tickling the ivories.

I've satisfied a small portion of my need-to-create-art-longing by playing the piano with my eyes closed. I've got two songs down now-- a dumbed-down version of Tori Amos's "China" and an improved set of chords and melody for Coldplay's "Trouble." I need to finish learning "Fix You" as well; that's my favorite Coldplay song.

I figured out the chords to Justin Timberlake's "What Goes Around," too.. it's pretty simple. All it took was a glance online and a little improvisation. It's just Am, C, G, Dm over and over, with the Dm replaced by a D when he sings "... and I guess I was wrong" right before the "don't want to talk about it/don't want to think about it" bridge. It's amazing how many songs are built off of such simple chord progressions... did you know that Avril Lavigne's "My Happy Ending" and Sarah McLachlan's "Building a Mystery" are nearly identical?

I've really gotten into Maria Mena lately. I found a link to a MySpace for this random 16-year-old girl that played one of Maria's songs, and I followed it to Maria's MySpace Music page. She's this amazing young Norweigan singer with a low, husky, airy voice. It's strange how some small quality of her voice reminds me of Bjork despite her not really sounding like Bjork at all. Maybe it's an accent thing, but Maria doesn't sound like she actually has an accent to me. The lyrics in her songs are really incredible... I love the line "I will no longer be disciplined by the frustrations of an insecure man," especially coming out of an 18-year-old (she's 22/23 now, I believe). Deep relationship-related songs for a young girl.

If you listen to Maria's stuff and really love it, I recommend Martina Sorbara and Imogen Heap as well, although I'm a fan of both women's older work and not the newer work. Martina Sorbara's 2000 album was golden but she got married and started an electro-poppy band with her husband which puts her floaty, birdlike, hearty voice to absolutely no good use at all; and I never really got into Imogen's work with FrouFrou nearly as much as her solo songs like "Come Here, Boy." I can't even find good links for either of them because it's all new stuff. Bleh. I think I need to order Martina's 2000 album before it goes out of print.