Write the Year 2021—Session 4, Assignment 5: Skies

Song 26 of 2021

This assignment is always my kryptonite. We had to write the entire melody first without writing any words.

So, this is UGH. It’s in Drop D, and the sketch is the original sketch that I made back when I wrote the song. I never reworked this one with my voice teacher. You can hear me not being able to find the chords up the neck at the very end, and I am SUPER warbly on the melody, which sits in a really terrible, uncomfortable place in my voice.

I should make a better sketch of this, but I’d have to figure out the chords again, and I’m not sure that I’m up for it, as the melody is a nightmare.

Write the Year 2021—Session 4, Assignment 4: Mess

Song 25 of 2021

Late July 2021. This had a lot of hoops to jump through. The verses needed to be four lines and use a III-major chord; the chorus had to start on the IV. It was also four lines that followed the structure:
Phrase
Response
Phrase
Response 2
End line

Painful for everyone, but it also had to have an instrumental after the second chorus and then repeat the chorus phrase over a 4-chord cycle for the outro.

My notebook indicates that I had the notion of falling apart/being pulled apart at the seams early on. In don’t know when the central metaphor came it, but I remember that I enjoyed writing this song, largely because there is a song called “Truck” by a band called Nickel that I have always liked, because it sticks closely to its metaphor and makes it work (“My love is like a truck/it’s gotta hook and winch/it’s gonna pull you out of all the stupid shit/ that you have buried yourself in/my love is like a truck”). I do not flatter myself that this works as well, but I amused myself with my metaphor!

Write the Songs 2021—Session 4, Assignment 3: Get Through

Song 24 of 2021

This is another from July 2021, and it’s a good old word list. I’m not sure what prompted the ominous minor key. Other than that, only two things I can think of about this one that are of note:
—a friend in the class also used “Dixie Cup” in the sense of kids making a telephone out of a pair and some string
—I actually didn’t use the majority of the words in the list. What a wasted opportunity to use Camembert and bowling pin.
—Okay, three things: at the bottom of the lead sheet, I have written: “Third verse?* Repeat verse one? Defenestration?”

*This says “(I GUESS)” next to it, so the class must have voted for keeping verse 3**
**Okay, a sneaky fourth thing. The second line of the third verse has (WHY? WHY U DO THIS?) written next to it. I have such relaxing hobbies.

Write the Songs 2021—Session 4, Assignment 2: Hope You Know

Song 23 of 2021

Well, figuring this one out was quite a journey. I had the assignment right there in the notebook from early July 2021: Refrain first, strive for Beatles form (verse, verse, bridge, verse), but the free-writing material in the notebook was not at all familiar.

That is, apparently, because in the writing of this, the song went from an aggressively angry song about being left by someone to a something that is somewhere in between passive-aggressive anger and a genuine attempt to behave well in spite of a painful parting and see one’s way through to the moment when one is able to wish the other well. I think the sentiment just gets confused, and the recording is at a much brisker tempo than I remember it being. That may be because this, too, breaks the 3-minute mark, and that always makes me nervous.

Write the Songs 2021—Session 4, Assignment 1: Think Less

Song 22 of 2021

So, after a million years, I’m trying to get back to posting songs. I mean, why not? I’m only 2 years behind, right?

SO. This one is from late June 2021. That would have been the first assignment of the fourth session. We were still doing class online, I believe. Anyway, the assignment was root motion in fourths (basically, the circle of fifths, counterclockwise, because I to IV always sounds good. But in looking at the lead sheet for this, there’s an uncharacteristically small amount of root motion in fourths. There’s A to D in the beginning of the verse, then some Bm to Em at the end; I cannot explain the key change in the chorus, as it has nothing to do with the line of fourths. And there’s another key change in the bridge? WTF? At least there, the line of fourths (Em to Am to D7) gets me out of C and back into G for the final chorus.

I think the silly, poppy subject matter must have at least come out of the idea of the line of fourths, but I really can’t remember what, specifically, prompted this song, other than it being vaguely about my teenage odd-numbered boyfriend.

Write the Songs 2021, Session 3, Assignment 7: After Midnight (At the Top of My Lungs)

Song 21 of 2021

This was from mid-June 2021.

Huh. I would have sworn that this assignment had to do with taking a title from another song, but its only instruction was that it had to be about a time of day and that time of day was probably conveyed in the title.

This arose out of memories of when we bought our house. We had a couple of weeks in between closing and when we needed to be out of our apartment. The bedroom was a terrible mustard color and the upstairs bedroom had a hand-painted Peter Rabbit mural. My options were painting or developing an acid habit. I would soon regret not choosing the latter.

