What was I thinking? Inside the Composition of the Acoustic Pop Album Fall

By Greg Arnold

"This book is intended to be both a conversation starter and a contribution to pre-existing academic work. I hope that in its own small way it will help to popularise the academic and academicise the popular."

Includes The Swamp Dandies complete album Fall as a digital download plus a second set of demo tracks.

Greg Arnold has been a songwriter since he was a teenager and a professional recordist since 1992. He has won an ARIA with Things of Stone and Wood and the prestigious APRA Songwriter of the Year. His back catalogue includes two top ten albums, the top ten hit 'Happy Birthday Helen' and the top four radio played song 'Wildflowers'.

He takes pop music seriously, while having a lot of fun doing it.

In 2009 he set out to complete a PhD from the University of Tasmania by using as his case study the creation of the album Fall by his band The Swamp Dandies. The result, a unique book with a perspective that has one foot in the academy and one foot securely adhered to the sticky carpet of the beer barn Australian popular music tradition.

Founded on a fundamental research question, 'What was I thinking?', Greg examines his own creative process as a recordist engaged in the composition, performance and production of a pop album. He explores a range of artistic methods from conscious applied systematic problem-solving techniques to ostensibly unconscious creative intuition such as Brian Wilson's 'grossly impulsive' method. Follow Greg's challenging, rewarding, and epic journey in an entertaining, engaging, and educational read. 

And would he do it all over again? "Yeah I tells ya, because it was fun, fun, fun."

From the Author

"I have been a songwriter since I was a teenager and a professional recordist since 1992. The academic term ‘recordist’ includes ‘the work of songwriters, arrangers, performers, engineers, and producers’ and accounts ‘for the frequent overlaps among roles’. During this time I have embraced this fluidity of roles. I have composed songs, co-composed songs, composed and performed collaborative instrumental and vocal parts and produced and co-produced entire albums. I have sung lead vocals and backing vocals; played bass, guitar, keyboards, glockenspiel and my daughter’s three-stringed ukulele with a crayon in it. I have hit canoes and water coolers for percussion, shouted into the strings of a grand piano and opened a bottle of beer to heighten the comic effect of a lyrical joke.

I have added near nuclear amounts of compression to performances and I have petulantly complained, like a precious diva, about the overuse of transforming effects such as compression. All of these, occasionally contradictory, tasks or performances were undertaken to compose a general sound and enhance a feeling. They were recorded and placed within a highly variable soundscape to illuminate what I perceived to be the emotional intent of a song."

ISBN 9781922117915

Soft cover, 216 pages

Released 2017