With the holidays behind us, our family has been busy implementing our New Year’s resolutions to make our life as simple as possible in 2018. This requires a lot of letting go – sometimes a sad and painful process and sometimes something to look forward to, but always challenging. Vulnerable. Also exciting. Slowly the results of the choices we made during the past year are revealing themselves, and for me this means more time for music. It also means that some songs that had remained ‘shelved’ for years are now finally being picked up and dusted off.

One of these songs is Curtains, a song I wrote in my US days. I sometimes think of it as a ‘small’ song, because it is about how small we can feel when we feel vulnerable. When we keep walking around with all this emotional baggage, all those negative beliefs about ourselves that we accumulated over the years – that we are not good enough and never will be, that we don’t deserve our blessings, that we will never win, no matter how hard we try. It is also about how much we can grow when we dare to be vulnerable, and allow ourselves to feel both love and pain.

So far, Curtains has not outgrown the ‘freshly written’ stage, which means it has lyrics and a melody – and nothing else. I’m in the process of completing it, but I would like your help with that. I want to play with harmony, but I am not sure yet how exactly. In the video, you’ll hear three versions of Curtains, and I would love to hear from you which one you like best, and (if you can tell me) why that is.

The harmony voices are being produced by a little device called a Vocal Harmony Pedal (the Boss VE-2 to be exact) – a little footswitch that my mic is plugged into, and which automatically generates harmony voices while I sing. In a studio recording, I would always sing every part myself, but this machine allows me to perform solo and yet sound like a barber shop all on my own. It takes some practice to stomp the pedal at exactly the right moment without bumping into my mic or dropping my guitar, but practice makes, well, not necessarily perfect but good enough at least. (The recording itself is not of mind blowing quality, I made it with our regular pocket camera. In the technical area as well, there is quite some room for improvement. I am aware of both issues – working on it 😉 ). And also many thanks to my folks-in-law for letting me practice in their living room! <3

I’d love to hear your opinion – A, B or C?