Torben Rees writes songs informed by the Songbook Greats. They are fresh and contemporary, yet keep the listener safely inside the ‘jazz’ arena. Oh, and he sings a storm as well, scatting, swinging and swooping with the best, in a clearly intoned tenor croon. Great stuff.
Ian Shaw
On Songwriting
When I write songs I tend to start with a little melody, which can come from anywhere at any time. For example, I started humming the tune to Give Me A Break while I was driving up the A1 on my way to York last year: I had to pull over and write down my ideas. When inspiration arrives you just have to drop everything and go with it.
Composing lyrics is a real labour of love. I start with a short phrase or two that works with the melody, and which usually sets the mood of the song. Then I focus on developing the music, usually while sitting at the piano. Sometimes it all comes together very quickly. My song Time and Again, for instance, got written in about three frantic hours, one hazy Sunday morning. But even if most of a song comes very fast, completing it can take forever. I mean, you might write ninety percent of it in half a day but the final ten percent, the real polish, can take weeks, even months. The lyrics to Better Way for instance have been tweaked gradually over the course of about three years.
I guess most of my songs have an autobiographical element to them. Mostly they are inspired by episodes in my life or feelings that have stuck around for a long time. Usually they’re about love in all its manifestations, but sometimes they’re about motivating myself to get out there and be the person I want to be. On the whole my style is influenced by the songbook greats like Johnny Mercer, the Gershwin brothers and Henry Mancini. But I strive for a fresh contemporary sound that connects with the modern world.
The music you can hear on this page and on the listen page is only a fraction of the total that I have written and I am steadily working towards having a professionally recorded album. The most recent recordings with Tim Lapthorn at Josh Kemp’s Full Tone Studios are a major step in that direction. A new and wonderful experience for me recently has been composing to someone else’s lyrics. Freija Glansdorp has written some beautiful, poetic verse, such as The Picture in My Mind and it has been my honour to set it to music and record it.