Episode 22 - 'Stay In'
We are starting this year off STRONG!-- Episode two, in month two of 2022!~~ AND this is song #22 out of 50. The schedule moving forward for this year will be new episodes on the first Monday of the month, unlike last season which was on the 1st of the month. In this episode, Tim writes a golden-era instant classic that is also the introvert’s anthem about NOT going out and instead, staying in with you. Using a songwriting prompt from Sarah Spencer's Five-In-Five Challenge at SongFancy, this song came together from this concept:
”She started peeling back the layers and wished she could put them right back.”
To learn more about SongFancy and the Five-In-Five Challenge, go to
http://songfancy.com/5-in-5-songwriting-challenge/
Episode Transcript
You’re listening to 50 Bad Songs -- a behind-the-scenes look at the process of transforming ideas & experiences into music & lyrics, AKA Songwriting! Each episode, you will hear a new song and how it came into existence. I’m Tim Rosko and this is Season 3, Episode 22, “Stay In”.
[Radio + 50 Bad Songs theme song plays]
Hello again my dear listeners, we are starting this year off STRONG!-- Episode two, in month two of 2022!~~ Speaking of, the schedule moving forward for this year will be new episodes on the first Monday of the month. Unlike last season, which was the First of the month, this one's gonna be the first Monday of the month, because that's better for me. Unfortunately though, for February and March, the 1st is a Tuesday, so it's almost a week after the month began that the episodes will come out, but you get the idea. It's the first Monday of the new month, Enjoy~
If you are new to this show, welcome, this is a great episode to start with and I hope you enjoy it. This podcast is also a documentation of a long growth process and if you'd like to hear that growth from the beginning, I encourage you to take a look back at the start of Season 1. You can also listen to all the songs that we've written on this show on band camp at 50badsongs.bandcamp.com or stream them on Spotify and Apple Music.
If you are a long time listener and have enjoyed listening to 50 Bad Songs, please consider supporting us on patreon at patreon.com/50badsongs. I've reconfigured the patron benefits tiers, and we've got a lot of fun bonus content for you there. And I've actually been updating it, unlike previous years, so it's exciting times over there and you should definitely go check it out! Special thanks this month, to our esteemed patrons in the Tenor Section tier on patreon, Susan and Chris Rosko, Francesca Scalici, and Vicki Scott. Your support means the world to me.
So, without further ado, this is episode 22. And here's a brand new song, “Stay In”.
[“Stay In” by Tim Rosko plays]
Lyrics:
When the snow starts to fall
And the wind starts to blow,
There might be ice on the road,
You really never can know…
It's a perfect night to stay in with you.
When our friends start to call
about the plans that we've made,
It's a really tough choice,
But baby, what if we stayed?
It's a perfect night to stay in with you.
You might say
that we've got to get up and go!
But when I take these blankets off
My body just says “no!”
They can say what they want
about the choices I make,
They can not like the coffee
Or the cookies I bake.
Still it’s a perfect night to stay in with you!
When the snow starts to fall
And the wind starts to blow,
There might be ice on the road,
You really never can know
It's a perfect night to stay in with you.
When our friends start to call
about the plans that we've made,
It's a really tough choice,
But baby, what if we stayed?
It's a perfect night to stay in with you.
You might say
We have got to go!
When I take these blankets off
My body just says “no!”
They can say what they want
about the choices I make,
They can not like the cider
Or the cookies I bake
But no matter what they say,
(and even if it's everyday...)
It's still a perfect night to stay
in with you!
So, this song again was started from a songwriting prompt as provided by Sarah Spencer at Song Fancy as part of one of her Five in Five challenges. I mentioned this in the last podcast episode, but for those of you, maybe haven't heard, the Five in Five Songwriting Challenge, is a thing that Sarah Spencer does where she is encouraging songwriters to write five songs in five days. And it's very quick process. She gives you prompts for each day. And the goal is to write quickly so that you can kind of get over your writer's block. And also, to use these prompts to maybe challenge you to write something different than you would normally, which is also part of the thing that helps you get over writing blocks. So, the prompt for this one was a quote and the quote was:
“She started peeling back the layers and wished she could put them right back.”
