Today's Document
shark vs the universe
One Nice Bug Per Day
sheepfilms
Product Placement
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
@theartofmadeline
NASA
tannertan36
bliss lane
Claire Keane
★
if i look back, i am lost
Fai_Ryy
occasionally subtle
hello vonnie
JVL
No title available
$LAYYYTER
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@libbytidley
tw// mentions of death and suicide but in a cheerful tone
I was in a really down place when I wrote this, I’m gonna be honest, but there isn’t really much I can say about this other than it was a letter to my family... also I’d been listening to Maisie Peter’s Toast all day so I accidentally stole the tune and the whistle thing I think... whoops.
Promise I Love You(r Netflix) by Libby Tidley
Well, my first ‘comedy song’ has a comic story of it’s own. I tweeted this song to Netflix and somehow managed to receive six months free Netflix as a gift. I’m absolutely thrilled that they actually liked it. That was a wonderful evening indeed.
I wrote this based off of that long running joke of being in a relationship with someone just for their Netflix account. The task was ‘Love with an Ulterior Motive’ and what better time than to write a joke song about Netflix.
Basically, I found this fun little guitar plucking part and separately I wrote the lyrics using titles I found on the ‘Originals of Netflix’ section and I just had a whale of a time. There’s not really much of a deep back story to this one. I just made a joke.
Actually, there’s one thing I could point out... ‘Sent me those sweet eight letters that I needed to read’? Most passwords are told me be 8 letters or more... also, the phrase ‘i love you’ is eight letters. There’s some subtle comedy right there.
Hello, second song I ever wrote for university. This song is under the brief of ‘Who Am I?’ and my first thought was: paranoid.
I was once in a band... I made a whole video about it for my one year on youtube if you’re interested. It was great until it wasn’t and until the people I had considered my best friends told me they had never liked me in the first place. That screwed me over. It caused me to become paranoid about everyone I knew. I was certain that after a while people would leave me, or they were only friends with me because they felt they had to be or because they pitied me. Sometimes I still think like that; it’s not something that goes away easy. A lot of people are just kind and polite and don’t want you to feel bad and I’m constantly scared of being abandoned.
I wrote this song about how that situation caused so much to happen for me. I don’t outright talk about the situation, I just explain the end result, sort of. Not quite.
I was never 100% sure about this song. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t. Maybe I’ll play through it a few more times and see if it’s worth doing anything with one day.
Wally by Libby Tidley
This song was both easy and difficult to write. We had been given the ‘a member of your family’ brief and I was planning on writing about my cousins, but that night, when I got home, my mum told me that we were having to rehome the younger of our two labradors, Wally, because he’s snapped at one of the smaller children again.
It wasn’t his fault; he’d grown up in a family where I was the only child, and I was 18 when we got him so he wasn’t used to small children pulling his tail and lying on him. The kids didn’t understand either, even though we told them time and time again not to. In the end, with how stressed Wally was getting and how stressful and on edge the whole house felt the majority of the time, it was the best decision. But it was still difficult. I locked myself in my room and cried for a good four hours and wrote this song with a bleeding heart. He was rehomed a week later.
I wanted to write this song so that you couldn’t 100% tell which member of my family this was about - and yes, dogs count - and I think I did well, although the ‘stealing shoes and running miles’ line tipped a few people off. But I wanted to capture his spirit in the lyrics. I think I did reasonably well. He’s a red fox coloured labrador (the colour of soaked through sand... look up that colour labrador and you’ll understand). He was cheeky and handsome and wonderful and I love him so much.
For this week’s brief for solowriting, we were told to completely rework a song. I picked my song ‘Coffee and Toothpaste’ because the original is very cheerful and upbeat but with an underlying bitterness and I thought it would be interesting to try and bring out to bitterness and the anger that are suppressed in the lyrics.
One of the things I really wanted to experiment with here was the change of melody in the verses. In the original, the melody changes slightly in the last half of the second verse which is something I don’t actually tend to do regularly but has been recommended for me to look into. I figured working on a variation of a melody change for a song where I’d already figured out that section would be a nice step forward to doing it with other, new songs.
Personally, I really like this version for very different reasons to the original but I still love the original too. It was actually suggested to me that I completely change the lyrics for this version of the song so it’s a completely stand alone track but I feel like having two versions of the same song would be interesting as the new melody and chord sequence give the song a completely different meaning.
This song was written for a specific idea that I later decided not to go through with because I liked it so much. Basically, I wanted to write a song about a same sex (female/female) relationship and then later change all of the pronouns into male as I was singing from a female perspective. I made sure to have ‘her’ as a rhyme at the end of a sentence to make the rhyming scheme not quite add up. I thought having rhymes of ‘prefer / him’ and ‘life / husband’ would throw off the listener and encourage them to question the topic of the song.
