1. Grey - Track one from "Head Above Water" by Marshlander

Grey

Untroubled I am by a burden of genius

I struggle with words to find something to say.

Life potters on - a distraction from boredom,

An attempt to stay solvent and living each day.

I'd like to be original; I know I'm derivative.

I wear my influences on open display

I grew up in colours I liked it that way.

Now I look in the mirror

And only see grey.

Look out of the window

Watching the river flow by

Look up to the skyscape

Clouds making shapes in the sky.

Make rhythms and colours from sounds that surround me

Watch how the wind shapes the river.

It changes each day.

Turn back to the blank page

Ink out a doodle.

I’m thinking in colour, but everything’s grey.

I hear my friends talking like proper songwriters

Of choruses, verses, key changes and all;

Of intros and outros and middle-eight solos,

Of descending bass lines and dominant chords.

I just tell stories or capture a moment

And fool myself it’s my inimitable way.

I imagine the colour in all that I say.

Then I look at the writing and only see grey.

Look out of the window

Watching the river flow by

Look up to the skyscape

Clouds making shapes in the sky.

Head full of music.  It’s all just the same tune.

The rhythms are boring and everything’s in the same key.

Turn back to the blank page

Ink out a doodle.

Another creation that nobody needs!

If I get close to finishing something important

I'll go and make supper though cooking’s a chore.

I could be at practice, or even rehearsing,

Or finishing something I started before.

I've books upon books of half-started writing

Or half-finished music that sits in a drawer.

The songs I’ve completed don’t leap off the score

I've started to practise them ten times or more.

Switch on the computer

Download the e-mails and weed out the spam.

Log into a forum,

Post in a thread, show how clever I am.

Share things on Facebook (too much information)

Leaving a trail through a garden of weeds.

One game of Tetris, one hand of Spider

Leaving a legacy nobody reads.

Sitting here pondering all my shortcomings

The list's getting longer and so is this song

I'll never be finished so maybe it's better if I simply stop.

(Music and lyrics by Marshlander - all rights reserved)

"Grey" describes my method for writing songs. However it may sound, it's not a completely haphazard process. While writing a song always takes me a long time - particularly writing lyrics - most of the time I don't like to think about chords until the lyrics and melody are in place, although naturally there are exceptions. I find that the songs I have written using a chord sequence do not give me the musical satisfaction that I get from those songs where I have to fit the harmonic accompaniment around a melody. A melody sometimes requires me to find, and even learn how to play, chords that don't always at first fall naturally under my fingers. Sometimes a melody insinuates itself at the same time as I am writing the lyrics, but I prefer to be able to focus on the lyrics first so that they have an integrity of their own, before I begin work on the music. I wouldn't consider myself a poet, but I guess many of my songs have begun their lives like poems. "Grey" took a while to emerge. It also had several more verses, one of them was even good enough to be in the song. However, the song was long enough with three verses, the final three lines and the choruses, so I edited out a lot of the text. Having to decide to lose a verse from a song is a bit like having to decide which friend has to be asked to leave an over-crowded boat!

I chose this as the first song on the album, because it sets a tone, opens up the songwriting process to possible discussion and the choruses mostly refer to what I see when I look out of the window, namely whatever waterway I happen to be navigating at the time. Living afloat, water seems to feature in a number of my songs, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically.