Making of – Twee Song

I was trying to decide which demo to play you this week, until I saw the fabulous Regina Spektor at the Sydney Opera House the other night which led me to Twee Song.

Regina does the quirky twee pop thing superbly in songs like Fidelity and the pizzicato rhythm immediately reminded me of Twee Song. My pizzicato is a bit tougher than Spektor’s and marches along in an almost militaristic fashion. For me, Twee Song possesses the Beatlesque charm of some of the tracks on the first Space March album, and I certainly see Paul McCartney as the pioneer of this genre of music. Twee seems to polarise people with some unable to tolerate its bouncy nature, but for me it’s great! I love those sometimes criticised McCartney tracks such as When I’m Sixty Four, Lovely Rita and Getting Better.

The instrumentation in Twee Song is almost completely orchestral but offset with a synthetic beat, distorted synth arpeggio and synth trumpet. It’s in swing time, of course, and it doesn’t really have any instrumental breaks – it repeats the melody three times and each time adds another layer of chaos to the mix. By the third round, I’m pretty much playing any and all notes with the flute and string counter melodies which serves its quirkiness.

The song is actually quite philosophical and is about the security of familiarity – that I (we) like the twee song because we know exactly how it’s going to end. It’s an observation of human behaviour that was brought to my attention from an early age when my Dad read the book ‘Future Shock’ by Alvin Toffler and he told me the premise of the book was that people will struggle to adapt to the increasing rate of technological change. A few years later when my parents split-up, I experienced first hand how change can undermine one’s sense of security. As I grew older, I also realised the converse to be true, in that too much familiarity breeds boredom and depression, and that change is fundamental to stimulating our spirit and creativity. So humanity is caught in this paradox of both needing and not wanting change.

Fortunately, the bouncy nature of the music lightens the heavy theme, and it always leaves me with a smile on my face. For this reason, I will be using Twee Song to close the album.

The banner image above shows me “tipping my hat” to some twee icons of the 60s – Warhol, Twiggy and McCartney!