NYC Midnight Short Story Contest 2017

I'm the person who cried wolf about prompt difficulty, but this was hard

Heat: 83

Genre: Action/Adventure

Object: An investment

Character: An Airplane Maintenance Technician

Title: Green

Synopsis: In a post-apocalyptic world, a pirate and a hostage take a gamble. “I wasn't always a pirate.”

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You are All My Children

I was more or less born watching All My Children. I stopped watching regularly several years ago, although it's like the mob (wrong soap, but I also watch that one): You're never really out. I used to write the Tuesday AMC recaps for rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc (remember USENET? Then you are old, as am I). I'll be giving the show a send-off with friends I made on RATSA, some of my very first imaginary internet friends. I think I'll have more to say on the slow death of the genre when I'm slightly less over-committed than I am right now. But for now, here's what was happening in Pine Valley on 9/23/1997. WE HAVE AN OPENING FOR A MISTRESS Skye toodles around Weirdwynd hummingly and grabs a nostril-full of some garment of Ed's. He pops in and watches her. She spies him and he tells her not to stop as it happily reminds her of Maria. They discuss the kids in a very couple-like manner. Ed wants to pitch the shirt of her olfactory dreams because it's covered with paint. She urges him to save it. He agrees, saying it's another nice memory. Ed wants to take her out to dinner for all her help. She tries to plead work. Ed urges her, she accepts. They opt for Holidays over the Valley Inn. Ed calls Mary in to brief her. She asks if he's up to it and asks about his hand. He urges her to call if the kids wake up. She agrees. They bail, she picks up the phone and reaches out to the Count to deliver the bad news: Ed is better. Ed walks in and catches her in the act. I haven't seen him glower like that in ages. He rips the phone from her hand, but Dimp is so upset that he's broken the connection. Ed harangues Mary who claims Dimp was concerned for his health. Mary admits she told him about Sea City et al. Skye gets in on the act. Mary weeps and wails. Ed kicks her out, telling her she betrayed him and his wife and is out of there tonight. Skye and Ed discuss damage control. Ed is irate that Mary turned on Maria who was good to her when she was ill. Ed wonders who else Dimp has bought. Skye is astonished that loyalty means nothing to Dimp. Ed says Loyalty, love, trust and any other human emotion is just a word to Dimp. He'll stop at nothing to get what he wants. Skye comes in with an apron and a cookbook with flour all over her face. She's going to make dinner. Ed tries not to be giggle as Skye mulls over the cookbook. They look up how to fold and egg. Ed takes the book from her, and says he knows what she's up to and it won't work. Skye looks incredibly guilty. Ed says she can't distract him from the Dimp/Mary/ Maddie debacle. He appreciates it, and wants to repay her. He's letting her go. Skye is stricken and begs for her job at Tempo. He tells her to go forth, be fruitful and multiply. Skye grits her teeth and insists she's having fun. Ed doesn't want her her to give up her life for him. Skye refuses to let him go through the fight of his life alone. She tells him that armed forces won't remove her from Wildwind. Ed relents and is shocked to find that he just laughed. He feels like it's a sign: if he can laugh, he can win. Skye runs out to deal with the souffle. Ed and Skye are finishing the dinner. Ed refuses more. They joke about her cooking abilities. He asks about the tune she was humming. Sky reminisces about Althea getting ready to go out as she watched when she was a little girl. She had repressed the memory before tonight. The bell rings. Ed goes to answer. It's a cop serving Edmund papers to appear in court re: Maddy's custody. SHE HAS AN OPENING, SHE'S A PRINCESS Rewind to Laura interrupting Scott's slipping virginity. Gillian scolds her for not knocking and then for her guttersnipe language in explaining that she knows what's going on. All the blood has clearly abandoned Scott's brain as he defends Gillian from Laura who tells him she's oh so sorry that she thought sex should mean something. Gillian burbles something about it being fun. Laura seems primed to scratch her eyes out, but settles for calling trash trash regardless of which side of the tracks it's from. Scott lackidaisically berates her for such language. He yells at her for barging in. Laura suggests closing the door next time. Scott rather irrelevantly tells her that Gillian's performance is a command one and wonders why Laura is there. She claims Stu offered bad info and urges them to pick up where they left off. Gillian tells her it's not th th that seempew. Laura wonders how many men of different nationalities have fallen for the faux party girl act. Gillian wonders why Laura doesn't like games. Laura goes off on phonies. Gillian throws it back saying Laura lied to Scott for months. Scott doesnt like that either. Gillian urges Laura to admit she's jealous and hangs on Scott. Scott tells her to back off. Her voice leaps several octaves as she sneers that she didn't realize Scott was only interested in her mind. More unintelligible stuff and she flounces out after some advice to Laura about not starving? Laura apologizes and humbly admits she had no right to barge in on them. She says he has the right to bed whomever he wants. Scott is either the quintessential tease or suffering from Alzheimer's. In spite of the fact that he was playing down comforter to the princess in the bra, he claims he wouldn't do that when Stu might walk in. The long and the short of it is, it's none of Laura's business, he's a guy with needs and Gillian is a veritable Galaxy of Mailbox Fulfillments. Scott, with no trace of irony, is indignant that she should think him so cheap. Scott tells her again that sex was not the issue and can't believe she really thinks that's why they broke up. Scott says that Gillian's assets help him forget what he misses most: Laura. The Luuuv doctor has prescribed defunct royalty for what ails him. Laura doesn't trust him and therefore doesn't love him and that's the bottom line. He tells her to look him up if she decides to trust him. THE MAGICAL MELTDOWN TOUR At WRCW Liza looks on as Tad is in the throes of another successful interview with Jane and her magazine. Pitch pitch pitch, verbal spar verbal spar verbal spar and yes . . . ladies and germs . . . I do believe there's a ratty orange haze on the meadow. Brooke rushes the set and tells Tad that they have to tell the public together. She raves, she rambles, Tad tries to reason and Liza orders the crew to catch every minute of the breakdown. Liza directs the camera crew. Tad continues to try to talk her down. Jane Pratt comes over for no particular reason and reminds Brooke that they met the month before at the Women in Media (snicker) conference. Brooke alternates for a few moments between apologizing and continuing to rave at Tad. Jane slowly backs away and Tad asks her to reschedule. My heart about stops as Brooke utters the words that strike fear into the hearts of BABES around the world: I want to do it here. I wanna do it here for the cameras. She assures him that this could happen to anyone! (Don't you threaten me, woman) They tried to put her in jail for telling the truth. Tad, at long last, is the first person, including hospital personnel, to ask her for a blow by blow of the plane incident. She says she tried to warn innocent people. Tad tries to ask sensible questions and she barks that they don't want to deal with her (no one does, Brooke, no one does). She explains that she took a big scary flying thingy, but it was ok because Jim was with heranitwasokuntilthebigbadnoiseandthepressureandthethingand the oh Ladyyyeeeee. She makes weird hamster noises when she comes to the part about the flight attendant restraining her from opening the Emergency exit. She says Jim defended her, apparently having sublimated ths slap. Tad gently suggests a short sharp trip to hospital land. Brooke promises us all that she isn't going to go away and Tad has to help her. Jim creeps in on little cat feet. Tad tries to reassure Brooke that if the airline is hiding something it will come to light. He tells her it was natural for her to panic so soon after the crash. She screeches that the threat was real, not her panic. Tad tries to present the possibility that she'll never have a satisfactory answer. Brooke whines that Jim is the only one who understands, knows etc. Tad suggests that she talk to someone. Brooke spies Jim and gets positively banshee-like demanding that Jim explain things. Tad finally clues in that they're being taped and tells everyone to knock off. Liza slinks around taking notes as Tad demands Brooke go back to the hospital if the police are involved. Derrick shows up to escort her back to rubber land. Jim get sin his face . Liza looks pleased as punch. She watches the back of Brooke's head through a monitor. Jim tells Derrick this doesn't have to get ugly. Derrick suggests it already has. JT winds down and asks for a private word with his detectiveness. JT points out that this could be a double-edged PR nightmare. Derrick can't let her walk, but JT isn't suggesting that. He promises to take Brooke on a date down to HQ on the morrow. Derrick caves, but still tries to sound threatening as he promises an APB if she's a no show. Brooke throws looks of death at Brooke, then rolls over to have her belly-scratched as JT approaches. As they bail, she babbles about having won Tad over to their side. Liza smiles. She hands the tape off to a lackey instructing him to rush it to editing and suggesting that problems be addressed to her, not to Tad. He re-enters. She plays innocent when he asks after the tape. She flat out lies that it has probably been erased. Tad plays the baby card: is she gonna teach Coco to lie in utero? Liza says it was fascinating and he's too close to the issue. He begs her as a friend to give the tape up. She says she has sympathy but she can't back off every big name loony who throws herself in camera range for him. Tad begs again, for her to do it for him. Doing the right thing is more important than a 30 share. Liza says responsibility to audience out ways responsibility to the mother of his child and she will report the meltdown. Tad blames this coldness on Adam hurting her. Liza appears to consider this. Back at Casa Destiny Brooke tries to thank Jim. He assures her it's nothing. Brooke wants to make a list and check it twice. Jack tops the list of pressure folk. Jim rips the pen and paper from her hand. She whinges to him to back off. She turns on him, telling him he sold out and asking the dollar amount. He denies taking a dime (hmmm . . . didn't they discuss him taking a settlement earlier? Wasn't Brooke sure he could do no wrong?) Brooke says that the concern everyone is playing at is a smoke screen. JT tells her she's hiding behind her anger so she doesn't have to deal with the crash. He kneels in front of her and urges her to let what is inside of her out. I predict the CDC is all over his pornographing butt in minutes. Brooke stares at him, fiddles with her ear. Then her chin. Hauls herself to her feet and vows not to give into fear because it's what THEY want. She won't be trapped in the past. She will face each day head on, she squeaks. No body is the boss of her or her feelings. She trounces to the stairs, looks back over her shoulder at him, then heads up. JT looks put out.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 27, In Which I Write a Cheerful Song About a Dead Person

Extraordinarily frustrating and messed up recording.