I love songwriting prompts for lots of reasons. For one, it's just like, an easy way to get an idea rolling. But also why I love them is that you could give this kind of prompt to 10 different people and get just 10 completely different songs or ideas out of it. And I think that's really cool. And for that, it seemed to me the prompt was setting us up for a more serious or contemplative sort of song. You know, something that's introspective and thinking about your internal layers. But for some reason that day I was feeling cheeky and I wanted to kind of turn the prompt in a different direction and make it a little more, I guess, silly? But ‘silly’ is not really the right word. It's more like ‘jovial’. Also, I know that I really enjoy writing slow songs, but I wanted to try to write something that was a little more upbeat and fun. So in thinking about this prompt:
“She started peeling back the layers and wished she could put them right back.”
I was like, what if the layers were literal layers of clothing or blankets? I thought about my personal love of being in bed and how in the morning, especially when it's cold, when you throw the covers off yourself, you're just like, ‘oh my gosh, I just want to put them back on!’, and sometimes I do, if I'm being completely honest. and I will just be snuggled under the blankets for a little longer because I'm cold and I don't want to get out of bed. Similarly, if you're relaxing at home and you're on your couch and you're all wrapped up in a blanket, it can be so hard to get up to do anything because you're just, you're just so cozy. And if someone invites you out, when you're already wrapped up on the couch feeling good, forget about it! I'm not going anywhere. I'm gonna sit on this couch and be comfy…most of the time, sometimes I can be convinced.
So anyways, I thought, what if I wrote the introverts anthem? Like what if I wrote a song about not going out and partying? You know like, what if it was about “hey I want to stay in!” You know, what would that song be like? So again, this was happening around December–this original songwriting prompt–and so I was clearly feeling inspired by a lot of the classic Christmas songs by Christmas crooners like Bing Crosby. And I really wanted to lean into that kind of idiom of, you know, jazz, classic, golden age, jazz sound.
[clip from original voice memo plays]
I didn't have a lot of time to write that day. I think I had rehearsal immediately after work or something. And so I was literally writing this in my car on my lunch break during work and surprisingly, I came up with the lyrics fairly quickly! I definitely surprised myself in that process. I think the time constraint helped, but then also just the, the coming at it from a place of fun rather than seriousness did help me more quickly come up with these ideas. So I was thinking about, you know, how could I set up the idea that not going out was the ideal choice and because of the season being winter, my first thought was winter weather is a great reason to stay home!
When you live in the south, or any other place where it doesn't snow, if there is winter weather of any kind, that means that you are staying home and you are staying inside. I remember growing up, specifically the threat of ice on the road was enough to cancel many a high school school day or school event. Even if it didn't snow! If there was the potential for ice on the road then like, we're done. And one of the things that I disliked the most about living in the north or a place that had actual winter was that whenever it snowed, you still had to go to work! And you still had to DO stuff. You had to do MORE stuff even, like you had to shovel the sidewalk and salt the stairs and clean off your car. All before you could go anywhere and you had to go places. So whenever it snowed in Pittsburgh, all I wanted to do was to just like, get real cozy in my house in my PJs, under some blankets, light a candle, put on some music and like, dreamly look out the window at the snow and and romanticize it, but you couldn't, you had to go to work…
So anyways, that quickly became the first verse where I was like, Okay, it's snowing. There's wind, there's ice. Perfect time to stay in. I was feeling this old crooner mood as I mentioned, so naturally I felt the urge to include a significant other and perhaps, you know, “it's the perfect night to stay in with you” specifically. To make it, you know, a little more of a Not Christmas-Christmas song about being cozy with your boo.
[clip from original voice memo plays]
So the second verse leaned into this sort of introverted anthem idea even more and builds on the first verse. So if someone wants to hang out with me, and I'm already deep into this cozy relaxation mode like, Nah, I'm gonna stay in. Also, added bonus, if you're living with your sweetheart, then why go out when you have each other? You don't need to go out in the snow. You can just hang out at home because you already have your beloved.
