February Album Writing Month 2022

Sometimes I think, this situation requires an adult 
And I look around and realise it’s me.
Who the hell allowed that to happen?
Surely there’s someone more qualified, more prepared, more adult?
But there’s not and I realise there never was.
And that’s an existential crisis before breakfast…

We’re all just making it up, just tilting at windmills.

And I think, theres a lot of things I thought five ten years ago,
That were just complete bullshit, just flailing anger at all the wrong targets
But self awareness and kindness and realising that systems are cruel is like realising that
Maybe the adults and teachers you had didn’;t know better and it’s OK to be angry and it’s hard to forgive but you’ve gotta try and make it better, you know?
And that’s a lot of work, before end of business. 

We’re all just making it up, just tilting at windmills.
Hopefully trying to do what’s right.

FAWM 2022

Don Quixote

I started off trying to do an upbeat song but it went a bit goth, so I leaned into that. Lyrics are inspired by a tweet from a pal.

A Shimmering Bouquet of Crows 

Gather in the dark
A murder in the shade
To find a special place
To spread our wings out wide
to show a painted face
Let the endless outside

I perceive in liminal flow
A shimmering bouquet of crows

Shed our mortal masks
Let down the masquerade
To open up the space
Our arms are open wide
Wash away the taste
Of the day we left behind

I perceive in liminal flow
A shimmering bouquet of crows

To open up with space
To spread our wings out wide
to show a painted face
Let the endless outside

I perceive in liminal flow
A shimmering bouquet of crows

A Shimmering Bouquet of Crows

Tried to write an upbeat song in a scale I'd usually use for metal. It kinda worked.

Doom Boxes

What did I come in here for?

I’ve got something in mind I might forget
I’ve got a great idea I might regret, again
It makes me move

I’ve got eighty high definition thoughts
I’ve got something in the fridge starting to rot, oh yeah
I should do something about that

I’ve got something to do,
It’s written down, somewhere
I’m hacking through my programming to find it

Hey,
Did you ever think that, maybe.. Never mind

I’ve got a dozen black marks against my name
And a multiplying pile of plastic shame, I plan
To deal with soon

I’ve got seventeen things to do at once,
Pushing all this stuff in a doom box for now,
I guess that’ll do

I’ve got something to do,
It’s written down, somewhere
I’m hacking through my programming to find it
To find it
To find it
To find myself

Hey,
So, I spoke to the doctor the other day..

A lifetime of underperformance with
A self worth tied to what I’ve done, oh yeah
It’s like a noose
I’m ticking off boxes, making lists
Got an alarm set remind me to drink oh yeah
Im an adult

Doom Boxes (v2)

Tried to write something off a funk drumbeat, aiming at a sort of Rage Against the Machine feel and given I'm into Warhammer 40-k, the beat suggested the refrain and I went a bit political with it.

The Emperor Protects

Burn the heretic
Oppression
Kill the mutant
Projection
Purge the unclean
Infection
The emperor protects
He’s naked

Suffer not the witch
Oppression
Refuse the xeno filth
Projection
Attain our destiny
All nations
Die for God and creed
abomination

Build it back better
Purgation
Make it great again
Inflation
Refuse to be replaced
Conflation
His invisible hand
Descension

The Emperor protects
No clothes
The emperor protetcs
No soul
The emperor protects
His own
The emperor protects
He’s naked

You are so blessed in his Light
Exterminatus gaze
Spending lives like coin to find
Anathema remains

The Emperor Protects

A few days behind in my FAWM projects so I rolled up some random chords and asked pals for some prompts. This is also for the one-note-melody challenge. Aiming at a sort of QOTSA vibe with an angst, sweaty Scottish frontman.

Tuckered

I didn’t ask to be put into a neat little pocket
I didn’t ask for this milquetoast version of society
I don’t want your crocodile tears
Or your performative rage
I didn’t ask to be born with teeth bared
I didn’t ask for this perpetual sense of existential dread

And the world say
Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off

And yeah, I didn’t ask to be put into a nice little pocket
I didn’t ask for this milquetoast, constructed version of a society
I definitely don’t want your performative tears
I definitely don;t want yo0ur crocodile rage
I didn’t ask to be born with teeth bared
I definitely didn’t want this persistent sense of existential dread

But you know what?

Come the fuck in, or fuck the fuck off x 2

Tuckered

A few days behind in my FAWM projects so I rolled up some random chords and asked pals for some prompts. The prompt for this was imagining whats going through the head of a woman about to be burned for witchcraft.