Argh.

This is one of those songs where I failed completely to capture any of the interesting things that were in my head. The rhythm is all wrong, the melody line wanders away from what it should be at multiple points, and boy did I screw up the B sections. I'm really disappointed in it.

This was the last assignment that I was in class to receive: Write a song with "summer" in it and write in one of the "bright" keys with sharps—E or B, capoing ok, because only crazy people write in B on the guitar.

When I missed class because I was sick, I had intended to go to a Sunday make-up class. My grandmother then died on Saturday and I felt like it was wise to go up to hang with the family on Sunday instead. On Monday, I beat my head against the wall trying to do the assignment that would be due on the coming Tuesday, which was a "Turn the Page" song in 3/4 or some variant thereof. Late in the head-beating-against-the-wall process, I thought about playing around with the summer assignment instead, and the line "Let's spend the summer in the big, yellow house" popped into my head. My grandmother was, of course, on my mind, and the house they lived in when I was a kid suggested itself. I spent a lot of time there as a kid, often with my cousin, who is the same age.

I threw my capo on the second fret and started playing around with chord shapes in the key of D. (Yes, a normal person probably would have just written it uncapoed in E. Have we met?) The melody of that line popped in and stayed there, and I could feel that there was a kind of sotto voce tail end to the line (what the heck do you call that, when there's lyric, but it's kind of filler . . . oh, hell, I am deeply stupid today. Anyway, in the first couple of A sections, it's "You and me.").

Why did the line "chasing helicopter daisies" suggest itself? I could not begin to tell you. I don't even really know what it means, although I'm pretty sure it refers to samaras, which are those helicopter seeds that maples produce. For a while, the line was "chasing helicopter daisies down the street," but then the song told me that, no, there wasn't that tail end to the second line, and furthermore there wasn't a hard AABB rhyme scheme, but rather some loose, suggestive assonance running through the lines instead.

The second half of the first A section ended up being about my grandmother's car—a pea green Nova, probably a 1971 or 1972. The vinyl interior was a busy houndstooth pattern that was always, always hot and had a crackly texture (at the time, both my grandparents smoked, which no doubt contributed). The back seat was always filled with bingo chips and coupons, which suggested some images for later. I fought with the phrasing of the second half of the verse, but it ended up thus:

[A] Let’s spend the [G] summer in the [D] big, yellow house, [D]
You and [A] me, chasing [G] helicopter [D] daisies [D]
[A] Let’s feel the [G] houndstooth burn the [D] backs of our [D] knees in the
[A] Back seat of the [G] car behind the [D] big, yellow [A] house

And this is where I started to ruin the song. Using the refrain at the beginning and ending of the A section doesn't work, particularly as the chord progression is the same throughout. I tried to tell myself that I could vary the melody and fix it, but no . . .

After I wrote this verse, I sat with it for probably 4 or 5 hours trying to write more. I tried coming at if from a stream-of-consciousness perspective, writing down images and memories associated with the house and that time of my life in my notebook. I tried crafting sentences in the same rhythmic template as "Let's spend the summer in the big, yellow house." I tried thinking of words that have the same rhythm as "helicopter," thinking that maybe that second line was the lynchpin of the A sections, given that it was an unusual choice. I had a melodramatic hissy fit during which I declared that I was obviously OBVIOUSLY never ever ever going to write another song EVER again.

Part of my trouble stemmed from the fact that the song was very much about my cousin and me staying over at our grandparents' house, but I'd introduced the back seat of a car in the first A section, which suggests clandestine nookie and maybe a romantic relationship. Those kinds of ideas kept creeping in, and I have "Let's live together" and things like that. In other words, I had a brain divided.

I'd brought my songwriting notebook on the morning of the funeral, because I didn't really know how the day was going to go, if I'd be in a position to go to class that night, and so on. In the car, it suddenly became clear to me that the second A section started with "Let's find adventure in the big, yellow house" and involved hiding in the pantry (neither my house nor my cousin's had anything as cool and exotic as a pantry, and we loved the one at Mimi & Papa's). Back-seat nookie be damned! Nothing says childhood like finding adventure! What I wrote down in my notebook as the second A section actually morphed into part A section, part B section, but I wouldn't know that until the following week, when I picked the song back up to work on.

Here's the second A section:

[A] Let’s find [G] adventure in the [D] big, yellow house, [D]
You and [A] me, secret [G] hideout in the [D] pantry [D]
[A] Cold cream [G] disguises, and [D] cloak-and-dagger [D] schemes on the
[A] Dirt-floor [G] in the basement of the [D] big, yellow [A] house

Did we ever disguise ourselves with cold cream? You bet we did! Mimi had a big old white glass tub of ponds on her dresser, and she was foolish enough to give up her bedroom to us when we stayed over. We totally caught hell for using all the cold cream once. I'm not sure that the basement, strictly speaking, had a dirt floor, but it was unfinished and dark and scary with unreliable old light-switches. We both loved sneaking down there and feared getting stuck.

B section! What the what? So, I had two long A sections with repetitive lyrics and repetitive chord structure. Just how many songwriting rules can I break at once? The B section . . . sort of has different chords. I completely fucked the B section up in the recording, because I was trying to follow a suggestion about removing this long, awkward pause at the end of the first line and I just screwed the pooch big time. I guess the B section is more free-form images:

[E] On the checkerboard floor, in the [D] claw-foot [A] tub, we’ll sail away [E] [D]
Down the [A] green stamp [A7] river to the [D] bingo-chip sea [A] to save the [E7] day

Being a big, old-fashioned frame house, it naturally had a big, claw-foot tub and black-and-white tiles in the bathroom. They might have been octagonal, rather than checkerboard, but another strong memory associated with Mimi was the fact that she would never, NEVER let you win at checkers. If you beat her, you beat her on your own merits. I had originally written the second line as "coupon river," in reference to the aforementioned back-seat coupons, but as S pointed out, that's a lousy, lousy word to sing. I think green stamp works because it evokes the same kind of thing. (Does anyone but me even remember what green stamps are?) I'm still murderizing the melody in the B section, and the timing problems I introduced in recording ain't helping.

I had hoped I'd be able to work the story about locking my uncle into his bedroom into the song. (Come on! It's an old house with brass keys in the locks. You're two 7-year-old girls. You're annoyed with the 17-year-old uncle who is not delighted to have you around. Tell me that you wouldn't try turning the key in the door to his room just once.) It didn't work out quite that way, but this A section got filled up with things we weren't supposed to do.

The attic was really just more bedrooms. I'm not exactly sure why weren't supposed to go up there. The screen door on the front of the house was heavy wood on an ancient spring. It shook the whole house when one left it to slam. At the back of the house, there was a weird arrangement of a kind of mudroom and then a very small bedroom, which was my grandfather's. They kept their "frigidaire" (as Mimi always, always called it) back there. Like the pantry, we just thought it was cool and would often set up shop there:

[A] Bet we’ll find [G] trouble [D] big, yellow house, [D]
You and [A] me, we’ll play it cool, [G] we’ll get off [D] easy [D]
[A] Ransack the [G] attic, slam the [D] front door, [D] use the back porch as our
[A] Technicolor [G] stage by the [D] big, yellow [A] house

I thought I was going to go right into a B section, then end on a tag, but as I was leaving the house, another A section cropped up:

[A] We’ll keep our [G] secrets in the [D] big, yellow house, [D]
Safe and [A] sound, locked up [G] tight with a [D] brass key [D]
[A] No one will [G] know, we’ll never [D] tell, they’ll [D] find out what we
[A] Whispered [G] in the dark in the [D] big, yellow [A] house

As for the second B section, I owe a debt to my cousin. She made a collage for the funeral that had pictures and images that she associated with the house and our sleepovers there: Bingo chips (natch), jell-o (didn't make the cut), and a transistor radio. I had forgotten that we were in the habit of sneaking the radio into bed at night and surreptitiously (I'm sure) listening to it.

[E] In our throw-pillow fort on the [A] front room floor, we’ll sing along [E]
To the [A] transistor popping, [D] crackling through our favorite [E7] song

So. You can't end on the B section, you know. So what the hell? How about a schmaltzy taggy thing:

[A] Make me a [G] promise in the [D] big yellow house, [D]
cross your [A] heart, never [G] grow up, never [D] change

I really did try to edit out some of the repetition and work on other suggestions that would have improved this, but nothing was willing to come together. At. All. I'm sorry, little song. You deserved better.

Re-Seduced: Minnesota Fringe Festival, Day 2.

On Sunday, we once again rearranged dinner plans slightly to accommodate our theatre schedule. Also, Saturday was just a leeettle overindulgent on the food and booze front, so a later dinner was not a bad idea.

First up, Steampunk! Anyone who knows anything about me knows that a show called Robot Lincoln: The Revengeance (The Musical) is like crack tailored to my specific nerd receptors, so that was our first show on Saturday, back at the Thrust (STOLL!) stage at the Rarig Center. (See previous entry for bitching about the building, but liking the actual space.) As we waited in the traditional second of 2 lines, I tweeted gleefully about the warning sign outside the theatre (guns, strobe lights, adult language, and violence), and broke the rules about no photography (only realized that I was breaking a rule in retrospect; also I'm not sure taking a picture of my program counts as rule breaking, even though I was in the theatre) to capture the Best. Dramatis. Personae. Evar.



Sadly, the show itself was pretty disappointing. The "plot" was convoluted and there wasn't much in the way of fun dialogue. The performers were singing to taped music, which led to a lot of problems. (I feel like an utter shit mentioning that—my homeless, underfunded theatre group had to do the same with a production of Mother Courage and Her Children, and it was a nightmare.) On the plus side, the group seems to have paid a lot of attention to the design, and that paid off. Robot Lincoln's costume was terrific, and there were a number of other great visual touches.

The "love duet" between Booth and Robot Lincoln was everything I think the show could have been with more time and stability for the production. Jason Garton was terrific as Booth, and Libby Slater was hilarious as Mary Todd Lincoln (less so as "Uncle Samantha," but that character was a very sketchy).

