Week Fourteen: Jesse Sample’s Freak of the Week “Spin”

Jesse Sample’s Freak of the Week airs EVERY WEDNESDAY at 6pm EASTERN only on RadioRadioX.com

This is Jesse Sample. Roseanna Grimaldi and I are preparing for a songwriters showcase at the end of May. We compose a group known as the Secret Fashions. In the studio, we take our Electronica to the Wild West with reverb drenched guitars and charged up synthesizers. This is an exciting way to produce songs. This style is energetic but also acknowledges the quiet frontier loneliness outside that tented desert rave.

But a songwriter’s showcase calls on us to put forth our songs stripped down with its parts clearly visible. Voices with acoustic guitars test the potency of the potion. Can we, as writers, express the essence of a feeling in a simple and clear way? Now, Powerful surf guitars milling around in a fuzzy electronic sea always wins me over. It’s not hard. That style, pioneered by guys like Dick dale, inspires feelings of frantic freedom amid chaos. I love it and that style, so powerful, can cover up arbitrary lyrics.

A song is a different thing. It can be produced in a million different ways but the core of it must be telling the truth. A tension must be addressed and, and at least in part, resolved. That melody must do something honest and meaningful within that harmonic room. The writers must feel it and pass that feeling to their audience.

We are enjoying this exploration into things that we thought we created. It turns out that these things have something to reveal to us.