I was recently asked about how I write songs. I want to answer the question because I think that the story of the songs might help me and therefore might help others.
"The Vulture" started out because I wanted to write a song like I had heard my idols sing. The rockstars I idolized were bad boys who abused themselves with hard lifestyles. Jim Morrison being the key figure. Robert Plant a close second. These guys have a few songs with lyrics that ask the listener to go somewhere, to leave and to leave with them as the leaders. Nora Jones also sang a song called "Come away with me." Where am I going, I wondered. If I'm going with someone I idolize, Do I need to know?
To get inspired I thought about the last conversation a man might have while dying alone. If a man was alone when he died who would his last conversation be with? I imagined it would be with a vulture who was about to eat him!
What would they talk about? The vulture would try to convince him to just give in so it would be easier to gnaw on his organs. The man would try to bargain with the bird to get one last dying wish.
Nora Jones's song "Come away with me" was a good starting point, but I wanted a darker sound so I used a different Nora song as my starting point for the music. I was also inspired by Jethro Tull's "Locomotive Breath" for the lyric about the steam of a locomotive.
The song evolved on the piano but became a different monster on the keyboard because I could not control the dynamics as fluidly as I could on the piano. The ending had to have a much different feel than the beginning but I had to get inventive on the keyboard to make that happen. I went back to the original genesis of the chords in Malfunktion on my Triangular Conception album Concrete Windows in order to understand how to get insane on the keyboard.