From the Rarig Center we were off to the Gremlin Theatre in St. Paul for The Duties and Responsibilities of Being a Sidekick by The Barkada Theatre Project. Other than being a sucker for superhero stuff, we hadn't chosen this show for any particular reason, but I'm so glad we did. The show was really well written (an interesting, compact story—no mean feat with a maximum of 60 minutes), had great fight choreography, and the cast (featuring Randy Reyes, whom we'd loved in Brain Fighters on Saturday) was just great from top to bottom. Also, great pre-show and entr'acte music, even if they DID cut us off on the theme from The Greatest American Hero just when we were taking it to the bridge.

From the Gremlin back to Theatre Garage for Those Were the Days by Blue Umbrella Productions. TV themes arranged swing-choir style with a minimal, but well-done framing story? Yes please! Really great arrangements, great ensemble and solo work from the whole cast (I forgive the mishap with the Jem theme, though it is dear to my heart), fun choreography. I'm not sure I would have done the whole Eight is Enough theme, but it's not my show, now is it? Shutting up, sir.

And finally, back to the Thrust at the Rarig Center for The Smothers Brothers Grimm., by Comedy Suitcase. This was the show we'd rearranged our dinner plans for. It had some great highlights, especially the closing "silent film," but the whole show was uneven.

The framing premise involves Milton, a young boy (wonderful work by Andrew Moy) who has recently lost his comedy-obsessed grandfather, and whose parents are convinced that he is not dealing with the loss. The parents try to get him to sleep by telling fairy tales, but Milton insists on "punching them up like grandpa would." We get Hansel & Gretel as told by Laurel & Hardy. Our group was divided on this. I mostly liked it, but felt it went on a bit long (then again, it's Laurel & Hardy . . .). Next was Rapunzel a la I Love Lucy, which just felt awkward and as if there weren't a lot of there there. Bob Newhart responding to the 911 call from the Three Bears, suffered from not enough Bob Newharty goodness. Some of the interstitial stuff with the parents and lovable drunk uncle were really good, and some fell a bit flat. The epic silent Sleeping Beauty segment was epic.

I was hit really hard by the realization that my fun at Fringe was over. I'm still trying to talk myself off the ledge of crazy renewal of my involvement in theatre.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 26, In Which I Write a Happy Song About Eschewing Unhappiness

Recording (I'm out of practice at everything. Be gentle.)

Behind again. Got a summer cold. (And I am a giant baby.) Then my grandmother died. (She was 94, lived independently until about 2 weeks before her death, and was fully with it until about 12 hours before the end—so, as ways to go go, not bad.)
This leaves me not just temporally behind, but 2 songs short for the session, striking fear into my heart.

The Kernel gave us a bunch of "-ing" phrases (e.g., "standing on the corner of bitter and fine">) to use in our lyrics, or we could make up our own "ing" phrase to use. For musical requirements, we were to establish a pattern of 2 or 3 chords, then move the same pattern up a step, a 3rd, or a 4th.

I got a "participant" trophy on this one. I misunderstood the instruction about the portable chord pattern. We were supposed to keep the same tonality, so if the pattern was major chords like C to F, then the moved chords should also be major (e.g., C to F, then D to G), so that the song would have an interval-based pattern, rather than being tied to a key. My song was all in 4ths, but the way I used them resulted in it being a boring old song in C. I also didn't use any of the provided phrases, nor did I really "get" that the "-ing" phrase was meant to be the hook.

It's been nearly a month since I wrote this, so it's challenging to recall how the lyrics came together. Looking at my notebook, I note that this started from a SUPER-EMO place with the image of an open door looking like a square of blackness on a very bright summer day. I was certainly working the -ing words, as I have dozens written down. I guess the phrase "wasting light" came early, and I've just remembered that initially the "hook" was going to be "wasting light on the likes of you."

Oh, yes. Now I remember.

So I mentioned during the dark days of Hall and Oates that I had unwelcome communication from someone and was toying with the freeing sensation of torching one's identity and escaping such things. That situation from the past has been on my mind (and showing up in my anxiety dreams). The responsibility for the unpleasantness that ensued (and apparently continues to ensue) is on someone else, but I wondered if I had handled things differently . . . well, you know the drill. Without telling a long, boring story that even I don't want to revisit: I was very unhappy for a while, something happened that reminded me that being happy is pretty cool, and I decided to stop being unhappy. That's how the story really goes, even if I thought it went differently in the past.

As soon as I started to revisit that sensation of suddenly remembering what it felt like not to be unhappy, though, the "on the likes of you" part seemed out of place in the song, but it kept trying to creep back in. That was interesting in and of itself, because the music that started to take shape was very light and tripping. Bright and lots of motion. And it started to feel like the song was like THIS < instead of like THIS >. That will make sense to no one except my classmates, but Paul Simon talks about the necessity of writing FROM a specific point in such a way that you have lots of possibilities for what can be included in the song, rather than progressively shutting down possibilities by trying to write TO a specific point. Including the line "on the likes of you" was personal, petty, closed off, and not that interesting.

The first verse:

Breathing in the dawning day (chords are [SHOCKER!] a split measure C-to-F vamp)
Tilting back my head to catch (full measure each of Em and Am with the chord change coming on the body part [See, that's I-to-IV, too, but minor and therefore missing the point of the assignment]).
The moment spilling brilliantly (return to the C-to-F vamp)
Everlasting resolution to (Dm to G vamp [I-to-iv vamp])
Stop (Ascending C to G in split meausures, so C, Dm, Em, F, G)

So, having patted myself on the back for writing to the possibility, rather than the specific point, let me admit that I got locked into several things. I became stubborn and insistent that the second line of the verse had to have a body part. Why? Who knows. If I wanted to justify it, I suppose I'd say that I wanted to convey the sense of being so completely out of practice at something that your body feels awkward and alien. Hmm . . . that actually makes some sense.

Verse 2:

Sounding out forgotten words
Lifting up my palms, to gather
Fleeting joys and passing fancies
Making good on good intentions to
Stop wasting light

So the second verse is very like the first, structurally. Body part in line 2 and every line beginning with a gerund, save the last, where the gerund "wasting" is drawn out over the ascending chord line. I never do that drawn-out vowel sound thing, though I like it in lots of the music I consume. For some reason it scares me. Anyway, I like it here. Profound? No. Pleasing? At least to me.

Verse 3:

Stumbling through what might have been
Falling to my knees, to thank
Yesterday for moving on
Singing out my resolution to
Stop wasting light

Ooh, I broke my own rules! No gerund starting line 3. What's this verse about? Gratitude to chance, I guess. Above, I said I decided to stop being unhappy. I suppose that's true, but I don't know that I would have (or if I would have, how long I would have remained mired in the unhappy situation) without the precipitating event, for which I can't claim a lot of credit.

Now. Nobody called me on this, but look! It's a bridge after 3 full verses, with only one verse after that! Any fool knows the bridge should come earlier in the song. I don't know. It felt like it should go here.

Drifting past such simple gladness (Am to D split-measure vamp)
Slipping into sorrow, passing through (Em to Bm split measure vamp)
At last (End on full measure of Am to full measure of F)

I did get caught on the bridge not sounding distinct enough from the verses, and that was a fair cop by my classmates. I tried to remedy that in the way I recorded it, but I think it still needs something more. Oh, I just also remembered that I distracted everyone from questioning the placement of the bridge by cleverly questioning its length. In the process, I made the Kernel feel bad for implying that bridges had to be a specific length. He's never implied any such thing, although he has noted that individual bridges I have written are too brief. I suck at bridges. (He has also never said that, just so we're clear.)

Final verse!

Wandering, I am wandering
Slipping off the path, to chase
Laughter tripping off my tongue
Pressing on, no hesitation, and I
Stop wasting light, I
Stop wasting light, I
Stop

Oh, right! I had another rule. That "-tion" word near the end of the 4th line. I'm a wreck of rules.

Re-Seduced: Minnesota Fringe Festival, Day 1

So, I used to do theatre, right? And then, quite a while ago, I broke up with it. Mostly. I mean, sure, I have been doing reviews, but that's safe, right? I mean, it's not like I'd go crazy and see 7 plays in two days and then desperately miss doing theatre, right? RIGHT?

Insert insane cackle here.

So I went to Minneapolis for my bunny-faced friend's birthday, and this just so happens to coincide with the first weekend of the Minnesota Fringe Festival: 168 plays, each no more than 1 hour long, running in rotation at 18 different venues. Um . . . ok, when I write that out, I don't sound like someone committed to recovery and breaking with my codependent ways . . .

BUT NEVER YOU MIND THAT.

We were set up with a 10-show pass and 3 buttons initially, and on Saturday, we were headed to Intermedia Arts for I'm Making This Up as I Go on Saturday afternoon. It was not the most auspicious beginning. The crowd was small and the sets were . . . of uneven quality . . . however, the last comedian, Mike Lester, was bizarre and quite funny.

Next, we were off to the Minneapolis Theatre Garage for Vampire Lesbians of Sodom by Brazen Theatre. I'm pretty sure I saw this show in Chicago more than a dozen years ago, but couldn't remember much about it. Having refreshed my memory, that's not surprising—it's a funny concept with a lot of potential, but the show itself is a bit ho-hum. As for the production: Its wigs were truly magnificent and Mark Hooker/Margo Caprice was fantastic as one of the titular sinners. In fact, he was so fantastic, I nearly failed to suppress my fan-girl-itude when we saw him 112 Eatery later that night. (Fear not, my pathological introversion raced to the rescue once again, and he and his companion were left in peace.)

The highlight of Saturday was definitely Brain Fighters by Joking Envelope on the Thrust stage (aka STOLL!) at the Rarig Center on the U of M's campus. As you can see from the linked photo, this building was forged in the bowels of architectural hell.

When we arrived, there was a line out the door for securing tickets (the system for multi-show pass holders was to hand over the pass for the appropriate number of punches in exchange for tickets), and then we had to trudge through the belly of the beast to wait in a second line into the theater. With no real sense of how big the venue was, we were worried—so worried that we did not get ice cream from the ice cream truck, despite my having loudly yelled "ICE CREAM TRUCK!" upon seeing it. I had tweeted a couple of pictures of the lines and made public my fear of missing the show, but the lovely Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw responded to say that we should not fear, as the theater was large.

