I’ve always got a to-do list of songs I’m working on and, this time last week, Three Broken Glasses was not on it. Last Thursday, I made good progress on one of the more complicated productions on the list and when I closed the session around 2 AM felt, as I often do having worked on something more involved, the spontaneous desire to make something immediate and direct. So instead of going to bed, I sketched out the beginnings of a quirky, minimal-ish beat. Here it is:
I knew I wanted to add some spooky vocals, so the next day, I opened up my giant note of random lyric ideas and near the top was a full verse that exactly fit the vibe:
Three broken glasses on a three dollar floor, A house made of paint with windows for doors, Three ashen sofas and a tall wool chimney, A house not fit for purpose nor, presumably, me.
I have no idea when I wrote those words, or why. Either way, past Steve really came through for me there. I was left with this rough sketch:
I assumed I’d leave it in the ideas backburner folder while I worked on my list, but on Monday decided I wanted to dive in, and it was done by Tuesday.
Operating under the guiding artistic principle of ‘doing whatever I want’, the tune becomes something completely different at the end. I LOVE working on conclusions/codas/endings. I mean in any medium.1 I don’t know what it is but there’s something about the feeling of bringing something to an end that I find incredibly freeing and intuitive.2
I also love tunes that save something magical for right at the end. Think of Burial’s Shell of Light, which becomes something completely different for the last 1.15 of its runtime.
The ending is so good Shlohmo made a 5-minute long remix entirely based around it.
The vocals at the end of Three Broken Glasses are just the random scratch vocals I sung in as an idea. I decided the ending was more about a vibe than anything concrete so left them in. One of my favourite Bob Dylan recordings is him mumbling his way through a tune that clearly doesn’t have proper lyrics yet. And it’s fucking great.
When I’ve been playing Three Broken Glasses, I always go back and listen to the ending a few times. Even if it requires me to take my poorly-circulated hands out of my gloves in -18C Montréal weather. It feels too short. I need to hear it again. But I love that kind of active music listening, where you loop sections of songs because you like them so much.3 It’s like having a little All Yr Songs — a charming, lo-fi pop song I am constitutionally unable to listen to fewer than three times in a row — embedded in a longer track.
As a student, teachers would routinely praise my conclusions (maybe everything else in the essays just sucked!), and, as weird/egotistical as it might sound, I got it. I was like, ‘yeah, that’s the best part of this.’
I’ve already mentioned that it’s the ending part of Improvisation which I love much more than what comes before.
Maybe that’s why I like songs that have lots of different sections: I can just loop the bits I like the best.
I love transitions too, and yours is great. Especially like when a dark sounding song turns to to end lighter, or vice versa...
did you listen to the two lil Simz songs i mentioned that I though did that well. No merci (at the 3:20 mark) and Broken (at 5:50 where she just lets the melody continue on its own).
that bob dylan mumbling part also reminds of the last half of kanye west's runaway, where its just him singing indecipherable words into autotune or wtv. for the firt year of listening to that entire song i had an illegally downloaded version on my ipod and i always assumed id got a corrupted version of the song somehow. it was only much later i heard someone else playing it and realized WTF the song actually ends like that??!