Waiting for the Fire

Waiting for the fire
My friends and family here
A sea of well kent faces
Who’s to blame that I
am heaven sent to hell
Who says that I am tainted?

The boy who carries
A torch for me is not
My friend

The sin of being wild
Outspoken and worse, right
For me is all it’s taken
Made an example now
for their power projected
sacrificed and forsaken

The boy who carries 
A torch for me is not,
My friend

I loathe to leave them, 
My sisters and my brothers,
I cant protect you anymore
How could you stand aside
My father and my mother?
My kith and kin will watch me burn

The boy who carries 
a torch for me, he brings
My end.

Waiting for the Fire

Another FAWM song, from the prompt 'Wave' which also fits this week's challenge as a word with multiple meanings.

Lyrics
Unknowable until observed
Particulate and divided
Contradict expectations
Insignificant, until observed
Deviant and derided,
Accelerate their destruction
Unknowable until observed
Particulate and divided

Alone we are the particle,
To be isolated and erased
Together we can be the wave
That sweeps the observer away

Alone we are the particle
To be accelerated and displayed
Together we can be the wave
That smashes obstacles away.

Away.

A wave.

Wave

Originally from the prompt 'Hiraeth' but became more about moving on from hurtful things, with some added Lord of The Rings references.

Lyrics

Watching the world fall away,
As go into the west,
Take your rest of the burdens,
Cause you can never go back,
That home has gone away for always.

Find a new hole that fits,
Find a new belonging,
It’s no betrayal to survive.
If you can never go home, again

You miss it so much it hurts,
As your finding out your feet
And stripping off the curses,
The old has left upon you


You carry it with you
You carry them with you
Wherever you may go.

Departing Lindon

From the prompt 'Cake' from a pal, I threw a bunch of references in and it ended up being a bit political, which fits the punkier guitar energy.

Lyrics

Don’t let them say it’s a lie
A made up drug 
to dull  Our senses
They say to give it up, 
for unattainable things,
Remember, 
That the house always wins

And we will have bread and roses
And let us eat cake
And we demand bread and roses.
And we shall eat cake.

With tea, with friends
In the shadow of a guillotine
If it has to be,
Or with a lovely book,
Alone or in company, 
Let us eat cake.

Cake

FAWM 2022 attempt. Was listening to Limp Bizkit the other day and decided to attempt something in that vein and the song 'Dad Vibes' made me want to tackle still being an alterantive kid from the 90s/00s 20 years later, but now a grown up with responsibilities and stuff.

I'm generally not that sort of player/singer (and when I was, I tended more to Deftones than Bizkit) plus I only detuned to Drop D rather than B or C so not as low and chunky as proper nu-metal but I had fun with this.

Lyrics

Two decades plus guess it’s more than a phase
Still a deviant though theres bills to be paid
Things move along, what was nu is now retro
Though the times are a changin doesn’t mean you gotta let go

Evolution is a must,  can;t live in the past
See more than I did as a teenage asshole
Taste for rebellion, now with substance & passion
Less a bairns rage, more community action

Still solace in headphones, the gig is a church,
Just balancing it out between kids and work
That’s not surrender, it’s keeping it real
Though turned to the plough, don’t doubt the steel

Diagnosis found, the kid’s still alive,
Bearing the mileage of a detoured drive,
We’re all mad in here, and we’ve stories to tell,
So jump in the pit, we’re going to hell

I’m not growing old
Not selling out
Putting down roots to stand my ground,
I’m not growing old,
Still acting out
Spreading my arms to shelter now 


Two decades plus guess it’s more than a phase
Still a deviant though theres bills to be paid
Taste for rebellion, now with substance & passion
Less a bairns rage, more community action

Still solace in headphones, the gig is a church,
Just balancing it out between kids and work
We’re all mad in here, and we’ve stories to tell,
So jump in the pit, we’re going to hell

You'll Grow Out Of It

FAWM 2022 track 11.

This started from listening to the track released to promote the Food Fighters new movie and some weird gatekeeper backlash online about how extreme metal doesn't need help from Dave Grohl, which reminded me of the Probot record he did various metal singers. So I thought I'd do something that was aiming at death metal of sorts and the notional working title was 'Probiotic' as a smashing of Probot and Biotech vs Godzilla.

