AUTOreverse | home

INTERVIEWS
REVIEWS
LISTEN
DISCUSS
LINKS

Walk me through the steps of how the average Daniel Prendiville pop song comes about. Where do ideas come from? And how do you start actually putting the notes and chords together, do you hammer out ideas on a keyboard by jamming? And as far as recording or sequencing, how do you record the notes? Do you have a keyboard going into your PC? I know you use Cubase but I've never used it for MIDI myself so I'm interested in how it works, especially in relation to your songs.

The best thing I can do is to use a few examples. "Schooldays" from Tree Ring Circus is based on a poem my late mother wrote in a school yearbook some 20 years ago. I was aware of its existence for a long time, but I only read it again towards the middle of last year, after she had died. I thought it might be a nice tribute to her to take her words and try to write a song around them. I came up with an intro and a chorus and played around with them for a few months before finally coming up with a full tune. My next step generally is to go into Cubase and program a drum track and keyboards. Once I had a coherent tune programmed for "Schooldays", I sat down and wrote a set of lyrics. This was comprised in part from a number of lines that my mother had written, plus other lines that I wrote myself which were either based on my mother's actual words, or on the sense of them. Having come up with a set of lyrics, I was then able to determine that I had enough tune to go with the words. I haven't recorded guitars, bass and vocals for the song yet - hopefully I'll do that next week, but what I will do first is that I will record the MIDI to audio in Cubase, do a rough mix of that, imprt the rough mix into Adobe Audition, record the guitars etc. there and then go back into Cubase to edit, mix and master.

Conversely, "Stuporstar," also from Tree Ring Circus, started with the guitars and bass. I basically recorded a metronome click track for about five minutes, and then went and recorded the guitars and bass in Cool Edit Pro. Since I can't play guitars and bass terribly well, I tend to record loops and then cut 'n' paste them throughout the song, doing slight little variations so that Joe Punter won't realise that there isn't a linear A-to-Z performance going down. I then imported the audio into Cubase and programmed the drumtracks in MIDI, to be converted into audio. My next step will be to record the vocals. "Stuporstar" started with the title, which was inspired by those pictures one sees of Liam Gallagher falling out of nightclubs and such. Bits and pieces of the chorus lyrics came to mind in the shower, for some reason.

Lyrics are generally a patchwork quilt for me. I tend to work out the number of lines I need between verses and choruses and slot the lines into the correct position as they come to mind. It's a bit like doing a crossword puzzle, and it can be frustrating when you've spent an afternoon writing a set of lyrics and one is still missing lines 6, 23 and 42...

It so happens that there is an old battered upright piano beside my PC, and it was on that piano that I came up with the hook for "Observer," which is played on the song using a Rhodes sample.

When I was younger and playing in bands, I tendend to write songs based around bass lines, since the bass was my principal instrument. I rarely do that now. It'll mostly be the keyboards and, to a lesser, extent the guitar.

Most of my music is made up in my head and it might be playing around my brain for months before I get around to doing anything with it. I'm a firm believer that if a tune is good, you'll still remember it in 6, 12 or 18 months time. Over the years, I've come up with wonderful tunes which I had forgotten after five minutes. Frustrating, but it's a quality control thing. If the tunes were really that good in the first place...

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Franco Turra, who taught me the value of melody in a song. We did a project a few years ago where I wrote lyrics in English to tunes which he compsed for songs in Italian. I got to listen to his backing tracks - which I think is always a privilege, to hear another artist's backing tracks - and they were generally very simple. Not a lot going on in them. But the magic of Franco's songs was his fantastic ear for melody. I've tried to concentrate on that over the years.

I use an old DX100 synth to program MIDI. I have small hands and not a lot of storage space, so a full-sized keyboard wold be wasted on me. I've used a variety of MIDI PC interfaces over the years, including two from MIDIMan. Currently, I'm using the MIDI port on the Soundblaster card on my principal PC, the MIDI ports on the Audigy soundcard and the MIDISport USB on my laptop. I hope to get one of those USB audio interfaces for my laptop, which would allow me to do a certain amount of location recording and mixing using different audio set-ups.

Cubase is easy to use for MIDI. I think all MIDI packages are reasonably standard nowadays. Cubase is quitre sturdy for MIDI, but it can get itself in knots when combining MIDI and audio, especially if you have a puny soundcard. It doesn't work at all well for MIDI and audio on my laptop, for instance.

What are you going to be painting? If you're truly the Irish MJB, it will have to be a 10-foot square, abstract drawing with lots of little details.
It's probably going to be 8' x 4'. Abstract. Kinda like a weather chart. I'm thinking of sticking some glitterdust on it. Thus says MJ O'B.