[clip from original voice memo plays]
So, the B section of the song, which is the, you know, if the first two verses were A sections, then this would be the B section. It was an opportunity to challenge the idea set up by the first two verses. So you know, instead of just blindly going along with this introverts dream, now my sweetheart was saying, “Hey listen, let's get up and let's go! We can't stay in forever!” (and I should say this is pre-pandemic lockdown, quarantine. So, you know, makes sense. After 2020, it was like, well, this song has taken on a different meaning...) But anyway, so then we call back to the original song prompt and say like, But when I take these blankets off my body just says no because it just wants to put them right back on.
[clip from original voice memo plays]
So then for the final verse, I wanted it to feel like, you know, full commitment to the introverted lifestyle. You know, like, let people say what they want. I don't care. This is how I like to live, and I don't need to go out to have fun. I also threw in the bit about cider and cookies because, again, it was a holidays and this was starting to feel like a classic Christmas song and, you know, what's a Christmas song without throwing in, you know, talk about baked goods and turkey and drinks and stuff. But, it wasn't just about feeling introverted, it was also about wanting to stay in with you, in particular. I don't need to go out and do stuff and be social because I've got you. So, yes, it is introverted, but I think it's more about being so in love with someone that no matter what else is going on, it's always a perfect night to stay in with them.
[clip from original voice memo plays]
And that was all I wrote, truly. I wrote that word for word, I didn't change anything. Well, later I changed the first verse to ‘coffee’ and then ‘cider’ for the second time through, but we'll get to that. But yeah, it just came very quickly and this was one of the rare times that a melody came to me too while I was writing these words, almost instantly, which does not happen to me very often. I know there would be some musicians and songwriters who say that they're inspiration, they'll have a melody come to them. That doesn't always happen for me immediately, usually. Sometimes it will, but this is one of the rare times that a melody came to me almost instantly and it was, it was so fast that I was sure that-I thought that I'd stolen in it from somewhere. But as far as I know, I did not! I don't know, it just came to me. I guess people call that inspiration. I don't know. Call it what you will. But, this melody came to me in that lunch break in my car and so I recorded it. This voice note with this melody and included a few little, like, bass nodes. Classic, you know, Christmas song. Bumba dum, dum doom. And that kind of gave me a harmonic context that I was hearing this melody in. I literally wasn't sitting at a piano. I wasn't figuring out any– I didn't know what key I was in. I was just singing this melody and singing those little bass notes along to kind of inspire and continue to ground my melody, I suppose. But that was it. And after that lunch break, I never sat with it again. I didn't write more words and I never sat down to flesh out the chords. All I had was this memo for at least a year, just sitting on my phone, existing.
[ukulele demo plays]
So sometime last year in 2021, I was thinking about season three of this show and went looking through some old demos and voice notes and song bits that I had written trying to decide what I had, if I wanted to use those for the podcast and whatnot. So I came across this voice note and I thought, well, this is fun. You know, I want to finish this song. So I sat down and tried to figure out the chords in the demo. As I was mentioning, you can hear that it was implying a sort of classic golden age sound, but I wanted to lean into that even more so. So I employed several 2-5-1’s. For those of you who are not music theory heads, a 2-5-1 (ii-V-I) is a chord progression that is built on the second, fifth, and first notes of the scale that you are in. So because of the harmonic pull of these chords within a key or scale, it's a quick way to establish yourself in a key or a tonal center and you know, you know where you are and it's satisfying, it sounds good and right. And you're like, okay cool.
[ukulele plays a 2-5-1 progression from the song]
And the 2-5-1 chord progression is used in all kinds of music for these reasons, but it is especially prominent in this particular era of the American songbook that I was referencing. And so I wanted this song to have that spirit but it's also still a modern song, so I didn't want to keep it completely traditional. And to be fair, a lot of the, you know, stuff that's in the Real Book is not just purely, 2-5-1’s, but you get what I'm saying. So anyways, what I tried to do was hint at the setup of a lot of 2-5’s and then take you somewhere else, which in music theory is called a deceptive cadence (depending on the context). But that's where you are setting yourself up to go back to the root, to the tonic chord, but then instead, you go somewhere else before you come back to that. So you hear these chords that sound like they're going to take you back to the tonic or the home key, but instead you go somewhere else, a different or completely unexpected chord.
