My studio is coming together

Here's a cover of a song I always loved

Interior of a CD shop in 1997.
A young Jake Morley enters holding gift voucher.

At that age I often preferred to discover an artist first through a live album, for a range of pretentious teenage reasons I’ve mostly forgotten.

When the first notes are played and the crowd roar as one, it’s hard not to get a little swept up. Who are all these people loving these songs I don’t know yet? There’s a sense of great potential, of being on the verge of crossing some life-changing threshold. I mean if all this lot seem to love this guy so much then maybe I will too? Maybe I’ll be down at the front with them next time? All very natural I think, and also the basis for several famous dictatorships we could name.

Clacking my way through the plastic cases that day I noticed a section on Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan was definitely Someone I Was Supposed To Know By Now. I picked out his MTV Unplugged album, and over the coming days grew to love the combination of abstract narrative imagery, pedal steel and unbelievably laboured cymbal roll ritardandos at the end of each song.

Being full of unrequited¹ teenage yearnings at the time, I fell particularly tragically for track 2, Shooting Star. Its story of a love beyond reach was what you might now call Relatable Content, and I added a few of its most meaningful lyrics to the folded up sheet of Meaningful Lyrics that I secretly carried around in my wallet. I even chose 1919 as my first bank PIN, as S is the 19th letter of the alphabet, a fact only recently declassified. The song is a bit of a footnote in his catalogue as it turns out, although I didn’t know that at the time.

Maybe it deserves more credit? I think it’s incredible. Although I did entirely forget about it until one of those dozy moments outside the realm of time and space between Christmas and New Years just gone. Strumming on my beloved £25 Facebook Marketplace Special 3/4 guitar, the chords rushed back to me, along with several adolescent memories I won’t share here.

So when my little studio room finally got painted last week and I was in need of a song to test out, this one bubbled up. I selected my finest² melodica, and my most exaggerated ritardando, and got to work.

I absolutely love this room

You can listen to the result here:

Shooting Star (cover)

As usual, there’s lots of live first take energy. I find it’s important not to let perfectionism stifle the creative impulses on a demo. Save that for the album recording sessions³.

I filmed the guitar / vocal take and added the final mix on top. You can check that out here:

Writing songs does take effort, as all meaningful things do. In life big prizes are not generally given away for free, and a song done well is a very high prize indeed. So a pretty mural on the wall isn’t going to do my hard work for me. I’m sure I’ll have some tough days here. But I am feeling ready for the work of uncovering good songs.

Of course whatever music I find here I will share with you! I hope you’ll give it a listen.

And don’t forget to roar. You never know who might be listening.

Love

Jake

1. Mostly because I would never actually allow myself to be in the position of being requitten.

2. Technically true, although it is also my only

3. In the distance we hear the wails of several producers I’ve worked with