Do you paint often? Are you any good as a visual artist?
No, and no. I did an 8-week evening class last autumn on oil painting. Teacher wasn't up to much, really, but she showed me a few little tricks of the trade. I did a couple of small paitings over the winter. Landscapes and such. They're okay, I s'pose, but I wouldn't try and sell them or anything. Then I did a kind of a geometric abstract, which pleased me no end. The reason why I'm doing this particular painting is because we have a big blank wall in our stairwell, and we need to fill it with something. We were going to get someone to do a batik for us, but it wouldn't have been big enough for the job and would've cost hundreds of pounds.

Oil painting sounds like a hoot. I've never tried it. We usually keep a box of acrylics around for the rare occasion that the mood strikes, but no oils yet.
Give it a shot. And if you get bored, you can snort the white spirits.

Any good as a visual artist? I fancied myself as a photographer back in the eighties, but the processing costs always pissed me off, and the number of times I expensively misloaded 35mm film into a camera...tcheh! I suppose with the advent of digital photography, I might get back into photogrpahy at some stage, but I feel a bit self-conscious walking around with a camera. At least with the painting and recording one can work away from the public eye.

One last thing, painting is so restful. All that concentration on small actions. Very Eastern.

It's true. The pace can be very meditative. Photography doesn't have to mean walking around like a tourist. Especially with those little digital ones they have now. You'd never have to pay for film again, nor for processing.
I actually started using my camcorder as a camera. Works very well. The only problem is transfering the data from the camcorder to the PC. My bloody PC - the one I've been complaining about all these months - is so fuckin' slow. But now that I've sorted out a few things on the OS side, I might give it another pop.

So it sounds almost like you start with an overview of an album and then you go in and fill in the blanks as you go. Is that how it works?
Pretty much. I start from the surface in as it were. If I get a good album title in my head, that will suggest a mood for the album, which will in turn suggest song titles which will, in turn, suggest moods for those songs, which will in turn, suggest a mood for the album. If you know what I mean...it so happens, that I already have two further future projects blocked out in that manner, and I'm working on a third. Bit silly, really.

Oh dear. I can see how that would happen but it's an agonizing way of working, I'd imagine. Or maybe not, maybe that's exactly what you need to help keep everything in perspective.
Actually, it gives me something to aim for. A sort of "to do" list. I still leave myself open to the happy accident. For instance, on Tree Ring Circus, there's a track called "Impulse," which was completely unplanned. I was just dicking around with a bit of tuning and the Pod, and I suddenly came across some interesting chords that were so Drums And Wires, I just had to run with the tune. Will the track make the final cut? It depends on how well I can carry off the vocals. If it doesn't make the cut, it may either be recycled or put into my outtakes folder.

What treasures lurk in the outtakes folder? Are you a ruthless editor?
Am I a ruthless editor? Well I try to be. I take the responsbility of producing my own material very seriously. Since I'm the only person doing anything on my albums, then any crap that gets released is all down to me. With Tree Ring Circus, I'm trying to achieve for myself something I've rarely seen achieved by other artists, that is an album that works 100%. If I come across a rotten apple in the barrel, or even if it's got enough of a blemish to really attract attention to itself for the wrong reasons, well then it'll have to go. As to treasures, do you really want to hear the vocal version of "Sarcastrian" off Tantrum Ego? I was going to put it on Mutant Ogre, but it was just so crap. The outtakes folder basically contains mixes of tracks that have been used for non-Reincheque releases such as "PPAN" for Turbogrooves 2003 or stuff that didn't quite gel as a particular deadline approached. There is some fine material in there, and of these days I'll rescue the pieces and set them free.

Spontaneity is not my middle name, as you'll have gathered. For me, composing and recording is very much like making a movie. It's made up of bits and pieces of performances which may or may not be used in the final cut. Plus, I'm doing things that I cannot do in real time, like playing guitar - or anything else for that matter. There's a lot of planning required before I can get started. You guys who can just strap on a guitar and plug into a 4-track don't know how lucky you are.

I don't know about that being lucky. In your case, it just insures that you don't have a box somewhere of 400 tapes that all have the same two songs on them, over and over. As they say, "more money, more problems." Sorry, what was the question again?
My EP Gargiste contains demo versions of two songs that appeared on Tantrum Ego. These songs were demoed on a 4 track and sound a lot more fluid than the versions later re-recorded on Cubase. The part of recording the demos that took the longest was programming the rhythm tracks. Everything else was proablby done in an afternoon or two. So, I can do spontaneity, but only on my own terms.

I see. It's a sort of planned spontaneity.
Finest kind.

What else are you working on?
A bit of remixing of a John Neil track for a collab project we're trying to get off the ground.

