For me, composing music is a form of therapy: I will write something and then try to look at it objectively and ask myself, “Is that who I am?,” or “Is that what’s coming out right now?” For a while now, I have been thinking that I want to write less in a given composition: fewer chords, simpler melodies and harmonic structures, etc. It then occurred to me that the thing I have not done enough of is to write songs that require me to sit out — stop playing! — and let the rhythm section take the lead.
FIGURE 1 illustrates the tune’s main melody. Played as straight (even) 16th notes, it does not reference or outline any specific chord and is built from pairs of notes that move in a somewhat chromatically ascending manner. Guitarist Nels Cline refers to this type of melodic line as a “squib,” something that ignites the music. I challenged myself to write a bunch of melodies like this, and so one day I sat in a coffee shop in Nashville and just wrote a bunch of them down on music paper. I don’t have perfect pitch, so oftentimes when I sit down to play what I wrote away from the guitar, I realize that some of the pitches are off from what I intended. But every so often, I find something cool, and the melody for “Earth Science” was born in this way.
FIGURE 2 shows the next melodic segment, which again features a series of chromatic passages, both descending and ascending. This is followed by a repeat of the first melodic line.
Ordinarily, I would then write a form to solo over and forge a musical environment to feature the guitar. But instead, I flipped the script by laying out and featuring Scott Colley on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums with a simple musical direction: play together, play fast, play dense and create so much tension that I can’t wait to come back in and interject.
These are the kind of cues you can have in a great ensemble, where you ask your fellow musicians to elicit something from you, saying, “I need you to pull something out of me that I can’t pull out of myself.” All of the great bandleaders seem to do that, and it’s something I aspire to do myself. The twist here is that I limit myself to playing only the notes of the melody, so when they build up a level of tension, I can only come back with something like FIGURE 3, wherein I play the line freely, speeding up and/or slowing down, and adding the unison bend at the end.
On the recording, the rhythm section then creates even more cacophony, with some overdubbed arco (bowed) bass from Scott, so I come back in with a faster version of the line, ending with a tremolo-picked frenzy on the unison bend, as shown in FIGURE 4. Then we all come in together on the first phrase, a little slower, as shown in FIGURE 5.
I look forward to writing more tunes like this, and I continue to be amazed by how effective the music can become when I stop playing, and by the things that a great band can allow you to do.