I made the melody sound a little bit restricted and like there was a conflict in the vocal line to reflect the conflict in the lyrics as the narrator is constantly questioning whether or not they deserve their loved one. The lyrics reflected the theme as once the listener was more engaged in what was happening with the faulty rhyming scheme they would be led to believe that the narrator was questioning whether their relationship was holding back the other person which is a worry that closeted homosexual couples can often struggle through.
I’m rather proud of how this song turned out and I’m glad I decided not to change the pronouns in the end.
Our brief for this week was to write a song about a ‘Simple Story’. I wasn’t too sure what to write about originally. I’d started planning out a song about a standard boy/girl relationship and the break up process because that’s a pretty standard song format, right?
But then I found this little ditty chorus on my google docs from when I’d read this story called Fading and I sat down and just wrote and wrote and wrote until I came up with a decent set of lyrics. It’s a little unusual for me to write a song with a full set of lyrics before a melody or chord sequence but I’m incredibly impressed with how this one turned out.
The outline of the story is that one character decided he was going to jump off of the cliff into the waiting ocean below and his best friend sat next to him, telling him how bad of an idea it is. However, the best friend knew that the first boy would jump no matter what he says, so he agreed to jump in with him because he didn’t want to leave him to die on his own.
The last verse shows the reason for the look back on the story; the first boy is in the process of risking his life once again and this time, the best friend isn’t going to let him and is going to encourage the best friend to ‘step away from the edge’.
The song is rather destructive and you can kind of hear that in the tone of the melody, chords and the lyrics but the lyrics are hiding a lot more secrets in them than at first listen.
There’s a running theme of self destruction evident suggested and hidden in lyrics such as ‘the sun bled on the horizon / you drew patterns with the sharpest stones’ and ‘you scratched your arm’. Sentences like these were added to bring in a bit of a well covered suggestion of self harm. Something that would seem harmless to some speaks volumes to others.
You know when you get really mad at someone and literally the only thing you can think to do is to expel all your anger into something productive? I tend to use that when writing songs, and this one was absolutely no different.
Back Seat Buddy is a bit of a shaming song, but at the same time that wasn’t the intention. For me, the intention of this song was to try and get across the pain and the hurt that the subject of the track inflicts on those who are stuck in it. When you believe that you and another person are part of a pact and could never break apart, and then they leave you alone or push you away so you feel as if you’re not important to them any more. This song is meant to be a ‘well if that’s how you’re going to treat me, you need to know that I’m not willing to be the person that you only look to when no one else listens’.
There are a few hidden things in this track that I’m not going to bring out... Such as one reference to a song I have written prior. Some of you may figure it out, some of you may not. Either way, that’s okay. It was a little easter egg put in for my own benefit, mocking my naivety to think that I could ever be important to someone.
That’s an exaggeration, I know I’m probably somewhat important to a few people - my family, for example, and hopefully I’m as important to Jake and Tarsha as they are to me - but the situation this song is about made me feel a little worthless.
For some reason, the song took a more country feel as soon as I began writing it. I quickly gathered a rhythm and the chords somehow just fell into place but I feel as if the feeling just makes it more entertaining to listen to. The twang of the vocal, especially in the chorus, to me makes it sound very sarcastic as if in the middle of an argument, over exaggerating particular words and making it sound exasperated and tired.
I’m rather proud of this song, especially as the first song I’ve written in the New Year and I’ve been considering putting it up on my channel... but first, I need to work on it a little more, dust it off and tidy it up, add a few harmonies, maybe an egg shakers. But overall, decent in my opinion.
the project
welcome to my new tumblr! most of you will probably already know my main, fun Tumblr @libbylumos but this account is more for my music
a few people did the ‘one song a week’ challenge last year (danny gruff for instance who did it incredibly well) and frank hamilton is well known for having done it
now, I don’t have the skill or the time to do as danny and frank did where they recorded the song properly with extra instruments and made it sound all professional and all that, so i figured my alternative could be this:
one song a week, an audio file as basic as it needs to be or as complex as I would like, with a blog article
the majority of these compositions will not be perfect, but this will be a great way for me to keep track of all the songs i am writing for my university course... although with the next term, i may end up writing more than one a week but hey, that gives me more of a selection!
anyway, for those of you who like my music, i hope you like this blog i’m putting together. of course, some of these tracks may be videos rather than audio if i write a song that i instantly think is worthy of uploading, and some of these tracks i will be hoping that some of you may be willing to give me advice
hope you all like it, and we’ll see how this goes!
- Libby Tidley