That sounds fun as hell.
Yeah, got a good bit of progress done on it today, in spite of my fucking PC. I sent John over a copy of Cubase VST and I got him to lay out a track for me. He was meant to get the track back to me by the time I was going to France for vacation, and was going to work on it on my laptop over there, but that didn't work out. Still, no bother. I'm now going through the process of editing the track to come up with some bastardized form of electro dub. If I could get a signficiant amount of the track done quickly, I'd be a happy bunny.

Who's doing what? Because you're both kind of solitary-pop-MIDI-singer-songwriter guys. I would think that almost any combination of your talents would turn out something reasonably amazing. It would be like a home-recording-artist supergroup.
We're taking each other's basic tracks and just choppin' 'n' changin' as we see fit. I'm not sure how we're going to finish off particular tracks. I reckon John's gots better ears and better audio equipment than I have, so what might be a plan is that I'd send him over my edit and let him master it. There might be a better sense of unity in the project if one person does all the mastering.

Are there any completed tracks yet?
No, but hold tough for a week or so.

Someone's got to be the new Power Station now that Robert Palmer snuffed it. Might as well be you and Johnny Go.
I tell you, he looked fuckin' awful towards the end - not Johhny Cash awful, but still. Curious bloke, our Robert. There was a time there during the 1970s where he was a kind of Bowie Lite for the Woolworths Generation. But then he met up with UB40.

Right. I remember reading about Gary Numan flying out to Nassau in 1980 to record "I Dream Of Wires" with Palmer and it just made no sense to me. I recently bought the album and, sure enough, there's Robert Palmer singing a fucking Gary Numan song. Robert Palmer did seem to cover a lot of stylistic ground in his time. Power Station is still the only thing of his that I really got into. I didn't even know he was ill.
Did he?

I stole some very wanky questions from The Wire's unofficial Yahoogroup so let's see what kind of absurdity we can get into with these. Here goes.

"In what way are you your parents' child?"
Mega-wanky question. I'll give this my best shot, but apologies in advance if I trail off...

Very much so. My late mother used to say to me, whenever she was annoyed with me "Oh, you're your father's son, alright...". I used to breathe a sigh of relief on hearing that, as I'd seen the milkman and I'd never fancied the cut of his jib. I won't go too far into a discussion of my psychological makeup in a public forum such as this. Suffice it to say, I was very close to my mother when I was a kid. My father had certain issues when I was young which meant one had to be careful around him. As I got older, I got closer to him in difficult circumstances, and less close to my mother. When I left home, I found the difference between living in a city and coming home to a rural small town quite difficult to come to terms with, and I tended to keep my family at arms length. Towards the end of their lives I began to get close with my mother again, but not really in a mother/son sense, more in the sense of two adults. When my mother started showing sings of Alzheimer's Disease, I found myself preparing for the day when she would no longer have a "functioning" personality, putting a certain element of objectivity into our relationship.On reflection, that was very much something that my father would have done. By contrast, before my father died, we had very little to say to each other. There wasn't much room in a small council house for two large guys. In many ways, I can see myself carrying on some of the "family traditions", not all of them pretty. I'm starting to turn into a bit of an old curmudgeon, like my mother in her prime. From my father, I've inherited a level of discomfiture with social inter-action, particularly with fellow human beings...

"What aspects of structure does your music share with your upbringing?"
I think an appreciation of the English language and a love of good writing have shown me that it is possible to come up with potentially fine works of art if you are prepared to spend a lot of time and effort in creating the work in the first place, then refining and refining until it stands up. I don't know if I've answered this question well - what I mean to say is that quickly knocking togther some ol' shite doesn't really appeal to me. I rarely, if ever, come up with anything of use or merit if I just slap stuff down quickly and walk away from it. Much of my music has been fermenting away in my mind for months before I actually go to compose or record. To a certain extent, issues like structure have been deal with in advance of committing anything to posterity. This is pretty much how an author would approach writing a piece of literature:- initial plotting-out of the book, research, first draft and multiple re-writes. Having said that, some of the best lyrics I've come up with have been written very quickly on the way to the studio. Sometimes, desperation focusses the mind. And I think there might have been a certain element of that in my upbringing too..

"Are structure and control mutually inclusive?"
Absolutely. Even when I do something that appears to have no structure, then the decision to do that was taken by moi.

"Does structure become an aspect of the aesthetic itself when composing?"
Yes, of course. Do I base a song on loops? Do I impose some random elements, if that is not a contradiction in terms, into the composition? Do I just generate tones and apply effects? Will I write a song in 5/4 time?

Let's let me ask the wanky questions here, okay?
"Is it possible to create a work of art existing independently of the aesthetic?"
You mean under anaesthetic? Sure, if you think it's possible to drool creatively on a hospital pillow.