And it was! Despite the building being ugly and having nothing resembling a plan for flow of actual people, the space was great and the show was greater. It's a three-person, all-ages show written by Joseph Scrimshaw, whom you may remember from such awesome cruises as JoCoCruise Crazy. (Can someone please tell me why Joseph Scrimshaw is not superextradoublefudgey famous?)

The script was funny and wonderfully paced. The three actors (JS himself, Randy Reyes [whom we'd have the pleasure of seeing in another great show on Sunday], and Mo Perry) worked flawlessly together and nailed the physical requirements of the story (ok, that sounds weird unless you know the plot, which involves being able to turn yourself into anything you can convincingly imagine). Oh, just go see it if you possibly can.

We'd initially had a dinner reservation that would have conflicted with Brain Fighters, but we rearranged our schedule to support our local Sea Monkey. This left us with a 9:30 reservation at the aforementioned 112 Eatery (and I would like to note once again that I DID NOT fangirl all over anyone there) and time to kill in between. We'd intended to go to Moto-I on Friday night, but we were seduced by champagne cocktails, chocolate chip cookies, yoga pants, and Ike, who thinks he is a lap dog.


The downtime between theater and dinner on Saturday gave us, as a group, time for sake and snacks at Moto-I, and me, as an individual, time to contemplate breaking and entering so that I could pet Casper the Great Pyrenees, who IS SO FLUFFY! Really enjoyed the sake flight at Moto-I (Junmai Nama Genshu was the best!), and the many yummy snacks we had that are lost to the mists of the sake flight and the Ginger Mistress.

Fear not, puppy lovers, I did eventually get to cuddle Casper (who, as previously mentioned, IS SO FLUFFY!), however briefly, before we headed to 112.
A word about 112 itself before getting to the good parts: Loud loud loud loud loud. LOUD. I wish that it weren't so loud.

We shared a bottle of a Turley Old Vines Zinfandel and continued our communist ways all through the meal. We had truly amazing scallops with oyster mushrooms, frog legs that are very nearly as good as those at Brigtsen's (I do not say this lightly), the 112 steak tartare (which kind of buried the lede, if one assumes the steak is the lede—it was weirdly chicken salad–like, and we wished we'd gotten it "unprepared"), and fried Shishito peppers (we liked Moto-I's version better). For our mains, we shared the prociutto ahi tuna (amazing), the stringozzi w/ lamb sugo (amazing fresh pasta, but the lamb didn't shine through), and the nori encrusted sirloin w/ ponzu (good . . . not great, though).

For dessert, the butterscotch budino (I don't like butterscotch at all, but this was relatively tasty), the lemon cheesecake, and . . . this is not good: I cannot for the life of me remember what I had. It was good. It was probably chocolate based. it is not on the menu they have up online. Olive oil chocolate cake! (Thank you, bunny-faced one!)

Ok, this is already a bit long, so I'll do Day 2 later on.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 25, In Which I Crack Myself Up

Two recordings.
Megaphone vocals. (Because I hear there's a man who'll pay you fifty dollars to sing into a can.)
Live performance vocals.
(Because some people prefer less silliness to more silliness.)


I'm not going to lie to you, Marge: I had fun writing this.


A few weeks ago, we had a discussion of "fun" in class. The Kernel, who may have been exaggerating for comedic effect, or may have been giving us a glimpse into the lives of quiet desperation that musicians lead, declared that there was too much pressure to have fun, that he couldn't remember the last time he'd had "fun," and that both songwriting and performing were hard work, rather than fun.

Although this treads on my desire for OTSFM to fulfill my workplace pr0n needs, I get the point*: Songwriting is scary, often frustrating, difficult, and sometimes satisfying, but "fun" isn't a word that usually springs to mind. I mean, it's "fun" for me in the same way that having my intellectual ass kicked for 4 years as a U of C undergrad was fun, but it's not . . . amusement park fun.

Except writing this song was TOTALLY fun. Pretty minimal requirements this week: Use a diminished chord and the song should include someone's name. Early in the week, I joked that the front runners for the subject of the song were "Lothian" and "James Victor, King of Croatia." A robust and hilarious comment thread ensued.

I then spent Thursday and Friday with the King himself.

I defy you to look at that face and not write a song about it.** In addition to the powerful cuteness field pulling me in that direction, I suddenly thought it would be really funny to write a talking blues from the point of view of a baby, particularly one whose face is so expressive, he constantly looks as though he's deeply frustrated by his inability to share his deep thoughts with the world.

From there, it was just a matter of setting down a rhythm and filling in details from my visit. I listened to a little bit of Woodie Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt to get a feel for how to do a talking blues. To be honest, though, it was pretty easy to get going.

The first verse was just about how waking up in the morning looks to a baby. On Friday, Jamie was inclined to sleep in a bit, but was woken up by the dogs of the household having a fight over food. My brother had come into the guest room probably 20 minutes before and waved me back into the bed as I started to get up, saying "I don't have the baby!" After the dog fight, he came in again to change him and said, sadly, "Now I have the baby." My brother is big and bald. I'm certain he loves having this pointed out in song form.

[C] Woke up of a morning, but it wasn’t the heat
[G] Dogs snappin’ and a-snarlin’ over something to eat
[F] With my big, bald daddy leanin’ over my crib
[G] Told him good mornin’ with my toothless . . . grin

The second verse is a bit of filler (other than a diaper change definitely being the first order of business each morning—Jamie is an Olympic peer, a detail I'm sure he'll be delighted to have memorialized in blog format), but I needed to go into the chorus in such a way that it reads like the message the baby is trying to communicate.

Wasn’t but a minute, I was clean and dry
And my giggle put a twinkle in my mama’s eye
She kissed me and she asked, “How’s mama’s little man?”
Took a deep breath and answered, . . . the only way a baby can

Up until the chorus, the chords are some what irrelevant, and C does as well as any key. It figures, then, that trying to hammer out the melody and chord progression in the chorus was a real pain in the ass.

I got the [C] blues, I got the [G] blues
I got the [F] baby blues, ‘cause [F#dim] I can’t sing the [G] blues
I got the [C] blues, I got the [Gdim] baby blues
I call ‘em [F] Jamie’s not-talking blues [C]

In particularly the melody over the second line was giving me fits, possibly because that's not really an F#dim in the second position, but a D7 with an F# in the bass. (I swear at some point, I tried it as a D7, but it didn't seem like it worked. Fortunately, my Check-Plus grade for the assignment was not jeopardized, because I had a back-up diminished chord, and the Gdim was the genuine article. (On a side note, Jamie likes when I play guitar and talk music theory to him. I kept playing diminished chords and singing, "There's a baby on the train tracks!" and he would giggle.)

Continuing in the "things that are only amusing to me" vein, I thought it was funny to turn his time spent on his play mat into a kind of business meeting. There is a big elephant dangling from the mat, which sometimes sits on his head, and let's face it, "pachyderm" might be an outdated taxonomic category, but it's a great word for lyrics. Moose, with its oooooo sound, ditto. And Monster needed to be included, not just because it was a gift from me. I'm sorry to malign monster's work ethic, but the rhythm of the words dictated that he be mentioned third, and "late" rhymes with "eight."

First meeting of the morning starts round about eight
With my pachyderm and moose, but my monster’s always late
I call things to order on the jungle mat
Monster reads the minutes in a minute . . . flat

Jamie is, generally, a happy little guy, but it's true that Tummy Time sends him into a rage—a highly illogical rage, given that he can flip from tummy to back and back to tummy more or less at will. Also, the threat about blowing this joint makes me laugh, both on its own merits and because it would involve tummy time, given that his mobility is limited to the army crawl at the moment. It's also funny, because when we speak in Jamie's voice, he sounds a lot like a Jim Henson's William Faulkner Baby.

New business, first item is the heinous crime
That mama and daddy call “tummy time”
Sure, I can roll over, but that ain’t the point
If they keep that up, I’m gonna blow this . . . joint

So we do nicknames in our family. Lots and lots of nicknames. Many of them terrible, inappropriate, and carried through life with no expiration date. (Example: One of my sisters had no hair until she was nearly 3. My uncles still call her "Moonie." Klassee with a k and two es, that's us.) Jamie has nicknames to suit his moods, most of which come out when he is pointedly NOT. TIRED. I'm pretty proud of having worked the most common into this verse. Herr Professor Big Eyes gave me some trouble until I realized that it had to be at the beginning of the line (despite its being a near rhyme for "tired"), and I hit on "real live wire" for a little bit of Talking Heads flavor.

Round about nine, James Victor rolls in
He’s the King of Croatia, he’s Anger Piggs
He’s Herr Professor Big Eyes, and a real live wire
With one thing to tell you all, he’s not . . . tired

And finally, I had to work in "baby ennui," which a concept I have long embraced. Let's face it, Dr. Spock, T. Berry Brazelton, and all those other LIARS tell you that babies always have a solvable problem when they're crying. SHENANIGANS. Sometimes babies feel suffocated by and bored with the sweet baby life: Baby Ennui.

No, he’s not tired, he don’t need to sleep
This is nothing but a case of baby ennui
That was an itch, he wasn’t rubbin’ his eyes
How many times can he tell you, he’s not . . .

I made an extremely rough recording of the song on my phone and sent it, along with the lyrics, to my brother and sister-in-law so that they got first listen. (It seemed only right.) Per good suggestions from E, my voice and guitar teacher, I'd like to work on how I play this, hopefully getting to the point where I can do a stumbling, irregular finger-picking pattern instead of the Carter-family strum which is boring (and I'm not very good at).