And part of this stems from a composition lesson that I had in college where I was writing and my professor gave me the simple suggestion that I not go back to the home chord quite so quickly and just go somewhere else and see where it takes me instead. And that has stuck with me over the years because I think, almost to a detriment, where I'm like, “I can't go back to the tonic yet! I have to go somewhere else!” But it is a good practice because, you know, if you come back to the tonic too much or too often, then it kind of doesn't feel like it's going anywhere and it just feels very stuck.
So in the case of this song, I made the deliberate choice of not going back to the G chord or the tonic chord, or the 1 chord in this key. (It's in G surprise. Spoiler alert.) So I didn't go back to the G chord for the whole of the verse. We start on G but then we go to a couple other places and we don't come back to G until the very end of the verse slash setup for the next verse. And I did that so that when you do land on the G chord at the end of the verse, it feels just so much more satisfying and feels very much like home. And because this song is about staying home and not going out, I think it was a subconscious intention that the feeling of home–I wanted it to feel really good and stable and home-like. Can I say that I was doing that fully intentionally? No, not necessarily. But I do think that our subconscious musical instincts can lead us to musical sounds that are like a perfect match to the song or the thing that we're trying to create and the story we're trying to tell. So while I didn't do that intentionally I think that it was a subconscious intention of, “I want home to feel like home” and you know, I don't need to come back to the G chord just yet.
[ukulele demo plays]
Something though, that I struggled with in coming back to the song again after a year or so was that it didn't have a chorus… I wrote all these verses and a little bridge and in looking at it on paper, I was like, surely this needs a chorus. I can't just leave this as is. And I remember, I did try to write a chorus after the fact, several times, but nothing I came up with felt good or right. Honestly, I think that the melody that I came up with in the car just sounded good and flowed well, and was self-contained that it didn't make sense to insert another melodic idea as a chorus. Ultimately, I decided to stick with the form as it was, which is this sort of A section verse that repeats itself, and then a contrasting B section, and then a final A section (with a little twist at the end!) In looking at that, I realized that this was in line with this sort of older form of songwriting. You know, in the swing era, jazz era, a lot of times songs didn't really have a chorus per se in the way that we understand choruses in modern songwriting. They had a verse, or an A section that repeated, and then a contrasting B section. And like, often you'd play through the full form of AABA and then return to the top for solos, or you just repeat the whole thing one more time. And that's kind of what makes jazz so ripe for improvisation is that you kind of know the form, AABA, and you can just keep going through it and then improvise over it, and that's fun. Anyways, so I decided that I would just leave it the way that I had written it. It doesn't need a chorus, I don't think. I know I've said that now for two episodes but truly, it felt right and I trusted that it felt right for a reason. It felt good. It felt like a classic. I thought that you could hear it in a mix of your favorite Christmas songs or otherwise, you know, swing songs or whatever, and it would fit right in! You wouldn’t know that that was written in 2021, instead of 1948, or whatever.
[ukulele demo plays]
So I was doing all this stuff to imply this sort of golden era sound and so I wanted to style this song as best as I could in that era. You know, really focus in on what that sounded like and try to replicate something. My first thought was to do a big band type of sound, but before I could do that, I did need to figure out the basic structure of the song and how I wanted it all to flow. So, the first thing I did was record myself playing the chords on the ukulele. I used my ukulele to help figure out the chords for this song, for whatever reason. So it was kind of it was just already comfy in my hands. So I didn't need to figure out voicing or anything. I could just play that real quick to get a rhythm, get something recorded, so that I could figure out the structure of how I wanted to record the melody. I wasn't thinking that I'd keep the ukulele in. I thought that it was, you know, I was just using it to get it down, but I actually ended up really liking the way the ukulele sounded. It gave it a sort of bouncy, Django Reinhardt jazz feel, and so I kept it in. You know, obviously, I'm not actually a guitarist and I don't actually play that level of jazz, but it gave the impression of that and I liked it. So, I kept it in.
