Love and major sevenths.

The tricky thing about the impending tour is that I've got to try and remember our songs. We haven't played since February '04, so that's not easy. Not only that, but, since we've recruited John the bassist, he needs to know how our songs go, which means someone needs to tell him the chord progressions. Now, I'm a programmer: on stage, I press buttons and twiddle knobs, making all sorts of cool noises. This means that, after the initial song-writing phase, I never play our songs on an actual instrument again. Which in turn means that, even when it were me what wrote them, I have no idea what most of the chords are. I'm not even sure what key half our songs are in.

So I've been playing a fair bit of piano of late, trying to remember things, or, failing that, figure them out. And I've made an alarming discovery. I have married a woman who doesn't like major sevenths.

Unless you start buggering around with nausea-inducing nonsense like quarter-tones, major sevenths are the second most dissonant intervals after minor seconds, and major seventh chords contain that dissonance. I'm rather fond of them myself, and so are Alun and Donna, which is why Squander Pilots' music is full of them. Yea, full to its very brim. Vic has always liked most of our music, until this last week. Every time I play one of our songs on the piano, the moment I reach the inevitable major seventh, she complains. She hates the chord so much that she has now asked me not even to mention major sevenths, as thinking about them reminds her of the noise, and the mere memory of the noise is enough to make her feel quite ill.

To be fair here, Vic does also say that she still likes the songs when all the instruments are playing together and the chords are spread across a number of different noises and there's a melody to hold it all together. It's just chords played on the piano by me that she hates. But especially major sevenths.

Hmm.

The important thing is that we love each other.