*No, not the kind of workplace porn that has coworkers having a doubly adulterous affair on your shared desk ('cause, been there. Neither fun nor porny): Workplace pr0n involves a workplace that one does not absolutely hate the thought of going to each and every day.
**That specific face happens to have resulted from me singing "Moo moo moo moo moo moo moose" (vocal exercise) and making his moose toy dance. He thought this was hilarious.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 24, In Which The Narrator May Be Cutting Veins Of Indeterminate Origin

Recording. This song is goofy, and the recording reflects that in playing with the vocals. Believe it or not I dialed back the drama.


A subideal week for songwriting.

The assignment itself sort of hamstrung me, because we were to explore our own "cheese line"—the highly individual point at which we roll our eyes, rather than being moved or wiping a tear away. This is not my strong suit to begin with, and worse, the Kernel suggested that a shortcut to the cheese line was writing about a pet. Given that (a) I had tears rolling down my face during the TRAILER of Marley and Me, (b) I wept through 9/10 of Children of Men because of a dog, and (c) I'm still wont to unexpectedly burst into tears after the recent loss of our foamy cat, this was dangerous, dangerous territory. I knew that there was no way I could write about a pet.

We were also out of town for the holiday weekend, so I was shorter on time than usual. Please ignore the fact that I have started writing the last several songs on Tuesday morning AND that I actually had a bit more time because I did not have a private lesson last week. Add in another stumbling block in the form of a false lead as soon as I started writing, and you have the recipe for a not-very-good song.

In addition to exploring the cheese line, we had to use root motion only in 4ths, 5ths, or steps (or half steps, as it turned out in class, but I had not interpreted the instructions in that way). I started writing from this requirement, which resulted in the false lead into a completely different type of song. I thought I'd saved that effort, which was something like 3 lines of what I was fairly sure was going to be a chorus, but I can't seem to find it. It was something along the lines of:

Darkness falls on strange, strange houses
Like (simile lost to the mists of time, but it had the word "beneath" in it and internal assonance)
Like the vein beneath the blade

Ouch, check out that last line. I'm not sure it's cheese, per se, but it's certainly melodrama. Naturally that shouldered its way into the song I actually wrote. Why? I like the way it sounds. I like the long as. I like going from the v to the bl. But it's a terrible line, and it rightly dogged me.

I had the chords for this chorus-y thing, and I kind of liked the melody and pace I'd set down. It took its time over "darkness" and "falls." I liked the repetition of "strange." But I Could. Not. find anything to finish out the chorus.

In desperation, I picked the guitar back up and started playing around with root motion. Suddenly I had an Em-Bm vamp and a verse just kind of spilled out.

You should’ve known better
You should’ve read the writing on the wall
You should’ve seen it coming from a
Mile away, now darkness falls

Lines 1 and 3 are a simple, split-measure Em-Bm vamp repeated twice. Line 2 is one split measure of Em Bm, then Am to Bm. Line 4 hangs out on Am for 2 full measures, then hits a split measure of G-D and back to the vamp. Initially, I'd had a full measure of D at the end of the verse. The Kernel advised going right back into the vamp. It's musically the right move (and that's what I recorded), but my brain and fingers have a hard time jumping back to that right away. I've since come to think of that D as the panic measure.

Content-wise, I feel like this kind of writing is such a cheat on the one hand, but on the other, I'm inclined not to be too hard on it. It's conceptually a blues form: Three different ways of saying the same thing, then some kind of "stinger" at the end. It shows up in all kinds of songs that I like, and Ba'al knows it's the stumped songwriter's friend. Also, in the case of this song, which shaped up immediately to be a revenge song, the repetition of the same idea feels conversationally real. It feels like an argument, like one of the all-time greatest scenes in cinema, right?

The last line of this verse gave me trouble. Initially, it was just "darkness falls" scavenged from the false start. It went through an awkward adolescent phase where it was "but you thought you had it all" (which ended up on the lyric sheet I printed out before racing out of the house to try to get to OTS early enough to vomit up a third verse), and I ended up singing "You were heading for a fall." More on why I ended up reverting to the original in a minute.

The second verse is more of the same technique and problems of the first:

What were you after back then?
What kind of fool did you take me for?
What kind games were you playing with
Me? I’m not playing any more

Many of these lines were harvested from a false start song from about a year and a half ago. Strangely, that song was intended to tell a funny story. Again, not really anything profound here. I kept swapping the "fool" line and the "games" line, trying to come up with an ending rhyme I didn't hate. I suppose what I ended up with is serviceable, but I kind of hate it.

By the end of the second verse, I was oh so tired of the vamping, so I needed a chorus, bridge, or ambiguous B section. Both the chords and words fought me pretty hard, and that shows.

[Am] I see the [D] lie beneath your [Em] smile (darkness falls) [Bm]
[Am] Like the | [Em] vein be- [D] neath | the [C] blade (darkness falls) [G]
[D]

I messed around with this six ways from Sunday. I left off the last measures of each line (the Bm and the G, respectively). I added them back in. I played them while singing "darkness falls." I played them with no lyric over them. I tried to rewrite the "vein" line so it didn't inappropriately imply that the narrator was suicidal. And finally, I was just sick of it, so I wrote the "darkness falls" in as echoes.

I left the house not knowing whether this was a bridge, a chorus, or something else, and hastily rewrote the end of the first verse so that I wasn't using "darkness falls" there. In class, the verdict was that I was trying to force "Darkness Falls" as the title, but that it came out of nowhere (because, let's face it, whatever this section is, it doesn't fit at all with the verses). Ending the first verse with it is a half-assed attempt to remedy that.

And oh the veins. The Kernel was on board with it, saying that he did not take it as the narrator being suicidal, but my classmates were not convinced. S commented that I satisfied the cheese requirement, because this was literally a "corte de las venas" (vein-cutting) song; L interpreted it as the narrator being so angry that she was going to kill herself—a sentiment that doesn't make any emotional sense to me, so I certainly didn't want to convey it. For now, it's just sitting there, making the song un-performable. I'm not sure it's a good enough song to spend time remedying the B section.

I hand wrote Verse 3 in the wings of the balcony at OTS. I think I squandered all my melodramatic simile power earlier in the day, because I kept coming out with incredibly literal lines like, "They will never find the body." What I ended up with is not exactly far advanced from that problematic literalism:

Nowhere you can hide now
Nowhere that's safe to rest your bones
No one will shed a single tear
For you. No one'll miss you when you're gone

I also had originally written "no place safe to rest your head," which too obviously wants "dead" for its rhyme. I suppose one solution to the B section is rewriting this verse to be less explicitly threatening to the person addressed, but the truth is, as little as I like this verse, I like it better than that B section.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 23, In Which I Do Not Write A Hall & Oates Song

Audio proof that I do not need to adopt either a mullet or cheesy pr0n 'stache. Like Michael J. Nelson, I'm immune to hockey hair, as I had it from 1987 to 1990.


So, I did not know this song. Thus, it was somewhat unnerving when I passed out my lead sheets to the class and the Kernel declared "This is a Hall & Oates song." Before I realized that he just meant that my uninventive title was also the title of an H&O song, I stared in horror. Truthfully, I had worried that this sounded like Bon Jovi song, or worse, like "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." (That's right, I Hannah Montana-rolled you. If I have to live with awareness of that cover, so do you.) But never in my darkest moments, had I considered Hall & Oates.

But let's not dwell. The assignment this week was to tell a story in the course of the song and employ the line of fourths (i.e., to use root motion in fourths to spice up the chord progression and borrow from outside the key). I started tossing around story ideas in my head, as usual going first to a couple of stories that I want to tell and have tried and failed to tell before, just to get that out of the way. I then had the image of a woman pulling a wilted flower out of her hair and tossing it away, and the song suddenly became about escape.

Why that and why now? Hmmm . . . a couple of things. My niece recently went to prom. This is very strange, because I'm pretty sure she's, like, 3 or something. They're also letting her take SATs and AP classes. What's that about? Anyway, she really hadn't wanted to go, but a friend pressured her into going as a group of female friends. When I asked if she'd had fun, she said, "Not really. It's kind of a couples thing." I laughed and told her that having gone to three proms as part of a couple, it kind of always sucks. Bad music, bad food, in my case, thanks to single-sex Catholic schooling, the awkwardness of all the members of one sex or the other not knowing each other well. Lots of build-up and expense for inevitable disappointment, which is true of a number of those kinds of events.

The third of the proms I went to was the ONB's—he hadn't gone to his junior prom; I was so comprehensively done with high school and the first 18 years of my life that there was no way in hell I was going to my senior prom (ESPECIALLY after democracy was subverted and they would not let us have "Paint it Black" as the theme), and because people spew all that "Memories that last a lifetime, blah, you'll never be young again, blah" bullshit, he seemed to want to go to his. It was a disaster starting with the limo getting sideswiped on the way there. So. Proms are not fun.

But I was also thinking more broadly about extricating oneself more comprehensively. Not just from the messed romantic comedy low expectations that prom is the magically delicious best night of your life (Although I cannot stress enough: No, no it's not. If it is, you are seriously, seriously doing it wrong. (See Patton Oswalt on Arch Campbell, starting around 7:30 of this clip.), but from the life that's handed to you as a kid, as opposed to the life you make when you become an adult. Also, truth be told, the story started to be about setting fire to an identity in general, thanks to an extremely unwelcome blast from the past recently.

Moving on, though. Verse 1!

| [E] Late-night [Asus2] creases in a | | [B] borrowed [A] dress |
| [E] Careless satin [Asus2] shoes | | [D] cast a- | [A] side like |
| [E] White [Asus2] lies | | [E] [Asus2] |
| A [E] kiss to [Asus2] seal, her | | [B] past to [A] press between |
| [E] Pages, [Asus2] people, | | [Dsus4] places, and [G] times of her |
[C] Life

The content isn't especially profound: As it happens, I borrowed the dress I wore to the first prom I went to. It was fine as dresses go, my boyfriend's cousin loaned it to me, and the experience was not traumatic or terrible in any way, so it's sort of cheap, dishonest shorthand to include the "borrowed" here, but I didn't want to describe the dress in any kind of specific way, I needed the syllables, and it invites the listener to form their own assumptions about why the dress is borrowed—Is it because of money? Does it suggest the woman is not invested in the occasion?

