Seeing Stars

By now, I have listened to about two hundred people in four or five days, and I'm seeing stars. It might not sound like work, but critically listening to singers, trying to imagine them on your songs, is quite a bit of effort.
The Starnow website makes things more enjoyable. For those who haven't seen it, Starnow is a talent-spotting website that provides everything from soap-opera extras to voice-over actors for detergent adverts, lingerie models to TV presenters. It also has musicians; but occasionally the odd lingerie model sneaks in to your casting call. Its remarkable how these multi-talented types put themselves about in varying capacities: actor/signer/dancer/model... looking for anything they can get their hands on. Some singers put on their profiles what basically amounts to soft porn, which helps brightens up the list of mugshots a bit.

The best bit is sorting through the list, determining those who are going to make a shortlist and who will not. The applicant list has a large, appealing red button labelled 'Unsuccessful', which you can press like an evil S.P.E.C.T.R.E bossman, condemning the hapless lingerie model to cruise liner gigs forever. Or, you can press the blue-pill 'Short-list' button to unplug your dancing TV presenter from their unreality into the real-world.

With so many talented singers, the strategy I've had to adopt is to sift through the list, short-listing those who I reckon might have a style that suits the music. I'm still left with over 40 singers though, and unless I'm planning on starting a choir eventually I'll have to whittle that down too.

Those who didn't make it either didn't provide a demo, so I couldn't hear them, or had a good voice but I guessed it wouldn't suit the style. There have been a wide range of styles, house, heavy metal, soul, indie, folk... its very subjective but sometimes I listen to a voice and I feel that I could hear that on a song I wrote.

Interestingly, the cover demo that I heard repeatedly on StarNow profile is the Snow Patrol song 'Run'. So many girls decided to demo it, I started to think that maybe Snow Patrol covered it and Leona Lewis sang it.
Last Wednesday, I invited one applicant down to my temporary studio for a jam. Amongst a batch of singers who had reached out to me recently, Aidan Parle stood out as an enthusiastic guy, with a bunch of great songs and a hunger to be involved in a new music project. His song, 'The Thorn', is a soulful, emotive anthem that in places reminded me of Seal, and I wanted to hear the real thing.

When Aidan arrived, I was quickly at ease. He told me of his current adventures playing traditional Irish music in London, dropping in an original Aidan Parle tune here and there. I was in Dublin myself recently, and heard first-hand how these boozy improvisations can bring audiences together into one pitch-deaf din; but one that connects people in the way that ensure these jams continue to be so popular.

I'm told this feeling of community is dwindling, unfortunately. Aidan knows more than most, following the theft of his guitar after a recent show. Stealing instruments from a musician is equivalent to stealing an old man's walking stick, a diabetics insulin or a cushion from a haemorrhoid sufferer; its just not proper.

Aidan recovered from the larceny by penning 'Letter to an inmate', a song about his imagined incarcerated thief. He has recently appeared on Balcony TV, a website that promotes new acts by making videos of live performances on a balcony in Camden, Dublin and somewhere in Germany.

We clicked well. After swapping some music we'd worked on it was time to begin a recording of 'Funeral for Democracy', a difficult-to-sing ballad about the demise of our democratic process towards the globalist plutocracy that are gradually consolidating their inhuman institutions and grip on the world. Refreshingly, I'm hearing a decent live rendition, and after the first couple of takes I'm already at the point where I was satisfied enough for a demo; further work would have been to perfect things for a real recording.

It was great to see that he'd practised the song, prepared the lyrics and was generally well-up for singing it. I'd definitely work with him again and I'm now putting together the takes to play my bandmates.