Anyways, this morning I hear that Russia invaded Ukraine and the notion of wargames came into my head, reminding me of the 80s film and that kinda became the inspiration for the lyrics, which are kin of a rant about being a millenial and sold a shiny future which has been snatched back from us rather than my original draft which was about trying to make a probiotic shot sound all metal and stuff (which was fun though, might come back to that.)

Of course, I'm totally not comfortable with screaming as a singer so I went with spoken word over the chunky guitars and I kinda dig the effect.

Lyrics

Growing up in the 80s was a trip,
Most of our food was so processed it glowed,
We’d dance to 99 Luftballoons and read 2000 AD,
We’d watch Mad Max and terminator 2, hear news stories about Chernobyl or see our mum;’s gay pals die of AIDS. 
The idea that we’d all go up in a nuclear fireball just seemed, inevitable like background radiation

Then the wall fell and they said it was the end of history and it would be nothing but peace and growth and prosperity forever.
Well, for who, exactly?

Then the towers fell and the recession hit and the pushback against the slow advance of minority rights came on full force, and we realised that despite going to college as we’d been told, we weren’t as well off as our parents had been at our age and that the brightness in the future was the fires of fascist book burnings, a climate apocalypse and or, the nuclear war wer thought we’d escaped.

Fuck this future, fuck these asset stripping, power crazed clowns, playing wargames in the middle of several global emergencies,,
Fuck this millenarian culture war, witch craze, death cult, baying for blood cause other people have the cheek to be a bit different.
Fuck these pyramid scheme cashing out techbros, busting unions and trying to sell us digital monkeys as the world literally burns.
Fuck this future, we deserved better, our kids deserve better, 
It’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

The End of History

Another FAWM 2022 entry. This time inspired by the four chord challenge and a discussion on a Warhammer fan page (the Fluffenhammer)as to whether Space Marines have bones, which got even sillier and ended up spreading onto Twitter and dragging in authors like Adrian Tchaikovsky (who gets credit for the image used.)

Anyways, this is what my mind made of that...

Lyrics

Idiots and fools 
Cant they see that the rules
Which I play by
Are different
Why cant they see
That my mastery
Defies restriction

My study of evolution shows
It repeatedly goes
To cephalopod
And for good reason
Versatile and strong,
At any pressure they belong
And multiply camouflaged

You may say this is heresy
But I say this is art
An act of sub creation
Deviating from the form
Of what we are

And they shall know no fear
And they shall have no bones…

But tentacles aplenty

I submit to the board
My strongest retort
Without contrition
My work will continue
Though unblessed by you
And you’ll see
I was right all along

You may say this is lunacy
But I say this is inspired
An act of sub creation
Deviating from the norm
Of what we’re meant to desire

And they shall know no fear
And they shall have no bones…

Make no bones about it.

A Disregarded Note of Censure From the Ethics Board

FAWM 2022  effort 13 - was listening to some Lamb and Tricky and thought I'd attempt some trip hop. 

Lyrics

Here's to the kids that fell through the cracks
Sweat blood & tears walked through hell to get back
Only to find this work didn't want us
Now those who wandered do need to get lost.
In the drinks, the dreams, the pills, the pages, the art, the antics, the stims and the stages
So much more that we're taught to be seeing,
When accepted ourselves as liminal beings. 

We are we are, in our own fime and apace
We made it so we could stay (safe)
We are we are, in our own time and space,
We made it so we could remain. 

Off on an adventure, a final frontier
Escaping all that draws out the tears,
Step through the portal, into the book
Rise above punching down the snark and the looks
Make a roll to save, a trip through the night,
Dance and laugh till the daystar bright,
Back to reality, pull on the mask,
Carrying worlds with you to make it last.

Through The Cracks

I remember that I hadn't used my new resonator at all during FAWM and that kinda slid to men a sort of southern gothic vibe. Ish.

Lyrics
They called the last month the blackness,
And the first the wolf burrow.
From the blood of hosts murdered in violation of guest welcome
And women dooked and burned as withes,
This last has remembers.

From people murdered so their body parts could be sold to doctors,
To cannibals in the hills, and generations bought & sold for oil and gold,
Theres a reason we plant rowan trees against evil spirits
And the land remembers.

We wear it well, with smiles and arms open wide,
But we drink too much and hold each other back.
From rogues and revenants, this land resonates
Sick saints and sinners, to sleekit saviours, this land needs a saining.

Or we’ll never deserve better.
And that kills me.

February Album Writing Month 2022

chriscrowing