#TrendingOnTwitter

#TrendingOnTwitter  [aka: Hashtag Trending On Twitter] is my latest song project. 

The idea came to me in December 2019 and I finished writing ten songs by early March 2020. I've made acoustic demos and am currently in the "rehearse and produce" phase... somewhat stalled by the Global Pandemic (but we don't let such things stop us, do we?). I'm going to have to put together a remote band and record from afar. That will be a fun challenge.

I love this project because the idea came to me one night, and then-- all of a sudden-- my song-writing faucet simply turned on. Ten songs came through as though on their own. I think what made it "easy" was the structure of the idea, the limits of it. I gave myself very narrow guidelines, and with that I was able to make creative choices that I would not have otherwise come upon.

What follows is a description of the overall process: 

(I may blog about specific songs later, because some interesting things "happened" I'd like to reflect upon.)

To create the lyrics, I foraged through the collective consciousness revealed through hashtags that happened to be trending on Twitter -- this took place between December 2019 and January 2020.

My process for each song was to pick the first hashtag which happened to be trending on that day. I would click on the hastag, then simply glance through the various posts which happened to be hashtagged by far-flung people “out there” who, for whatever reason, decided to say that particular thing on that particular day and tag it to that particular hashtag. Enough people must have been thinking about whatever it was at that particular moment, for it was…as my title indicates…trending… on Twitter.

BTW, I don’t actually use Twitter a lot, but I happened to check it one day and came up with the general idea/concept. The rest was only a matter of follow through.

I derived my lyrics by culling words from statements and phrases that caught my eye … actually in the order that they came up on my feed. My lyric-pattern-creating brain sifted through the raw material and organically decided what would make sense as a verse or a chorus, a hook or a refrain, a bridge, an intro or a coda, etc. From some posts I found full sentences (or parts of sentences) that were evocative, but from other posts I may have gathered only one choice word.

Later on, in February and March 2020, I explored the material to find rhythms and melodies through singing and playing guitar. As I developed t­­he music, I permitted myself to fine-tune the poems, add repetitions, adjust the order or tweak the grammar as needed to better fit the flow of the emerging music.

Frankly it felt like some of the melodies just appeared to me… through thin air. The unexpected topics, word combinations and resulting emotions seemed to call those particular notes out of the aether. I don’t overthink melodies. I just channel them. At various points when I needed to edit or hone the words to better fit the music, I went back to the orginal hashtag and found a phrase or a word that would finish out the lyric puzzle. I only rarely put in my own words. Yet, now, they are all my words. I claim them for I have breathed them into brand new context by juxtaposition.

Little by little, I polished the music and made demo recordings, added percussion, etc.

I think, in the end, it makes sense that this writing process would have tapped into universal emotions. Yet, the songs ended up surprising me in how well they turned out.  I like my #TrendingOnTwitter songs very much. I hope you enjoy them too.

#TrendingOnTwitter Album Cover

#TrendingOnTwitter Album Back

Heavy Machinery 
#TrendingOnTwitter 
©2020 Kilissa Cissoko/BMI