I did both bedrooms on my own. It took forever, and there was nothing in the house at all. I slept on an air mattress with a broken seal on the dining room floor several nights in a row.

The painting itself was, of course, incredibly boring, so I sang everything I could think of. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought to bring a radio or something. I might have even had my first iPod at that point—I know I at least had the terrible Archos Jukebox that was my first MP3 player.

In any case, it only belatedly occurred to me that with no curtains or anything, I would have looked like a complete lunatic, as it was obvious that I was belting out showtunes and what have you.

Not sure how the 6/8 came about, and I’m still not quite sure where this ought to be capoed.

Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 6: Unfamiliar City

Song 20 of 2021

This was a form assignment. Two verses followed by a bridge where the chords come twice as fast as in the verses, a third verse, the bridge again, and then the refrain in a higher register.

I had a HELL of a time getting a recording of this down this past week, and just now I’ve decided to go with the rough version I recorded back in June, because that at least adheres to the form (which is why—please shoot me—this is four minutes long).

I don’t really remember the lyrical inspiration for this. My notebook indicates that this started out in a far, far drippier place, and that the idea of the letter that no one wrote came pretty early and was responsible for the more up-tempo turn, though the footprints got frantic early . . .

Here is the real mystery, though—I have a list of writers on the page: “Nietzche, Ginsburg, Heinlein, Sun Tzu, Dickens, Shakespeare.” I . . . what? It’s not atypical for me to end up with a list of words or phrases that have the right rhythm/cadence. But this list is 100% a mystery to me.

The bridge is a hot mess. I, in fact, spent my voice lesson this week working on a simplified version of it, and I could not make the simplified version work AT ALL. So. There you have it.

Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 5: Word to the Wise

Song 19

It took me forever to figure out what this assignment was. We were given a prefabbed chord progression to use (I use it for the chorus), and then several possible melodic paths to choose (e.g., a drone, an ascending line, a descending line, etc.). I think I chose “dramatic leap”? Or maybe leaps and steps?

Lyric-wise, I started in a very, very different place than I ended up. I was reading Native Son at the time, as well as writing from Wright himself on the novel and James Baldwin’s essay dismissing it. I had a number of ideas from that, and obviously not a one informed this.

Instead, I partly stole this from a friend on FB who’d been walking by his childhood home and the current owner invited him in to look at the pencil marks indicating his height and his sibling’s. I’m annoyed by the Delta Dawn melodic motif in the chorus. Otherwise, I don’t have many deep thoughts on an obviously shallow song.

Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 4: Hands that Do No Harm

Song 18

More or less a straight-up word list song, this one honoring Bob Dylan on his 80th birthday. The words and phrases are translations of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. I remember having a long conversation in class about whether the word “electronic” would have existed at the time Rimbaud was writing (consensus: no—it should be “small electric moons,” but TOO LATE).

Oh, I remember my major accomplishment here. The line from Rimbaud is “Ridiculous stubborn prayers.” A few years ago, a friend managed to use a line that was something like “did that giraffe have her baby yet?” by breaking it across two lines. So here, I “pulled an E” by doing the same thing.

Otherwise, it’s strange, but looking to my notebook, it seems as though things took a while to come together here, despite how central “hands that do no harm” seems to be to everything.

In revisiting this, the first rough recording I made felt unbearably slow; I had a temptation to do it at kind of frenetic Elliott Smith speed. I don’t really like where the tempo and rhythm have landed here.

Write the Songs 2021—Session 3, Assignment 3: Stop Time

Song 17

Another surprise from May. I remembered writing this song about the park near my house when I was growing up. When my brother was a toddler, one of the first times he had a babysitter who wasn’t me (there was a family wedding), he was riding one of the metal horses backwards, and when he hopped off, it popped up and slammed him in the chin, requiring stitches. When I was about his age, our older sister yanked me off the rainbow in the same park and I fell onto a shard of glass. I did not have stitches, and I still have a crescent moon scar on my knee.

I had no clue what this assignment was, and it turns out it was “Songwriting is Theft!” based on a Carly Simon interview. I could not think who I was ripping off, and unless I’m creating a memory to fit the scenario, eventually I realized that I think what I stole was the relentless descending bassline from Patty Griffin’s “Poor Man’s House”? I don’t know if the weird chorus chords are also attributable to that.

The highest note in this is only an Ab, but for some reason, it’s giving me fits. I also may make a change to the last half verse to have the melody on the last line ascend, but I am going with this recording for now.