OUGD603: Secret 7" Research

This is a brief that doesn't particularly require much initial research and a lot of decisions can be made for purely aesthetic reasons. That being said there is still some basic research that can be done, listening to the songs for one, mind mapping or jotting down initial thoughts.

I went through each of the tracks and listed initial feelings when listening to it, I also made comments on whether it was a good song (one I could come up with lots of visuals for) or an alright song (one I couldn't come up with any good visuals for and probably didn't like the song too much)

CHVRCHES: CLEAREST BLUE

ETTA JAMES: AT LAST

JACK GARRATT: WORRY

MAX RICHTER: DREAM 3

JOHN LENNON: IMAGINE

THE JAM: ART SCHOOL

TAME IMPALA: THE LESS I KNOW THE BETTER

I also did a quick youtube search to find out how many views each song has to determine it's popularity and thus, the likelihood that a larger amount of people will design covers for those songs. The most popular was Imagine by John Lennon and the least was Max Richter's Dream 3. 

From my initial thoughts alongside the viewing numbers I will go on to create ideas for two of the songs. Chvrches and Max Richter. From here I then looked into the intended purpose of both tracks in order to gain a better understanding of what I was trying to represent.

Dream 3

From The Guardian:

"On one level, Max Richter’s latest album is straight-up ambient postminimalism, all hushed and precious moodiness, but there’s concept behind the mellow loops and drones and wordless floaty vocals. A decent night’s sleep lasts for eight hours"

Dream 3 and the album SLEEP are designed and composed to send the listener to sleep. He constructs melodies and rhythms that are repetitive yet comforting and that allow you to switch off and drift off. The album is intended to be listened to as we sleep and acts as a 'personal lullaby for a frenetic world'

Clearest Blue

To Chvrches clearest blue was the track where they began to define their sound and manage to balance positive and negative feelings within a big, bold track. It depicts the journey of them as a band and their rise to fame- represented by a 'drop' in the track. Band members described it: "Well, it's big and happy and sad and a banger. It's a sort of a cry-dance."

Lyrics within the song reflect the madness and the overwhelming sense of work and fame and music that happened to the band as they went from small time to the big charts. Exhausting and great, positive and negative, all summed up.

They placed a lot of emphesis on how the song grows and how it grew almost unstoppably followed by a satisfying crescendo or 'drop': "It started out super, super low key and it just wanted to come alive. It became clear that the whole thing was building to that crescendo, the way the meter of the melody works, it's really frantic and quite anxious. That release is my favorite moment on the record. I think it's just Chvrches in a bottle, that 8 bars and that explosion. That's what we do."