Adding "late-night" before creases was, to me anyway, sort of interesting. Early on, I'd been thinking about this scene as the woman carefully undressing, so I had her smoothing the creases and lining up the shoes. I have a persistent problem when writing narrative that I become obsessed with minutely describing a person's actions. All I want to say is the person went out the front door, but I get hung up with every step along the way. It struck me that in a song, there is NO TIME, LEAVE THE BABY! I didn't want to waste time talking about meaningless actions, I wanted the images of the dress and the shoes to convey something about mood or character. I'd thought about "angry creases," "careworn," "lonely," and the terrible cop out "thousand." I don't know why "late night" occurred to me (I suppose the pressure to stay out all night whooping it up after prom might've suggested it), but I decided I liked it. Again, I feel like it suggests and invites, but doesn't direct.

The other thing that was sort of interesting about writing this verse was the addition of "like white lies" after the shoes. Frankly, I don't know what that line means, and I didn't know that I needed anything after "cast aside," but when I started trying to set chords to the verse, it suddenly seemed necessary to have a simile and a slight extension of that line. I had a bitch of a time coming up with the simile, though. I knew the phrase needed a long I sound, and I had thinkings like "dice," "time," "silence," "childhood" (UGH) . . . I like white lies well enough, even though it's sloppy and I don't know what it means.

The second half of the verse took the place of the image of the flower. I already had a dress and shoes. I didn't want to have to talk about the flower, so I took the image of pressing the flower and spun out a few things that I hope suggest a scrapbook or box of mementoes, implying that the woman is either trying to decide what to take with her or tossing out the whole lot or whatever.

Oh, I should talk about the magic of the line of fourths. The little E to Asus2 figure was certainly suggested by my practicing this for the showcase last Sunday. So that split measure started off the verse, and I initially went Bm to a resolved A major in the second half. I can only hope I was singing a slightly different melody over the Bm, because as it is now, that chord is surely a plain old B, which seems to put the song in E until we get to the D in the second line, but it's cool, baby, because that D is just from the line of fourths. But was the song line-of-fourthsy enough? No, it was not until the second half of the verse, when it all goes crazy! I absolutely would have just done exactly the same thing in the first and second half of the verse otherwise. I like this trick. I like ending on the C in the verse and then heading into the chorus on a D, and look! The chorus is actually in A, isn't it?

Chorus!

Now she’s | [D] standing on the [A] outskirts, |
| [Bm] Balanced on her [A] toes |
Half a [C#m] breath before the [E] dawn
A one-way | [D] ticket in her [A] fist, |
And a [Bm] Name that no one knows at [E] all,
And she’s [D] gone

My favorite line in the chorus is "Balanced on her toes." I don't think anything else about the chorus works without it, and I completely stole it from Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games: She describes Rue as standing "tilted up on her toes with her arms slightly extended to her sides, as if ready to take wing at the slightest sound." The idea of using the word "breath" came from problems rhyming "dress" in verse 1, and I admit I also kind of like "half a breath before the dawn." Liminality, man! Go, go gadget Victor Turner! I'm a lot less crazy about the rest of the chorus, but I became attached to the idea that she's not just leaving, she doesn't want anyone ever to find her.

Verse 2 gave me fits. I sort of had the idea that it was about her leaving behind a few things on the porch, propped inside the screen door. Again, this is the kind of thing that you just don't have time to spell out in a song, and I was trying to do that, so I suppose I deserved the fits. I didn't want to talk about a ring, nor did I even necessarily want the thing she leaves behind to BE a ring, so the velvet box got me out of that. Certainly it's most likely a ring, right, but for all YOU know it could be a human head. Or it could be filled with chocolate, ok?

I also got myself stuck on the idea of her leaving a letter or a note. First of all, cliché city. Second of all, as I went on writing the song, I became more and more convinced that she was not sad or uncertain about leaving, but celebratory, so a letter apologizing or explaining was not her style. The dress and shoes in verse 1, I know, suggest that she's running from a wedding (after it's already happened, presumably), and the velvet box and the word "vow" aren't helping there. Going back to the theme of prom, adolescence and the stupid things we think we'll be attached to FOREVER when we don't know any better . . . I guess I was thinking of it as a childhood sweetheart sort of thing and the woman realizing that children pick terrible partners for the rest of our lives. Don't put your childhood-self in charge of the adult you, friends! So the vow became threadbare, and the second part of the verse became celebratory in an impressionistic way. Probably I am the only one who is cheering this woman on at this point. What can I say? I wouldn't run away from my current life in a million years, but I should have run away from a lot of things a lot earlier. (I'm going to spare you the dark hours when the key "die[d] with the sunlight." VAMPIRE KEY!)

| [E] Velvet [Asus2] box and a | | [B7] threadbare [A] vow |
| [E] Memory and a [Asus2] spare key | | [D] she leaves be- [A] hind in the |
| [E] Mo- [Asus2] ment | | [E] [Asus2] |
| The [E] Screen door [Asus2] hisses, | | the [B7] front porch [A] sighs |
| [E] In the distance, [Asus2] promise, | | [Dsus4] tomorrow [G] bright on her |
[C] Shoulders

As usual, I was recording rough drafts along the way, so as not to lose the melody and timing. I knew that with 2 verses and 2 choruses, the song was just under 2 minutes, which is usually my "long enough" mark. But as is happening more and more lately, the song insisted it had a third verse at like 1:30. (I try to leave the house by 2 PM to avoid traffic or leave enough time to sit in it so I'm not late for my lesson.)

I thought that verse 3 would have her at least far away, but no, she was content to barely make it off the front porch. I actually wrote the second half of this verse first, but it became clear that the "nowhere, nothing, no one" part was better supported by the escalating line of 4ths. The lines in the first half are still clunky, and the "milkweed" seems clunky and inauthentic to me. I wanted the idea of dropping the picture (or note, or flower, or whatever the hell it was going to be) into a ditch. Ditch. Ditch. Not a singable word. Weeds gave the same impression of neglect, but was too vague. Milkweed's fine, I suppose. Turning her back on the pay phone was ridiculously hard to get into a line, and it's still not quite there, but inserting the idea of a familiar, childish touchstone (i.e., the swing set) helped a bit.

| [E] Drops a faded [Asus2] picture and her | | [B7] last [A] regret |
| In the [E] milkweed [Asus2] by the swing set, turns her | | [D] back [A] to the |
| [E] Pay [Asus2] phone | | [E] [Asus2] |
| [E] Dusty [Asus2] miles on an | | [B7] outbound [A] road |
| [E] To nowhere, to [Asus2] nothing, | | [Dsus4] to no one | [G] she’s ever |
[C] Known

And there you have it: First song of the new session.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 22, In Which I Catch Up And Completely Miss The Mark

Recording of the last song of the previous session. I'm glad to be caught up and glad to be done with those songs, as I don't feel like I produced much of anything good.


But new leaf, yo!

The final assignment was to write a song in the style of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. You, like I was, might be saying "Who the frilly heck are Felice and Boudleaux Bryant?" So glad you asked, because they wrote every song that ever has been or ever will be written. (Also, check out Felice's sweet 70s threads.) Ok, not quite, but they DID write, "Wake Up, Little Susie," and a shit-ton of Everly Brothers songs, including "Love Hurts," which I will admit I did not know the Everly Brothers had recorded, because I am a Philistine.

They also wrote a song called, "Hey Joe," which could not be any less THAT "Hey, Joe" if it tried, for Carl Smith is no Jimi Hendrix, and Jimi Hendrix is no Carl Smith. My appetite for the absurd and silly made me latch on to "Hey, Joe," because the "jolly dolly"-type lyrics and obsessive-compulsive internal rhyming are right up my alley.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote "Boy meets girl, and there's blood everywhere" in my notebook. I'm not sure that I didn't steal it from a song we were talking about in class, or worse, from a classmate. I'm worried about that, but not so worried that I didn't use that line as the starting point for this song.

The line I started with got chopped up in the process, and I knew that the last line of the first verse was something along the lines of "a case of girl meets boy." The last word of the verse ended up being "boy," which needed to rhyme with line 2, and lines one and 3 ended up having internal rhymes, but not rhyming with one another.

Point-of-View seems to have been the problem of the session for me. I started out thinking that the narrator of the song was "the boy" in question—a man who'd gotten embroiled in a bad relationship. This gave me an incredibly shitty line "By the time I got there, there was blood everywhere." What the hell kind of line is that? You have the back-to-back theres and a sentence that is boring as all get out when spoken, let alone sung. Songwriting is about killing your children, though, so once I had killed off the other problematic character on the canvas, things started to shape up:

Just a [D] small-time stop on her [A] way to the top
She’s on a [A7] mission to search and destroy [D7]
Her look [D] is devil may care, but there’s [A] blood everywhere
Another [A7] classic case of girl meets [D-->Db] boy after boy after boy after boy

Ok, so the lyrics started to come together. The melody started out being boring, derivative, and altogether blah, and it never really improved. The best thing I can say is that I at least figured out (after beating my head against the wall in the OTSFM balcony wing and alerting the world to the fact that there are, apparently, foil lasagna pans in the ceiling there) that a D7 at the end of line 2 (rather than a plain old D), would at least make it sound slightly less like a rip off of Paul Thorn's fantastic "Great Day (To Whoop Somebody's Ass)"

After I had the first verse down, the other verses just became sort of wordplay challenges. And since no song by me is complete without Judeo-Christian allusions, I give you verse 2:

She goes from [D] town to town, she’s [A] makin’ the rounds
She’s the [A7] fire and they’re gonna get burned [D]
She’s a [D] Delilah, you see, she’s a [A] downright Eve
But [A7] Samson and Adam never learn

The only songwriting award I'm ever likely to win is for most religious content generated by a complete heathen. But in this case, it's only partly my fault! I know that I didn't want to go to the chorus until after the second verse, as the chorus is not particularly strong, and the verses are short. I wanted something about rules or learning to lead into it, so I figured the verse would end with "never learn." From there, well, I'm sorry: Can I help it that Delilah and Eve just happen to be two singable vixens whose beaux are not very smart?

