Achievement Unlocked: Start a Music Project

Lately Hilder and I have been idly discussing doing a small music thing together. There was talk of trying to start a new band but that's possibly a bit much to start with. I mean, they'd be other people involved, can't be insular with outsiders.

As Hilder often writes single passage pieces and i'm often accused of being too loquacious, garrulous and with a tendency towards prolix (if those aren't all the same thing) so it seemed a good idea to try and craft some small vignettes.

On the face of it this would probably seem a cop out. On the contrary it's every bit as difficult as writing a more traditional type of song, if not harder. Take Trippin' by Robbie Williams I find everything about the verses to be flat and dreary. Lyrically it's a bit uninspired, he seems to be singing about Eastenders characters and the melody is really unoriginal. Once i got to know the whole song i felt very much that the verses had been written backwards from the chorus. When it kicks into the falsetto for the chorus and the lyrics become a bit more all embracing then it gets good...

Of course some songs have good bits all the way through and of course Coldplay continue to make albums long, long after they should have stopped. During the lunar eclipse earlier in June I imagined Chris Martin watching it in his back garden with his rhyming dictionary. Struggling*.

So anyway here is the first sort of single stanza piece that i'm putting in my back pocket for possible use...

White feather float away

cross me once shame on you

cross me twice shame on me
catch the wind follow it

It probably needs at least another four lines. The challenge of course with a restricted form of writing like this is that every word has to be weighted just so. It sort of annoys me that the sentiment of the second and third lines is simple yet takes two lines to express. Also it's repititious.

So this may well just go down as getting my arm in; ready for some very redacted lyricism. I'll leave you with one of my favourite short songs. It's by music hall duo Flanders and Swann and is called Dead Ducks. It is both concise and yet has some repetition. It has wit and even pops in an amusing reveal at the very end...

*Check the Pervasive Rhymes list. As well as Moon and June there are some other ridiculously common pairings. This is not even a recent observation, Flanders and Swann had a song about the unoriginality of rhyming moon with June way back in the sixties.