other. As it was, he made the genius decision to use both in a question and answer scenario.
For the ending, I was really struggling but Matt suggested what we ended up with, and for a really cool end, I reversed the main guitar intro section to make the production feel like it had gone full circle.
As with a lot of songs, this took a while to develop as the lyrics did not come easily. Lines need to flow well, and getting the right balance is not always easy. I probably have about four other songs worth of lyrics with the lines that I cut / changed in this song before it became the final version.
Ageing can be terrible. Especially when it starts to affect your memory. Someone I know very well was telling me about a relative who had dementia. Their memory was slowly fading so they decided to go on what would be their last holiday to the place where they had their honeymoon many, many years ago. The reason for this was because it was a familiar and comforting place to be. Somewhere from the past and somewhere different to the nursing home.
This became the story for this song. What if a woman went to visit her husband in the home. What would they say to each other as his memories faded in and out? Where would they go? Somewhere safe, somewhere new, somewhere good.
I had a chord progression which I really liked. It was in 6/8 time and quite upbeat. Usually when I am writing, I start with a chord progression and then just sing whatever words come to mind (unless I’ve written the words first, which is rare). With this chord progression the first line I sang was “take me to somewhere new’. But it didn’t really go anywhere after that for a couple of weeks. Then randomly, one day I was out walking our dog and I remembered what my friend had told me and everything clicked into place.
The narrative took the form of a conversation between the man and wife. Originally I was going to sing both parts, but that seemed silly when I had the option of asking Georgia Batterley to take on the role of the wife. Georgia very kindly agreed and actually went the extra mile by recording several harmony vocals as well.
The man recognises his wife as someone he knows and loves. That’s all he knows. He feels safe with her but he can’t remember her name. The line “Just take me anywhere, as long as it's with you” is kind of heartbreaking.
The humming section was deliberate. It takes the pace down a little and gives the listener time to reflect on what is happening.
Whilst slightly ambiguous, I make no apologies when I tell you that the final line of the song (“take me away to somewhere new”) is actually the man saying that he is now ready to leave this earth. They have been on their final trip to somewhere safe and he is at peace. It happens to all of us this thing called death and my intention for this song was to convey a bittersweet narrative.
The original recording was much bigger with lots of electric guitars and strings, but once Georgia had recorded her parts, the song didn’t need it, so all of that was stripped out to leave a much simpler acoustic performance.
I hope this song resonates with those who have experienced the effect of this horrible disease and also that it is in some small way, a tribute to my friend and their family member.
The verse section for this song was actually written in the mid ‘90s, and there have been several chorus sections kicking around for the last 30 years which I was never happy with. It was also very much a guitar based rock arrangement back then with the rhythm being a bit like the song Wonderwall by Oasis.
I always liked the verse sections and decided that I’d try to write a brand new chorus. It felt like it should have an electronic bluesy feel to the song.
Being new to Logic Pro software, I was amazed at how many sounds there were, so I started to experiment with drum loops one day. I don’t know why but this song came to mind, so I had to try to remember how it went and what the chords were. Very quickly I started a groove and the song fell into place. A simple electric piano part provided an anchor for me whilst I meticulously programmed a ‘boppy’ synth bass part,
It needed a chorus, and one day out of the blue, I came up with what you hear really quickly. It was far better than any of the previous ones and allowed me to make it big - just as choruses should be!!
The songwriting process is interesting because good songs often go through several drafts before the finished version is ready, and Green Light is no exception. Sections were added, others cut, lyrics changed, timing changed etc and that’s even before getting to the arranging and production stage.
The end section had a repeated chorus, but when listening back, it didn’t add anything to the song so I was brutal and cut it. I think the song works better ending where it does with just the single chorus.
The song was inspired by a night in Derry, Ireland back in 1996. My band had played a Halloween festival in Derry that evening, and I met a girl. We went back to hers for drinks and she had a lamp which had a green bulb in it. We listened to the Stone Roses and stayed up chatting for most of the night until morning time.
To make the song work, I created a story about forbidden love. I.e. a good catholic girl falling for a British guitarist. In the story, they both want the passion but stop themselves. The ‘Green Light’ is both the actual lamp, but also a metaphor for letting something happen.
I love the line ‘take off your dirty clothes, they’re so clean’, just because it's kind of sleazy and has a double meaning.
As I learn more about crafting songs, I feel it's important to introduce hooks wherever possible. In this case it was the IT Crowd sounding keyboard which cuts through throughout the song. Musical hooks can be as important as sung hooks.
Just one more thing. In the production mix, Matt removed all the crash cymbals from the second chorus which was genius as its has a totally different dynamic from the other choruses and set it apart.
Another song born out of lockdown. Originally, this was going to be a piano instrumental track. I had the basic melody which I’d recorded, and it was nice but it needed to go somewhere else. I was playing it on the piano one day and accidentally played the wrong chord, which was in an entirely different key, but somehow, it sounded perfect. From there I finished the melody of the song.