Initially, I'd thought of ending the verses that led into the chorus with an Ab7->A7 slide, echoing the Db->D slide at the end of the first verse. It just ended up sounding stupid. The dramatic arpeggio sounds stupid, too, I know.

The chorus is still the weakest part of this, despite harmonic help from the Kernel. My original chord progression did not have the F#, went to F#m after the Bm, and just went from G to G7 before ending on the D. This is better, but the lyrics are bad; I already have a song called "Close Enough"; and that song sounds suspiciously like this one these days.

Look but [D] don’t touch [F#]
You see her [Bm] baby blues
Across a [Bm/A] crowded room
Don’t you [G] think that’s close enough [G#dim]?
Look but don’t touch [D]

Being lazy, I couldn't help but notice that I had used "learn," but not "rule." Sweet! I knew what verse 3 ended with. Remember how I said that songwriting is about killing your children? Sometimes we fail at that. And by "we," I mean "I." See, I had a whole Helen of Troy/Face that launched a thousand ships thing that i wanted to work in well after it was clear that it was not going to work at all. And still it made it in here.

She’s all [D] chantilly lace with a [A] dangerous face
Launched a [A7] thousand ships filled with fools [D]
Just a [D] cryin’ shame they keep on [A] playin’ her game
Keep gettin’ taken [A7], they keep breakin’ the rule

Once I got that atrocity down on paper, I thought I was all done. While I was literally in the act of putting on pants to leave the house, this damned song insisted on another verse. WTF, man?

She ain’t the [D] girl next door, she’s nothing [A] you’ve seen before
She’s a [A7] drive-by she’s a hit and run [D]
She ain’t [D] nobody’s gal, she’s a [A] femme fatale
A Mata Hari [A7->Ab7], she’s a smoking gun

There you have it. Eight weeks, 7 song equivalents. Here's to moving on to better things this session.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 21, In Which There Is A Questionable Bb And Dangerous Levels of Drama!

Recording. (I know the drama is unforgivable. Please forgive me anyway.)

Given the choice between Doomsday and cocktails, you might expect me to choose the latter. I expect me to choose the latter. But Doomsday it was. This week's assignment was to write about our favorite Doomsday scenario.

Doomsday it, apparently, is.

Given that the song started to go in a Doomsday-y direction immediately, I at least thought I knew what I'd write about: Nostradamus, obviously. IMDB insists that The Man Who Saw Tomorrow came out in 1981, but my memory is equally insistent that I saw this several years earlier than this. In any case, it freaked me the fuck out and I resigned myself to not seeing the age of 14, thanks to the impending nuclear holocaust.

I jotted down a lot of detailed memories from watching this: how we watched on our cutting edge OnTv box, the nightgown I had at the time and the way that the elastic pulled at the skin on my wrists and neck, the detailed inventory of the dolls and stuffed animals that I would pile up over my heart when I went to bed at night—to prevent me from being stabbed to death by the maniac afflicted with ADD who was obviously going to climb in my bedroom window, but only try to stab me once— and the order of dearness to me in which they were piled. And, of course, my nightly prayers, which always ended with "and let the world never end and let no one ever die again."

I think that I have grown into a remarkably well-adjusted adult, if we're grading on a curve.

Anyway. Having gotten a bunch of that stuff down, I wrote in my notebook:

It is a single moment.
It was a million moments.

I guess that got me thinking about absenting thee from felicity awhile, yadda yadda, drawing one's breath in pain to tell my story and what have you. And I thought to myself, "Who cares? Who WOULD care, even if there were anyone to care?" And, you know, all that "whimper, not a bang" astronomical Sagan-y stuff.
Which naturally lends itself to metaphors about light traveling through great distances of space.

And then it turned into a Roger Whittaker song. Ok, my classmates say that it did not, but they are nice people and I'm pretty sure they're lying.

But let's see how this all actually came together into a melodramatic mess.

[Em] When the light arrives
[D] Light of a [Am] single moment
[D] Shadow of a [Am] million moments
[Em] Trapped in the [D] teeth of [Em] time
Rhyme and [Bm] reason [D] died on the [Em] doorstep

Most of that's pretty straightforward from the stream of consciousness outlined above. "Trapped in the teeth of time" took a while to get. I ended up feeling like that fourth line needed to at least quasi-rhyme with line 1, and I stuck myself with "time." The metaphor is ZOMG melodramatic, but I wanted some hard, closed consonants after all the sibilance and mmm sounds. I also don't like the use of the phrase "rhyme and reason," but I did want something that would convey the idea that whatever "reasoning" led us to finally blowing ourselves completely apart would be lost before the initial pulse of light had even finished.

Verse 2 continued on in a similar, "Seriously, chuckleheads, no. one. will care." No one will care what outraged you, there will be nothing there to sympathize with your fear. Nada. Yeah, that's a recipe for more DRAMA!

[Em] When the light arrives
[D] Who will taste the [Am] steel of malice
[D] Press the fear from [Am] every atom
[Em] Snatch the future [D] from [Em] the sky
Speak the [Bm] final [D] lines of the [Em] fable

Oh, a note on the chord progression and how it's executed. It all started with the pinch-fingerpick on the Em. Initially, I carried that throughout the whole song. In my lesson, E quite rightly pointed out the wrongheadedness of this. Given that there's a whole bunch of split measures running into one another in the verse, and that my fingerpicking is erratic and unreliable, this left almost no harmonic support underneath the melody (which was obvious as I kept losing the damned melody).


She suggested using it as an intro and then strategically in the course of the song. Despite my distaste for this song, it's probably one that I'll play at the showcase on Sunday (which says more about the crap I've churned out this session than anything positive about the song), and when we worked on it again this Tuesday, we'd decided on carrying the strum through the verses and returning to the fingerpicking before the chorus-B-section-whatever-the-hell-that-is. Not sure that's the right call, but that's the way I recorded it for the moment.

Speaking of the odious B section. The Em-driven verses felt overbearing after 2, so I originally wrote a new section that more or less replaced each chord in the verse with its relative major (if it was minor in the verse) or relative minor (if it was major in the verse). Super. Duper. Roger. Whittaker. Naturally, this became a chorus by consensus and to spite me. Here it is as originally written:

[G] When the light [D] arrives
[C] Keen and cold and [D] silent
Not a [Em] breath to [Bm] bear the [Em] cries
[G] When the light [D] arrives
[C] Passionless and [D] violent
From the [Em] void to [Bm] paint the [Em] night

The ever-wise Kernel commanded "When in doubt, reharmonize!"

So what I recorded was:

[G] When the light [Bb] arrives
[Am] Keen and cold and [Bm] silent
Not a [Em] breath to [D] bear the [Em] cries
[G] When the light [B] arrives
[Am] Passionless and [Bm] violent
From the [Em] void to [D] paint the [Em] night

That Bb sounds incredibly strange to me. In fact, it sounds so strange that I meant to ask the Kernel if I had possibly written it down wrong twice. Of course, I forgot to do that Tuesday, so the weird Bb is immortalized.

Content-wise, I think it's clear that whatever Brenda says, it is irresponsible of me not to keep the drama and emotion shackled. The only line I'll even make an argument for is "Not a breath to bear the cries." 'Cause there ain't no air in space.


Several times this session, my brain has tricked me into writing songs that are too long. I wrote what became the fourth verse and then all of a sudden the old brain was like, "Oh, you know what? There's a another verse before this one." What the hell, brain?

[Em] When the light arrives
[D] Casting off the [Am] mighty and
[D] Meek and every [Am] story of the
[Em] Foolish [D] of the wicked [Em] of the wise
None of [Bm] these will [D] rise from the [Em] ashes

[Em] When the light arrives
[D] Sleek and fleeting, [Am] rarefied
[D] Stone faced and [Am] hollow eyed
[Em] Callous as the [D] rising [Em] tide
As the [Bm] sinless [D] mind of the [Em] ages

In retrospect, I guess I get what the brain was getting at. The last verse is the "In summary, morons, no one gives a ballistic fuck about your issues. Congratulations on killing 7 billion people and ruining a perfectly nice planet" verse. But before that the song wanted a "I'm looking at YOU" verse, in the spirit of "And finally, Christians? Christians? Yes, I'm sorry, I'm afraid the Jews were right."

Songwriter's Navel: Week 20, In Which I Rely On The Assumption That Non One Listens To The Words

Recording

Another ZOMG! It's longer than 3 minutes! song.


Occasionally, the Kernel will cruelly force us to talk about our songwriting strengths. I can't be 100% certain that I have always first uttered something along the lines of "I don't have any," before mumbling, "Well, words are usually easier for me than music," but my response is always in that ballpark. In a similar vein, my friend E asked me a few weeks ago if I ever suddenly had the feeling that I would never be able to write another song. I told her quite truthfully that I feel like that every week.


And yet . . .

Anyway, this week was one of the weeks I should really like. Our assignment was to write a I-V-vi-IV song and start the melody on beat 3 of the first measure of each verse. Although funny (and mind bending, thanks to the OCD adjustment of tempo and key), that medley video is actually soothing to my songwriting soul: Some of those are good songs, some are bad; there's quite a diversity of genres represented; and they don't necessarily all sound the same. Of course, once you know to listen for it, you hear the progression everywhere—for example in the IHOP in Crestwood when your husband is just trying to be thankful that, for once, Delilah is not on.

I really didn't have a lyrical concept for this song when I started working on it, which probably accounts for serious content problems two weeks in a row. I don't remember why I started out with the image of a bar at closing time. For no earthly reason, I think it started with me remembering an episode of Alice that opens and closes with Mel mopping himself into a corner. Anyway the image suggested the first verse (oh, and after much dinking around, I decided that D was my key of choice):

[D] This place has [A] seen [Bm] better days than [G] these
[D] I wish I could [A] say the same [Bm] [G]
[D] Behind the [A] door, [Bm] drink myself in- [G] to a corner
[D] Trying to [A] forget every [Bm] letter of your [G] name
For [D] tonight, [A] just for tonight [Bm] [G]

For the longest time, the first line was "These chairs have seen," because I was still thinking that the narrator was working in a bar at closing time, turning the chairs upside down on the tables. Of course, that person is not a very responsible employee if sie is "drink[ing hir]self into a corner" while on the clock. I worked with "paint," "mop," "talk," and some other verbs in place of "drink," and spent a lot of time trying to figure out if the person was walking through the door, locking the door, watching others walk through the door, and so on. In other words, I really didn't know who this person was or what was happening. More responsible songwriters probably would have tried to figure that out before moving on to verse 2.

