There's this song by the Hollies, which quite literally says, "Do the best you can." Herman's Hermits have a song titled "Sleepy Joe," which contains the line, "Do the best things you can everyday." And in their World Café appearance in November 2011, the Zombies said that they were just trying to do the best they could with what they had.
So there must be something to this.
Over the past year or so, I've been trying to do my best musically, and I realised recently that trying to do the best with what I have has pulled my music in a different direction. In my poetry class, the discussion turned towards the blues, and the professor explained that modern drumming owes almost everything to African beats, which I've heard before and makes a lot of sense. But then I started thinking about how that applies to me. I can't play drums, and I have no way of even faking percussive elements. (I suppose it's possible to do it with MIDI, but I'm averse to that.)
African drumming has influenced nearly all modern music, but there are still areas that retain their cultural influence. A few weeks ago, I was listening to the Milk Carton Kids a lot, and their whole instrumental corpus is just two guitars. Punch Brothers have some really great arrangements without any percussion. Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers recorded traditional songs without any percussion. But because percussion is so prevalent in the music I listen to, I felt that what I wrote was missing it. Many of the songs on Newcastle City Gaol feel a bit empty without percussion, but because I had no way of doing it, I just left it out.
But more recently, I've been writing around percussion. Instead of writing arrangements that are more rock-influenced, I've been writing with more classical influence. Whether its because my English major has made lyric writing more of a chore than anything else or whether I simply have no-thing to say, I haven't written any lyrics since October. So because I have no way to use percussion and I haven't been writing lyrics, what I have written has gradually shifted the genre that it belongs in. (Even though I don't believe in genre, I've noticed this shift.)
So the media has changed the content. Because I either can't or don't want to include certain musical elements, the classification of what I have been writing has changed.
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