[ukulele demo plays]
And then, because I was playing with the ukulele and it was this sort of Christmasy type song. You know, I went to the Queen of Christmas / ukulele songs herself, Ingrid Michaelson, for reference. And a couple years ago she released a cover of “Looks Like a Cold, Cold Winter'' which was also recorded by Bing Crosby. And I found that it was particularly inspiring for me for this song and I used it as a reference point. In listening to it as a reference, I decided that I would do the whole form twice through. So, instead of doing one time through and then, doing sort of an instrumental solo and then coming in with the last half, like, I was originally thinking. I was like, No, Let’s just do it two times all the way through with words, but the second time through I would do a sort of, close harmony, Andrews-Sisters-style, background jazz choir or whatever.
[BGV choir demo plays]
As most of you know who listen who are my friends, I have a history of choir singing and acapella singing. So this idea was very interesting to me and it was truly energizing. Once I got that idea, I was like, oh, I'm excited to figure that out. And I have a lot of experience writing choir parts and background vocals, also known as BGVs, which you'll hear me refer to them as BGVs = background vocals. Something though that I do when I want to write BGV parts, is that I actually don't sit down and try to write the parts one by one on score paper, or in a notation software, which is what I would maybe do for a choir arrangement. But for BGVs instead, I first like to sing along with myself and then sing whatever harmony feels natural and fun. And part of why I do this is because like it can help me overcome any sort of writer's block, that comes from staring at an empty blank page. But also if you've ever harmonized to one of your favorite songs in your car, then, you know, it's basically that. It's very freeing and fun and helps you get out of your head and just kind of be listening and responding to the music as opposed to thinking about the music, you know.
And one of the other reasons that I do this is for a technical reason and that's ultimately BGVs are sung parts. So they need to be singable. They need to stand alone as an interesting melody that someone can sing, would want to sing, and can sing expressively. In my early choral writing and arranging days, I would write parts based on what made the most sense from a theory standpoint. But that doesn't always make for the most interesting or singable parts. And that is a lesson for anyone who's listening who may be a young composer or arranger who's writing choir or vocal parts–Make sure it's singable. If the part is not interesting or singable, your singers will be bored and then they'll sound bored when they're singing because they're not singing anything interesting. So why wouldn’t they?
Anyways, Also with this method of singing first before arranging, I find that I tend to come up with way more interesting melodies and lines than I would otherwise if I just sat down and tried to write something. For instance, little vocal nuances that I would do naturally as a singer that I wouldn't do naturally as a piano player, you know what I mean? And also, potentially what you sing as a harmony might alter the harmonies of the song in an interesting way and, you know, you might sing a 6 instead of a 7 or you might transition from one chord to the next with a passing chromatic note that is not in the original key of the song but sounds great when you're singing it in a melody line. So then that would provide you with even more interesting bits to work around with and it might inform the song or change the song to be more interesting than you originally had created.
Another benefit of making your melodies and harmonies singable is that they are then more likely to get stuck in your head, you know? Like, if the line is singable, then it will be singable later when you're cooking dinner, or taking a shower, or driving to work, which means you'll remember it and want to listen to it again. And ultimately, that's what you want from a song. You want people to remember it and sing it, you know?
[BGV choir demo plays]
So after I came up with a few harmony lines that I thought felt good and sounded good to me, then what I do is I will sit down and arrange the remaining parts with like my theory hat on. Sometimes, especially in the jazz idiom, there might be a harmony that's not immediately intuitive and you need to sit and tweak it to make it feel right or to make it sit right in the melody line. But again, if you have an interesting line to begin with, then the other parts tend to be interesting as well because they have to be to fit with all the other stuff.
