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Week 16: I live for you
I’m finally catching up with uploading my ideas. When I get busy, I still write but blogging seriously falls by die wayside. Week 16’s idea started out just playing around on the piano. It’s really just a riff and an idea of a melody with some placeholder words at the moment, but I would love to develop this some more. Here’s just a simple recording with my phone.
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Week 14: Beskermer van Israel
One of my favourite verses in the Bible is Ps 121:4 that says “Indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep”. This verse has calmed my racing thoughts many times assuring me that God is in control. So many times over the past year we’ve been bombarded with scary news and I’ve felt overwhelmed many times, but time and time again God has reminded me that He is not sleeping and is still in control. This gives me immense hope. I wrote the verse and chorus a few weeks ago and just didn’t get around to recording the idea. This week I completed the song and also…
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Week 12: Ek sal hier wag
This week’s song is about waiting. Not something I’m good at and there’s a lot of it going around. Waiting for schools to open (they finally did this week!), waiting for vaccines, waiting for normal life to return, the list goes on. And all the time we’re waiting, God is still working in us and around us. This is a prayer about submitting to God’s timing and recognising that He is working us into His bigger picture. He is creating a symphony requiring not only my little part, but all the parts to work together for the sake of beauty. In terms of songwriting techniques, there’s quite a bit of…
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Week 11: As die virus weg is
This week I wrote a fun song with my girls about all the things we’re going to do when the virus finally goes away! We used the loops on the iPad Garageband app again and had great fun arranging our song. Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash
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Week 10 – Hier by ons (vers)
We all have songs that we love while we’re writing them and then they turn back to pumpkins when dailight comes. This week I thought I finally had a verse for a great chorus I wrote awhile ago. But, alas, in dailight they did not seem such a good match after all. One thing I have learned, though, is that no lyric or song idea ever is a waste. It might just come back to you in a co-writing session as you search for a verse or some lyrics. Sometimes you can take lyrics and just write a new melody later and suddenly it works. So, here is this week’s…
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Week 9 – Bly in my
This week I wrote a prayer song or Taize-like short repetative song that is based on John 15 where Jesus said we should remain in Him to bear fruit. The beautiful verse that follows that is where Jesus says he loves us like the Father has loved him. What a comfort that is in a time such as this. The words are from Jesus’ perspective so it’s more of a ministry moment song or for personal worship. The challenge of this type of song is to keep it simple. I like to write it with a little climax in the second part of the verse that provides contrast, but traditionally…
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Week 8 – Ek moet swyg
“Ek moet swyg voor U heerlikheid, Ek moet swyg en U almag prys Wanneer U aan my genade bewys Ek moet swyg” This week’s song is a Christmas worship song. I had written the chorus in 2017 with the idea to use it together with Psalm 8 out of the Afrikaans hymn book (Die Liedboek). When I started writing the verses for this new song, it just fitted together so well I decided to use it here instead. The whole song talks about the world and our response to the Christmas message – darkness that has to flee before the Light of the world; nations that will bow before His…
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Week 7 – Kortpad deur die Vrystaat
There’s nothing like the long road ahead of you – kilometre after kilometre of flat farmland and time and space to think. Except if you have to dodge trucks on the N1… So, we decided to take a shortcut through the Free State this year on our way down to the coast. We even drove some dirtroad due to Google maps’ recommendation of the shortest road. Well, it turned out that the shortest road was indeed the prettiest and I really enjoyed driving through the Free State. As a little girl we always went to my grandmother’s farm just outside Edenburg and there I learned to love the Free State…
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Week 6 – Fall (instrumental)
I often sit down at the piano and improvise and never actually record these moments. I would say this is some of my most creative moments where there is no end goal or structure. Emotions can just flow into notes and melodies can evolve in whatever way they want to. This week I recorded a short improvisation session. I call this “Fall”, because it feels like the season. And of course it starts off in a minor key, my favourite colour to improvise in.
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Week 5: I will remember
This week’s song was inpired by Psalm 57:10 (Msg) that says: “I will remember every time I look up. Every cloud is a flag to your faithfulness”. I love the idea that we can look at different things in nature and it reminds us of attributes of God or what he has told us in the past. When I first got the idea for the song I wrote about a page of ideas for possible lyric angles. None of it rhymed, it was just thoughts around the topic. I then went to the piano and wrote the first verse and chorus. This was end September. For me the hardest thing…
