{"id":25079,"date":"2024-08-23T09:55:33","date_gmt":"2024-08-23T15:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/?p=25079"},"modified":"2024-08-29T19:18:07","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T01:18:07","slug":"the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-songwriting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/?p=25079","title":{"rendered":"The Agony and Ecstasy of Songwriting"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Afro-Goth Fusion<\/h1>\n

This Dispatch is going to be a deep dive into the creative process. I know most of you are music lovers and hope you find it interesting \u2013 raw and unfiltered from the horse’s mouth instead of highly processed in movies like Once<\/em> or the upcoming A Complete Unknown<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The last time I wrote new songs was over a decade ago \u2013 and those were just experiments, nothing memorable. After that, I became concerned about the hundreds of hours of archival recordings I’d accumulated with bands and friends, and began editing and releasing some of those. Meanwhile I was writing my epic novel and starting on a big painting. It wasn’t until early 2020 that I got the itch to write new songs. Maybe reviewing those archival tapes had reminded me of the era in which I matured as a musician \u2013 the post-punk years of 1978-1980 \u2013 because it finally hit me that although that’s what got me started, I’d only written a few true post-punk songs, instead plunging straight into primarily instrumental experimentation with my band, Terra Incognita.<\/p>\n

I felt that the purest form of that original post-punk sound had been achieved by New Order immediately after Ian Curtis’s suicide, in their 1981 recordings of “Ceremony” and “Dreams Never End”. But rather than developing it further, they abandoned it in favor of club dance music.<\/p>\n