I do, actually. "Insofar as your music goes, why do you do what you do?"
There's a couple of different ways of answering this question. I record solo because I've always found dealing with band members very difficult. Everything has to be justified to them before you can make any progress on anything. And then you've got to keep rehearsing and gigging in order to keep a band together. And everybody has to have their bit in every song. I record on PC becuase the technology allows me to work on my own, and to emphasise my abilities while helping me to minimise my disabilities. I try and record to a high standard because there is no other outlet for my music. If all one ever heard of my music was something slapped on to cassette, there wouldn't be much of a legacy, if you know what I mean.

I do, actually. "What is your ancestry?"
The Prendivilles were descended from Norman invaders who came to Ireland in the 12th century or so. According to Irish history, the Normans became "more Irish than the Irish themselves," so to a certain extent, we were the good guys in the gallery of invaders. My mother's mother would, I think, attempt to trace her ancestry back to the Earls of Desmond, who were big nobs in the South West of Ireland back in the Middle Ages. Don't know an awful lot about this, and frankly, I prefer to look forward than to look back. Oh, and my mother's maiden name was O'Connor, so obviously meself and Kurt Cobain were distant relations...

"Was your heritage crucial in bringing you to where you are now with your music?"
Barring a few notable examples, Ireland has rarely been in the mainstream of pop/rock music. A lot of Irish acts have gone the mid-Atlantic route, in terms of musical and singing styles. I've always regarded myself as being as much a European (tying back to the Normans) as an Irishman, so I've tended to look to the right of the musical map, rather than to the left. This would've lead to an interest in electronic music and that brief moment in the early 80's when there was a type of Euro-funk music perhaps best exemplified for a while by Simple Minds. Being some way off the mainstream, I'm inclined to write songs that try not to adhere from a lyrical point of view to the cliches of rock'n'roll. Having said that, I am happiest ploughing the pop furrow. I keep hearing new angles on the old pop formulae. There's life in the old dog yet.

"Does your way of thinking about your music affect your life?"
Yes, but the reverse is true to a greater extent. Having hit the big 4-Oh this year, and having come through the loss of both parents within the last seven years, I find myself taking stock of my life and trying to weigh up whether or not it has been a success. On balance it has. There are things in my life that I wanted to achieve and never did. That might have pissed me off ten years ago, say, but on mature reflection, I now realise that I probably didn't really want the bastards in the first place, and I'm thankful that I didn't put myself and those around me through hoops trying to achieve something that would've have disappointed me at the end of the day. I often congratulate myself for not having had a musical career per se, with the thought that by now, I'd be in my "aging-rocker-working-in-the-Guitar-Department-of-a-music-store" phase of my life, trying to keep a career in cabaret going, and flogging ultra-expensive kit to a bunch of over-affluent teenaged wannabes, while sneering at them behind my hand - "Look at those fuckers buying Strats with Daddy's credit card. Things weren't like that back in the 80's" etc. etc. etc. It's like this - my family are happy and healthy and they still love me (bless 'em). I have my house and I have found a way of balancing the day job (and paying the bills) with pursuing my musical and artistic interests (and increasing the bills). And technology has finally caught up with me in terms of being able to record at home. And I own a big old fuckng Lexus. What more could I possibly want?

Now, finally answering the question. I have to plan my musical activities with a certain element of military precision. Early MIDI porgamming can be done by me at any time, but recording of vocals, guitars and bass have to be done when the house is empty, so I've got to try and co-ordinate aspects of my recording projects with days when I'm off work and the kids are at school. There is a sense of achievment in making progress with a project ,which is sadly lacking in aspects of my working life. I'm a (bad) office manager and I have to deal with staff and a demanding boss. Sometimes, the fact that I know I can make progress on my musical projects allows me to have the confidence to deal with awkward customers at work. I don't always succeed, but I don't do too badly either. Still, it's like being in a band, and it is frustrating to know that, if left to oneself, one could make work headway at work than if one has to involve other people all the time, and then justify the outcome to the boss. Can't complain though, they let me work part-time...

"Should art be consumptive?"
TB or not TB?

That one was kind of silly. One last question, from me. Which major label would be the best one for your music?
With all the global restructuring of the music industry, and all the little imprints that the majors have, I find it difficult to keep track of what's what anymore. I miss the old days when you knew your labels and you could be guaranteed of quality. Labels such as Harvest, Island, Virgin, 4AD, Rough Trade, Factory and the like.

I have no idea which labels are good or bad anymore, and the chance of me being bothered by label execs these days is very slim.

At this stage in my career, I'd be more inclined to go for a licensing deal rather than a more traditional contract. So if any label were to offer a licensing deal, I'd be happy to consider it. Having said that, I don't send actively seek out a deal by sending out demos anymore. The music is out there, either on CD or online. If people want to pick up on it, fine...if not, well boo, hoo for me.