Once I had all the parts written out, I then like to record them and see what they sound like in my voice or in an actual human voice, because it can be easy to write something on the piano and sounds good on the piano. But then when you have singers sing it, it doesn't sound as good as it did on the piano. And you're like, why is that? And it's because they're different instruments. And also sometimes it might make sense on paper, but then when you sing it, you're like, that doesn't make any sense at all. And I think for this song, for the most part, I did a good job and I like the way it sounded mostly. But, there were two lines that once I had arranged them, they didn't sound- they just weren't sitting right and I didn't know why. Because they harmonically made sense. The lines were interesting melodically and singable. But then what I found out, or what I figured out was that if I swapped two of the two lines in different octaves. So it was the bass part and the high tenor part and they were outlining the chord, doing a melody. And the bass part– I took it and I instead put it up an octave in the high tenor part and took the high tenor part and put it down an octave in the bass part and then suddenly it made way more sense. And I didn't really change what I had written or arranged, but it was just easier to sing, it sounded better as a group together. And that's something, again, that you have to figure out by doing this in between, arranging it by singing it, arranging it with theory and thinking about harmony or whatever, and then taking it back to singing so that you can make sure that it sounds good and also feels good and is easy to sing. Or not even easy, because some of this wasn't easy to sing, but it was easy in the sense that if it was just a melody by itself, it wasn't insane, you know, or boring. It was well written.
[BGV choir demo plays]
Originally I was thinking that I would have the BGVs sing the entire second half of the song or, you know, the repeat of the form. But when I went back and referenced the “Cold, Cold Winter” song again, I found that they did a back and forth between the BGVs and the soloists, and I really liked that, and so I used it in my song.
Also, related, as I mentioned, I record these BGVs to hear what they sound like and decide if I actually like the way it sounds on voices. In the past, I often end up with- I just stick with the scratch BGVs that I record because usually they're fine. like, they sound good. I'm singing them intentionally right because I want to hear what the harmony sounds like. And I don't want to take the time to record them again, you know, and if they sound good enough then why record them again? But, you know, if I take so much time to make sure that these lines are singable, then I should actually sing them as if I was actually performing them and not taking a sight-singing test in college or something. And so for this song, I did that. I said, I'm gonna re-record these BGVs, now that I know that I like the harmony, and I'm gonna sing them like I am on stage performing them and I am giving the performance of my life. And so I did that and I'll be honest, it made a huge difference. The song really came to life at this point. And I know that's obvious, we'll get to it in a second, but I know that that's obvious. It's just when you're recording by yourself, sometimes it's not obvious until it's too late to fix them.
[instrumental version of “Stay In” by Tim Rosko plays]
Anyways, so after that I was still toying with this idea of writing some big band parts, but at this point, I liked the BGVs so much that I kind of just wanted that to be the main focus. So I fleshed out the rhythm section with piano, bass, and drums and, you know, said that was that. Also the rhythm section is the part of the band that holds down the rhythmic pulse and harmonic foundation of a piece of music as contrasted by the instruments that are playing solos or melodic parts. It's generally bass and drums, but can be like a rhythm guitar or piano in this case. Like in this case, the piano is truly not doing anything except playing the chords rhythmically, so I consider it part of the rhythm section.
The only other thing of note here is the sort of swing era brush drum kit that I used. As I’ve mentioned in every episode ever probably, drums and rhythm parts are not my strongest suit to write and arrange. I've never played drums and so it's not something that comes naturally, but I really did want to make sure that in this song the drums felt good and felt in line with the rest of the style of the song. And so I tried to work hard to have that brush kit sound and play things that were interesting and not just a basic drum pattern, you know, add some lively bits to bring it to life and I think they turned out okay.
[instrumental version of “Stay In” by Tim Rosko plays]
So, as far as lessons that I've learned while working on this song, I think the biggest lesson I learned was that even if you are recording something in your bedroom or apartment, you have to perform it like you are on stage in front of thousands of people or as if you are already the finished product that is on the radio. You can make some recordings sound more exciting through production and after effects and whatnot, but that can only take you so far if the original take is not there. To quote, whoever said this, I don't know, You can polish a turd all you want, but at the end of the day, you'll just have a shiny turd. I know that that sounds obvious and it IS obvious, especially for solo parts, I do that when I'm recording the solo or whatever.
