About a year ago I invested in an anonymous review of this song, Say Goodbye, which is a simple piano ballad with a VERY somber and hopefully beautiful aspect to it. You can click here to listen to it for free in a new window if you like.
Now of course it isn’t fair to compare apples and oranges like that. Some of my favorite songs of old were studio recorded with great attention to arrangement and/or much more complex than just a simple ballad; and they had excellent musicians in collaboration on them. Still even those I most like didn’t score as high as this plaintively soft song. In fact this one was recorded and produced by myself in isolation from others; I did the PAD strings, and the sound engineering myself. True, my wife did make a request of me as I was writing portions of it which likely challenged me to improve it. But still it hits me as kind of interesting that the highest rated song of mine is one I did entirely on my own.
Now don’t get me wrong, I loved my recording studio time with several producers in the past (most all of them), and I’m not comparing myself as a producer with anybody. But I’m wondering about how this song is truer, perhaps, to my genuine musical inspirations. When left alone to play and write a song, I most often create something soft, sweet, and yes a bit sad. And it is really difficult for me to write a song that is based on joy versus angst. Perhaps the reason this one turned out more pleasing than some to anonymous listeners across the internet is due to authenticity and lack of dilution from writer through producer and collaborators and on to digital +s/-s on a computer. Or then again, perhaps it is just how this time my review request fell on a red moon shading across a cactus plant in Arizona, who knows? Meanwhile, I need to play piano more these days.
If you read this far, please know you can download for free one of those songs I spoke of that I enjoy and that this song beat out anyway… you can download it with just a click here.
