Tenth song in the can

Tonight's song - the penultimate one on Annie's sing list - is a pleasant little ditty about the girlfriend of an axe murderer whose head is so messed up she doesn't really know whether he's killed her, or she's killed him.

You begin to see why I picked "Weird & Wonderful" as the title of our second album.

Anyway the interesting thing about this number, for us, is that it's one of the ones that highlighted a slight problem with the way we write songs. Annie gets an idea - it might be a bass line, or a beat, or a melody - and she builds on it until she has a complete tune, which will probably have many of the elements of the final version in terms of the instruments used, etc, and it has a definite melody line, but often will still need some work to polish it into the final version.

At this point she hands it over to me and I give it a listen. Many listens actually - over and over again - which is why I need to be alone for this part, or at least wearing headphones! Eventually the song begins to speak to me, telling me the story it wants the waiting world to hear. All I do is write the words down. Simple really.

But at that stage, we haven't decided who's going to sing it. And there's the rub. Because not only has the tune not been written with one of us in mind, up to now it's not actually been written with either of us in mind. And just occasionally, this has meant that neither of us can sing it. I mean, I'm an OK singer, and Annie has some professional training from her years at drama school, but there's only so far up or down you can make your voice go.

For our first album... well, we were *so excited* to be recording music we just knuckled down and got on with it. And struggled in places. Listening back to that album now, one or two of my tracks are at the limit of my range and sound a bit painful. Definitely wanted to avoid that this time round, and there have been a few tracks in danger of the same problem. This one being the case in point.

Usually, she can solve the problem with a bit of clever transposition. This time round, after half an hour of trying to hit the high notes in the middle eight it became obvious that wasn't going to be enough. But hey, when you're an accomplished musician, that's no problem. After five or ten minutes at the keyboard Annie had rewritten the offending four lines and we were off and recording again.

We're hoping this kind of emergency measure won't be required in the future. With neat biro marks on her keyboard denoting our upper and lower ranges from now on she'll be writing nothing but notes we can reach. The songs might be about murder, but at least they won't sound like they've been murdered.