My lyrical attention snagged on the short second line of the verse, and I liked the idea of carrying the "I wish" sentiment through the verses, so I had the line "I wish I could say I cared" for the second verse before I knew what else was going on. And then all of a sudden things got out of control. The character was a songwriter. OH NOES!

[D] Another [A] song, [Bm] tale of woe, [G] love gone wrong
[D] I wish I could [A] say I care [Bm] [G]
[D] I fill the [A] page, knock [Bm] one more back, [G] take the stage
[D] Remember to [A] pretend this [Bm] then, and I am [G] there [G]
For one more [D] night, [A] just one more night [Bm] [G]

Oh, I've just remembered that it wasn't until I had written the second verse that I went back in and added the fifth line of the verses, bringing in the word "night." I'm generally symmetry gal, so I don't know where the need for an odd number of lines came from, particularly given that the last line isn't really a refrain and the damned song has a chorus anyway, so it doesn't need a refrain.

Speaking of choruses, brace yourself for one that makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the song.

[D] No [A] ali- [Bm] bi [G]
[D] I’m [A] behind the [Bm] yellow [G] line
[D] No [A] ali- [Bm] bi [G] tonight
[D] I [A] am the [Bm] scene of your [G] crime

And repeats exactly the same chord progression from the verses. But hold up! I'm not going to beat myself up over that fact (or at least not too much). Because, you see, I am fascinated by songs that manage to have really distinct A and B parts, and then you realize that they use exactly the same chord progression. I do think the chorus sounds different (or at least different adjacent) here. Originally, I was drawing out the Bm in the last line and had a big pause between "scene" and "of your crime." The Kernel pointed out quite rightly that this kills the momentum of possibly the only good line in the song. (Um, of course, he just referred to it as a good line, not the only good line in the song. BUT WHAT DOES HE KNOW?)

OH DEAR SWEET FANCY JEEBUS. I just realized that I recorded this in the wrong form. The recording goes:

Verse
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Chorus
Bridge
Chorus

And normal people with any inkling of songwriting ability would put the bridge . . . after the first chorus? Oh hell. Anyway here's the bridge and verse 3. Oh, and a tag, which is slightly less than a half verse.

[D] Bar after [A] bar, the [Bm] same old tune, the [G] same old sorrow
[D] I wish there were some [A] other [Bm] way [G]
[D] I work the [A] crowd, [Bm] smile and nod, [G] laugh out loud
[D] Down another [A] drink, I’m not [Bm] thinking too [G] straight
Tonight, [D] no [A] not tonight [Bm] [G]

Bridge
Last [Bm] call, same as [A] last night
I’ll [G] have myself the [D] usual a- [Bm] gain
Another [A] regular to [Bm] spend [A] the night

Tag
[D] Back then I [A] knew [Bm] better men than [G] you
[D] Wishing [A] that you [Bm] were here [G]

Kindly, as always, classmates asked what the song is about and noted that there are two threads that never quite meet. They are perfectly, 100% right. I didn't want this to be about a songwriter/performer, but once it was, I got to thinking about where the subjects of songs come from. As I've noted before, I almost never write songs about the ZK. As Steve Earle says, "Some girls are better for writing songs about," which probably means they're not the girl you want to be married to, they're the ones who done you wrong, amiright?

So that got me thinking about songwriter-as-crime scene and performance as reenactment, which . . . oh hell, it's just too dense and unworkable.

Which did not stop me from a game-time decision to play this on the 6th when me set was too short. It was a disaster, as everything was that night.

Songwriter's Navel: Week 19, In Which I Am An Intentional And Unintentional Scofflaw

Recording (a very sloppy one; read on for excuses galore!)


This is me, getting back on the horse.

So, I played out this past Monday night, and it was awful. I know, it's a Peter and the Wolf thing with me, because my bar for success is "No one died." I am not sure no one died this time. I really don't want to dwell on it, but I did very badly. Guitar playing was awful, singing was all over the map. Ugh! Ok, that is me not dwelling, but leading into this recording and write-up.

I really didn't want to record this song, both because I'm still wanting to dig a hole, climb in, and pull the hole in after me and because I don't think much of this song. Again, that's not exactly odd for me, but what IS odd is the fact that others pointed out both strengths and weaknesses of this song that were mostly below my radar.

The assignment was to use at least five words from the following list (the ones I ended up using are in bold):

• Reflex (or Reflux)
  
• Embargo
  
• Formaldehyde
  
• Embrace
  
• Reciprocate
  
• Investigate
  
• Condescend
  
• Cruel
  
• Dynasty
  
• Impassioned
  
• Messed-up
  
• Coagulate
  
• Venture
  
• Replace
  
• Kind
  
• Gruel
  
• Valid
  
• Sneaky
  
• Troubled
  
• Violate
  
• Concentrate
  
• Vinegar
  
• Grasp
  
• Whirl
  
• Fecund
  
• Zimmerman
  

Musically, we also had to stick the following chords: D, Em, G, A, Am7, C, Dm, B7, F, Dmaj7, F#m, Esus4, and E.

Starting with the words, I knew right away that I wanted to start with some kind of play on "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," but my mind was being especially slow and dull that morning. It took me forever to come up with the opening line of verse 1, which is kind of an exercise in South Side rhyming slang or something ("pain" rhymes with "gain" and . . . that's all I've got). At the time I also liked playing with the juxtaposition of "cruel" and "kind," with "kind" having a different meaning in this case. I'm less crazy about that in retrospect.:

[Esus4]* Nothing ventured, nothing [E] painfully obvious
[D] No one can replace you if you [Dmaj7] hide yourself a-[E] way
Far a- [Esus4] way from the cruel from the [E] kind of troubled waters that the
[F] Foolish weather never real- [G] izing nothing violates the [E7]** rule

Um. Yes, it's a lead sheet with footnotes. I'll get to that in just a moment, because I just remembered something about this song that I had completely forgotten. I spent easily an hour with completely different and, in retrospect, horribly wrong chords over the first 2 lines. I think it was C, D, Em, F or something ascending like that, and it was all Carter strummy and nightmarish until I looked up an Esus4 on my iPad's chord finder.

Oh, you troublesome Esus4. As soon as I played it, the whole character of the song changed. (In my opinion, the change was at best a tiny improvement on the original nightmare. I'm not a fan of this song.) Back to the footnote indicators. Even though I knew that the song now started on what GuitarToolkit assured me was an Esus4 (and what my rudimentary music theory knowledge backed up), my ear knew that it was really an Asus2 or at least some flavor of A.

How does my ear know this? Can my ear explain itself? No, it cannot. It's like having a sliver you can't find. The Kernel confirmed that I am a complete whackadoo and that one would never ever call that chord Esus4 in this context, even though it has all the notes of an Esus4 chord. Oh, and the E7 is just flat out completely illegal, but I couldn't make any of the legal chords work there for love or money.

In terms of where the song was going theme wise, things snuck up on me. I say "That will end in tears" a lot. For example, a few years ago, my frontier sister bought one of her sons a Jack Sparrow costume for Halloween, with "Real working shackles!" Given that her two sons would cheerfully murder one another if there were a reasonable chance of getting away with it . . . well, you get the picture. I wasn't aware that I say it a lot until a friend used the phrase and claimed to be quoting me.

Anyway, that struck me as a workable chorus, and I started thinking about the song as being about someone who is emotionally cautious to the point of pathology, and someone else trying to gently or not-so-gently point out that it's perfectly true that you can't get hurt if you never risk anything, but you also can't experience anything at all. Yeah, that's when the song started to go off the thematic rails. Anyway, here's the chorus and verse 2.

Chorus:
This will [Am7] end in [F] tears
[C] Every fond embrace
Each im- [Em] passioned state of grace
Will [F] end, in tears [Esus4]*

Verse 2:
[Esus4]* You’ll never miss what you [E] never had, never
[D] Know the pain and sorrow when the [Dmaj7] love bleeds a- [E] way
You keep a- [Esus4]* way from the precipice and the [E] dangerous romantics and the
[F] Happiness they grasp for but a [G] moment, don’t they know it cannot [E7]** last?

When I played this for E (guitar/voice teacher), she warily pointed out that the melody in this kept returning to the F# (when I'm playing this, I'm capo 2, so it's the open high E string) and that this was a note that I seemed to sing clearly and without effort. We worked a bit on studying the feeling of singing that and trying to pull that up and down in my register. As she suspected, calling attention to it made me extremely self conscious about it. When I listened to a recording of the song I made on the phone after my lesson, my pitch and tone were absolutely painfully terrible, a problem that persists on the recording I made today, despite the pop vocals magic.

Finally the bridge:

[Dmaj7] No ambrosia, no hopeless devotion for you
No [A] ecstasy, no breathless delight
[F] No tears of joy, nothing [Dm] touching the heart of you
Every [G] emotion denied [E7]**

The bridge complicates the thematic issues. Part of the problem is that I sort of hear the song as the narrator humoring the person addressed in the song, saying, "Yes, you're absolutely right. People who risk things emotionally are crazy and in denial," but with the subtext of, "Yes, everything—EVERYTHING—ends in tears, because everything ends. But strong emotion, even pain, is what makes anything worth while." I tried, fairly unsuccessfully, to throw this around in class with K and others who were rightly noting the problems with message and POV. I slightly changed the wording of the chorus when recording, but I am both lazy and so lukewarm about this song that I'm not sure how much more work it really deserves.

Uh, this is kind of obvious now, but this is kind of all about not wanting the balloon because I couldn't deal with the knowledge that it would eventually break. Way to get over things, kid!