I had a particular friend in mind who wasn’t in the best place even before lockdown, but the isolation made it so much worse. They were unable to smile. This is what this song is about.
The original demo was just piano and vocal, and there’s something hauntingly beautiful about it which we could never recapture in the final version.
I must have made 50 attempts to get a lead vocal that I was happy with as the range of notes was slightly out of my comfort range. In the end, I decided to record a 3 part harmony arrangement.
The lead guitar is a strange one. In the mixing stage, Matt decided to move it back a bar. It works really well but sounds so different to the original intention.
I love the fact that musically, it changes key from Am to Eb. It kind of breaks all kind of rules but I think it works for the song.
I really like the sound of the clock in the hall at the start of the song. This imagery inspired me to use the actual phrase in another song called The Perfect Storm.
There’s a song by Paul McCartney and Wings on their London Town album called ‘I’m Carrying’ which is such a simple song and McCartney plays a very simple arpeggio in E major on the 12th Fret. One day I picked a guitar up to play it but by mistake, I started in the 13th fret, which put it in the key of A minor. I continued to play the song in this position and it sounded so interesting that I decided to keep it.
The lyrics came really quickly and I don’t think its any secret that it is about how smart phones and speakers are always listening so that they can build their AI algorithms in order to profile and manipulate us in some way.
I wanted to arrange the song so that each verse was different to the last, so had lots of fun layering up sounds and atmosphere.
For the end section, Matt suggested we have a musical fade out section similar to the end of ‘The Day Before You Came’ by ABBA.
See if you can spot a brief snippet of the theme tune from a popular British Science Fiction series near the end…..
I set myself a challenge to write, record and mix a song in just one week, and I actually managed to finish this song in just six days. I have no idea how it happened but starting on a D chord is always a great way to start a song.
Sometimes, songs literally do write themselves, once you have the first line.
"What would you say, what would you do, if I walked away, would you sit and stay and watched me disappear into the blue"
I'm a big fan of harmony and backing vocals, and this song has an abundance of both. It's nice writing, recording and then hearing back the counterpoint harmonies which I think complement the lead vocal really well.
There's a stop after the first chorus and whilst the song is called 'Save Me Now', I deliberately omitted the word 'Now' as I think it clashed with the start of the guitar solo.
I'm not a natural lead guitar player, so I'm always nervous when it comes to reccording lead guitar lines. However, whilst ot perfect, this one happened really quickly as well. So much so that I continues recording in the end section of the songs which gives an almost question / answer effect with the lead vocal.
The chorus seemed to write itself. D to Dmaj7 round a few times and then down to an Em. What could go wrong?
Lyrically there’s nothing special here, but it tells a nice story I think.
Originally, I had programmed the drums and that version is the one which was completed in six days. Since then, the brilliant Steve Dutton recorded his real drums and then Matt Stockwell used these in his final album mix.
By sheer accident, this became the title track for the album.
Thinking of a title can often be the hardest part but then I was thinking that this project really helped me get through the lockdown. It kind of kept me sane, so in a way it did 'save me'.
This was the title of the first song I wrote. Ironically, it was written using one of the Ukuleles I’d built earlier in the year during the first lockdown.. It’s loosely based on a dream I had about my mum. She died in 2016, so dreams are the only time I get to see her. In the dream, she looked much younger, and was dancing away. This gave me a starting point for the lyrics.
Writing on the Ukulele is so different to guitar and piano because a lot of the simple chords shapes are actually more complex jazz chords that you would not naturally go to on a different instrument.
For any musicians reading this, some of the chords used in this song are..... C. A9, Cdim, Dim, Cmaj7, Fmaj7, D9, G7, E7, Fmin6...... It may seem like there's a lot going on here, but most of these chord are just slight variations of each other and come naturally when playing a Ukulele.
I had great fun experimenting, layering this new song up with lots of backing vocals, piano’s, bass and drums. Once I had everything recorded, I attempted a mix down of Let’s Dance and was really pleased with it.
Around this time, I was having a catch up on the phone with my old friend Matthew Stockwell. We’d lost touch in recent years, but as with many other people, the lockdown prompted me to make contact with old friends to see how they were. Some good things came out of isolation.
I was telling him about my plans, and by sheer coincidence, he told me that he had been getting into sound engineering and was looking for a project to work on. He asked me to send over the multi tracks for Let’s Dance containing all the instruments and vocals I’d recorded so that he could have a go at mixing the song.
About two weeks later, he sent back the version which was to become the finished mix that ended up on the album. I have to say that his mix blew me away. It was a hundred times better than my mix.
Right there and then we agreed that Matt would mix what would be the whole album. With one song in the can, my only problem now was that I had to write, arrange, perform and produce another ten or eleven songs…….
