datamusicata

On Wednesday I’ll talk about the three shows I just did with John Batdorf this past weekend. What was good, what could have been better and what was perfect. It was three shows as different from each other as they could be, with most of the same songs. Amazing.

But I wanted to finish up our lyric writing exercise first, as I sort of left us hanging. Last week we worked on this song developed from the first two lines that I gave you. Here is the song, so that you don’t have to be bouncing between different posts:

We were in the Red Pony , on the coast of Monterey

You said you liked martini’s dry, as the sunlight slipped away

We laughed at karaoke, we toasted one and all

It didn’t seem like time had passed until we heard “last call”

Last call, last dance, last chance for romance?

Last call, last dance, take a chance on romance?

It was that blue and empty hour, when we walked into the night

The waves were whisp’ring to us, the moon hung low and bright

The sand was soft and shining, as like fools we raced that moon

Til breathless then and laughing, we fell upon the dune

Fast fall, slow dance, taking a chance on romance

Fast fall, slow dance, taking a chance on romance

With salty kisses on our lips, and margarita grins

We melted into darkness, that’s how love must begin

We found inside each other, our secret’s hiding place

And kept our promise to the night, and met it face to face

Then morning found us tangled in the covers of that night

And your eyes smiling into mine made everything just right

Fast fall, slow dance, last call for romance

Fast fall, slow dance, last call for romance.

This isn’t where we left the song, this is where I’ve taken it. I put in a little two line release or bridge and then back into the third verse. I took a lesson from the Beatles songbook with the bridge. Something simple and short and then back into the song. There really should be a course at music colleges, just about the bridges in Beatles music. Amazingly effective composition …and it rocks. But I digress. Back to the song at hand.

The rhythm of the verses is now all lined up to the pattern we established, and the story has unfolded without too much detail though we all still know what happened.

I took Andrew’s images of Salty kisses, but left out Bobby’s run to her place or the rain. I didn’t want the weather to change so abruptly from the second verse. Left off Eva’s lessons for now and eternity and got us to the morning, which is the real “tell”.

If you wake up and wish you were a thousand miles away, you made a mistake, but if you wake up and are just grinning at each other, you know something really good happened in the dark last night…as they say.

Remember. One of the things we want to avoid when writing lyrics is using imagery or simile that has already been used. I realize that it is almost impossible to be completely original, but we can put our own spin on it and the story we tell. Many new writers actually use phrases that they heard somewhere else. I heard a songwriter the other night actually use the title of a well known play. As soon as he sang it, I was out of the song and into the play, not to mention the fact that the title did nothing to further the song, it was like a mindless non sequitur. You want to be succinct and you want to be true to your own poetic vision. Look what it did for Dylan…or for Lennon…or for Eminem. Good lyricists all.

So now I want to get your feedback, before I put a melody to it. If you believe that you can make it better, then take a whack at it. And if I don’t like it or want to use it, that only means that “I” don’t like it or want to use it. You can do whatever you wish with the ideas you came up with. And after the comments, I’ll put a melody to it. And why do I get to put a melody to it, you might be bold enough to ask?

Perhaps when we’ve all got really fast computers and compatible programs we can work on a melody in cyberspace, but for right now, we’ll do the lyrics up here and then I’ll do the melody myself, hopefully this week, and finally post it to myspace, as soon as I can get it recorded. So I am taking over, neener neener. “It’s good to be king.” –Mel Brooks/The History of the World, Part One.