Prima tempo

As the production of the Laika song draws to a close I wanted to share my experience of being a first-time songwriter. I was handed the brief just after the Cambridge Science festival gig was finished so it seemed particularly pertinent to make it as educational as possible. One of the great things about the IML is everybody's forced to do some research; I love researching so spent a couple of days scouring the web for as much on Laika as possible, moving into the USA-USSR space race and the Cold War, ie ended up generally trying to get my head around 20th century Russian politics and wondering how I was going to fit all that into a 3 and half minute song. What became almost immediately apparent is that the guy responsible for putting Russian animals in space, Oleg Gazenko, actually felt pretty guilty about the whole Laika business so that seemed like a great starting point. In 1998 he said this:

"Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog."

One of the other scientists (Vladimir Yadovsky) took Laika home, on the eve of her space journey, to have some play time with his kids. I was getting a sense that there was a level of guilt from the scientists about blasting this dog into space on her terminal journey and that Laika was a pretty lovable little dog. Thus the song I've written is an attempt to be from the perspective of these scientists at the time (thus it turned out I didn't have to fit 50 odd years of Soviet politics into the song afterall, phew) and gave me an excuse to try and sing with a bit of a Russian accent. After I'd written what turned out to be pretty much the final version of the song I read the marvellous graphic novel Laika by Nick Abadzis - he did tonnes of research and came up with practically the same story so that was quite gratifying!

Once I'd done the research I was surprised at how easily the lyrics were to write (much thanks must go to Kip here for giving me a firm structure to work with) -- maybe not surprising to you guys but shocked the hell out of me, I thought it was going to be much harder. But I was fascinated by the process and the different way of thinking it provoked (compared to editing medical journals which is my usual brainpower outlet). However, it plagued me after a few days; for a week I had the song endlessly, incessently on a loop in my mind, got pretty sick of it and had to just entirely leave it alone for a while. Still, I played my mum a rough version I'd recorded and it made her cry so I thought I was probably on the right track.

Anyway, the final result will be uploaded soon and I'm happy with it. Barney's been doing some nice production on it (though I did have to say 'let's turn down the robot effect a bit') and I've been learning some basics of logic pro this evening. So, all in all a fun learning and gratifying experience which I'm keen to repeat...

Here's a short animation all about Laika which I wish I had done http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz7Xbo1m5XA

xx Layla