Socien's Blog

Teaching myself to sing and write songs remains the most ambitious of my DIY projects. I am yet to publish a song but I promise I will try to deliver something the earliest possible. First, the story behind this DIY project.

I fell in love for the first time when I was twenty years. The very same year (2016), happened to be my year of enrolling at the College. So, after six good months of giving her my best, I had to leave my lover. I went to a town 300 kilometres away. I struggled with coping with College life at a time when Mom fell sick.

With no communication with my family behind me and none to supply me with tools to fix my problems, I broke my phone in half. I lost every reason to love myself. Our relationship was never easier from then. We never had a chance to meet again until 2019. She had fallen in love with someone between 2017 and 2018, a phase during which I was her virtual boyfriend. But we were quick to forget the past mishaps and move into the future.

Our last run of togetherness was sweet. I gave her my best attention. Now a single mother she remembers me now instead of the guy who slept with her before her first marriage. I last saw her in December 2019. The situation played its hand. I could not afford to visit her. In July 2020 she gave birth to a boy, a sign that someone impregnated her while we were still in love. Needless to say, the father of this boy is now in jail and it automatically left her a single mother.

Her attempt to reach me in 2023 gave me a missing puzzle of her story. But then it was too late to undo the love letters that I had written lamenting my loss of her and praising the love we had between us. “A Letter to Ex-Lover” written in 2022 became a reference book from which my songs were drawn. But before this letter, a lot of songs had been written.

“I found love” is a song written in 2020, March. I kinda have all the instruments that will be part of the song playing in my mind. With knowledge of musical notation memorizing everything about the song was the best way to preserve it. In 2022, a ‘knit-key’ system was adopted. I don’t have to waste your time explaining what knit-key is. But the short story is I invented my notation system (with a lot of shortcomings).

Apart from simply writing love songs, I also wrote inspirational ones. I hope I will use them to promote this blog. “Champion” will have its first chorus and two following verses in English. The rest will be sung in as many languages as I can, each taking its line. The level of work demanded on this project is massive.

My earliest forms (2020) of writing a song, involved starting with a mumble. A mumble is a voice recorded imitating a beat or the instruments. Anything sung at this stage is usually inaudible. After the mumble phase, there is then the filling phase. This one is all about adding the actual lyrical content. This again is also the poetic phase. Lyrics are developed, memorised and kept safe—without any recorder and the knowledge of musical notation, “I’ve Found Love” quickly cruised past the mumble and filling phases in a few days.

Later works (2023) like “Be my downfall” were written using a knit-key-mark system. This group of songs fit under the section Quassa. I was beginning to use Marks instead of just numbers to determine how to sing a song.

I am trying to come up with a rare genre based on Sungura’s notation system, a guitar being the instrument of choice. If you have any time to waste on understanding what is Sungura (and you are not from a country) listen to this song on YouTube by a local musician. But I intend to make my songs shorter and based on Western Pop. My lyrics are rarely banal.

Conclusively: Some people who make an impact in our lives are not meant to stay forever. My former girlfriend is the reason I started to write music. I believe that it’s not only music but a radically new genre you can think of. She was also a reason for my dropping out of College. She never had an idea that falling in love with her turned me into a person who hates jobs and believes that he must found a company.