But, I mean, this is truly one of the main challenges of recording. On stage, you have adrenaline pumping you up, or you have the excitement of an audience pushing you to perform, or even your other performers and everyone's excited and so you're building on each other's energy. But in an isolation booth, where it's calm and quiet and you're on the clock because you're trying to get things recorded and not take up too much time or maybe you're paying for a recording session at a studio that costs a lot of money, so you're trying to get it all done. It can be easy to get kind of complacent and not truly perform. It is a skill to record and sound like you're performing live, like that takes practice. Because after you record the same line, three or four or five or six or ten times, it can be really easy to sound bored or to sound tired or to sound not as excited as you would if you were performing it live, you know. And especially doing BGVs. For instance, for me it's like, I probably just learned what the notes were like 10 minutes before. And so I'm singing it, but I'm not singing it with any conviction or singing it with any sort of intention of performance. I'm singing it so that it's right and sounds good, but ‘sounds good’ in the purely technical sense, not ‘sounds good’ in the like, wow, that's such an amazing performance. Anyways, you have to sing it like you've been touring the country for weeks and it is second nature and you are performing the heck out of it.
So in this song, for both the solo and the BGVs, I really tried to push myself to go even further into this style and sound that I was trying to create with each subsequent take. So I was doing it like I was performing it on stage in front of people. And that meant that I had to get loud, I had to be excited, and I had to probably sound insane to my neighbors, or to my roommate because, you know, that's the only way! It may not make sense in a recording situation as compared to a performance situation, but that's the only way to get it to really come to life.
[BGV choir demo plays]
Anyways, I was also reminded by working on this song just how much I enjoy writing vocal parts and singing in harmony. This is something that I've done my whole life and I've known that I love doing it. But over the last couple years, I haven't really had an outlet for singing in harmony with other people and so doing it very intentionally reminded me of how much fun I have doing it and how much I like it.
Also, relatedly, I've been trying to- with this show and also just in general outside of this show- I've been trying to find my musical point of view, my sound, my style in writing my own songs and, because I spent so much time doing choir arrangements and acapella arrangements, I've been steering clear of that sound intentionally. I was trying to not do that much. I enjoy doing some BGVs and stuff, but I was very intentionally not doing stuff like what this song has. But in doing this song, I am honestly feeling very inspired to try to incorporate that kind of intentional vocal harmony writing into my songwriting again, but doing it intentionally and making something interesting with it. I don't know. Obviously, I don't think I'm gonna be – well I don’t know if this is obvious – but I don't think I'm gonna be necessarily doing this swing era sound on everything. But knowing that singing in parts, singing in harmony, and writing vocal parts is something that brings me so much joy, I'm like, well why wouldn't I just do that, you know?
Whatever. That's another lesson from school that I learned later in life, which was like, why? – this is a brief aside – In school, I really pushed myself to write stuff that I wouldn't normally write and specifically I wrote for instruments I had never played because I wanted to learn how to write for those instruments and I wanted to try it out and have the experience of it. But then at the end of college, I started to realize, wait, I haven't written any of the things I want to write, you know? And this is another situation of, I was trying to push myself in songwriting to not do what I was familiar with, and in doing so lost sight of like, but you like doing that, so why aren't you just also incorporating that into what you're doing? I don't know! Who can say.
[BGV choir demo plays]
The last lesson though, that I think that I learned on this project was to Trust My Gut, which I guess is tying into what I just said. Sometimes, what you come up with in an hour, on your lunch break, is exactly all that you need. Just because something comes to you fast doesn't mean that it's cheap or worthless, you know? Sometimes it is right! And that's cool! You're allowed to- that's allowed to happen! I think that's really cool and one of the amazing things in music and in writing is when inspiration hits you in that kind of way to just, accept it, not fight it, you know.
So, I found working on this song so rewarding and it truly has become one of my favorite songs that I've ever written. And I know that I say that after every song. But you know what, we call that? We call that growth. So anyways I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I do and I hope that you share it with your friends and listen to it for fun because you like it.
Now, once again, here is “Stay In” in its entirety.
[“Stay In” by Tim Rosko plays]
50 Bad Songs is created, recorded, and edited by me, Tim Rosko. Follow us on social media at 50BadSongs on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. You can listen to this song and all previous songs on bandcamp at 50badsongs.bandcamp.com or by streaming them on Spotify and Apple Music.
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My name is Tim Rosko and Thank you so much for listening!