5/10/2022
Lyrics to pop songs seldom mean anything—at least at the point they are written. But they usually gather meaning over time. For example if you just search the phrase, you will get the literal meaning. If you reverse-engineer them, it's the typical hook. The idea must have been the title because it's in the hook, then beyond the first stanza, the rest is love song filler: Hey, girl, stop what you're doin', Hey, girl, you'll drive me to ruin, I don't know what it is I like about you, but I like it a lot... [This is essentially what I'm doing with Songdays, where I cherry-pick words and phrases and then assemble them in such a way that meaning becomes a by-product. In pop music, no one is thinking that every song is a story, and words are sometimes just a form of percussion or are otherwise filling a vocal space with something] 5/10 "lyrics": Ava, Ava Seemed too human Barely born Then deified
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Or rather climate change and changing patterns. In contrast, this year has been a veritable rain forest. It is rare to have droughts in Chicago in May.
5/9/2005 This is the first spring I've ever experienced in Chicago where it hasn't rained. Climate change? 5/8/2005, Sunday
News has become more and more idiotic. Once you have decided what's important to know, news generally becomes less important to day-to-day functioning. A wacky song potentially. Times were wacky back then and they still are, but cranked to 11--and there are things that are in fact more important than they were in 2005. Today's abstraction is from Eno's 5/7/1995 entry: Split Music. I don't know how to develop such a simple idea. He mentioned "rare chord changes". Using "split" and "vertical" as metaphors might be interesting.
"New piece of music in morning...with rare chord changes. How difficult or discouraged are changes when working with sequencers! The effect of computer sequencing is to split music into vertical blocks with sheer edges." Today's is partially written by ChatGPT in an attempt to create a character and narrative. As always, I grab the first line and rhythm and go with it, i.e. "Got a letter from Sally". I made a note about the girl in the Jarmusch film. I'll have to re-watch it. I'm hearing the "swamp" groove cliche (think Credence CR Run Through the Jungle.
Got a letter from Sally Ghost Dog Life of the Samurai What role did the girl have In the Jim Jarmusch film? 5/6/1886 (ChatGPT Diary) Learned about the terrible events that have been unfolding in Chicago. Haymarket Riot/Labor strikes turned violent and police firing at workers. I cannot help but reflect on the state of our country. I hope that we can find a way to resolve these conflicts peacefully, and that we can move forward as a nation with compassion and understanding. Received a letter from my friend Sally who recently moved to California. It was lovely to hear about her new life on the West Coast. 5/6/2000, Saturday Summery, 85 degrees Out to see film: Ghost Dog Life of the Samurai—a Jim Jarmusch film. I like the ambiguous elements and characters. What role did the girl have?
This one is derived from a 5/21/2021 riff where I had referenced an art gallery in the Chicago Loop that exhibits and sells the art of art students. I had always liked going there to check out the new art. Sometimes there would be interesting pieces that had a je ne sais quoi about them.
The phrase that generated the rhythm was "Gallery in the Loop" which has 16th notes in it and I immediately thought of the "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" groove with the stop-and-go bass. I'm reminded of that art gallery in the loop (on Randolph across from the CCC) that exhibited art that was made by art students and various other "amateur" artists. Some of it was really interesting because it was de-skilled—where the errors in the artwork made it interesting--a little smear here and there or the characters weren't painted correctly—it just had a certain charm to it. Ultimately, the value of art comes from [life] its endearment.
At The CCC by meta4s
5/3/2017
I used to love to dance before I became a musician. Sometimes I find myself reacting with music rhythmically, but it's not dancing. Even in classical there are some pieces you can dance to, and are written specifically as dances (Gigue, Gavotte). The Pulcinella Suite by Stravinsky is very "danceable" in some sections. Once you've done lots of writing you can lose your ability to dance. Words and music are its cure. Since music composition is more like writing words, the composer gets stuck in the frontal lobe. (Daniel Dennett doesn't think enjoyment of one's own profession is dulled by doing it.) 5/2024: I still think words and music are a “cure”. There is a primal connection between the two, as evidenced by aphasia patients still able to recall music. Very often I’ll get song ideas from repeating 1-4 bar phrases in dreams. They are earworms essentially and are further evidence of the connection between language and music. There is now more evidence, at least anecdotally, that music came before language in the form of onomatopoeia or mimicking of animal sounds going back 30,000 years. The first flutes were made from bird bones, which they probably used to mimic bird songs as a way of communicating with them. Whistled language is another example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language This would be something I would hear in a dream--a 4-bar groove. But it's the rhythm in the phrase "I used to love to dance". that generates the music There are different ways of expressing it rhythmically, but the nature of music should be more immediate, so I go with the first rhythm that comes to mind as I find chords on my guitar. What is the sound of a place in an abstract sense? Motown had a sound. Philadelphia had a sound. Memphis had a sound. Glen Campbell "soundtracked" places like Phoenix, Wichita, Memphis, and Galveston. Chicago doesn't really have a sound all its own but it has "scored" my life. I suppose you could use the "Chicago" song by ___________. But do we want that as its "sound"? There's "Sweet Home Chicago" as a blues shuffle, but do we want that? I hear Chicago as having a "steel" quality.
For the entire month of April the routine was do carve a song out of the diary entries, and would only be for one month. Routines are hard to break! I couldn't resist this one because it's a song whose lyrics come from song titles or lines from songs. I'm not sure if it's plagiaristic or clever parody, but I would argue it's the latter. They are "cameos", as well as an ironic juxtaposition between war and postwar.
Where would you go? You can't do that You better get better Or else you're gonna get worse Can't buy me love 5/1/1943, Saturday Anne Frank writes to Kitty: "...Tonight the guns have been banging away so much that I've already had to gather up my belongings four times. Today I packed a suitcase with the stuff I'd need in case we had to flee, but as mother correctly noted, "Where would you go?". All of Holland is being punished for the workers' strikes. Martial law has been declared..." 5/1/1964, Friday Beatles in the studio 6:30-9:30: taped eight numbers, including 'I Saw Her Standing There', 'You Cant Do That', 'Can't Buy Me Love'. 5/1/2012 May Day. Arab Spring of OWS protests. *** You better get better or else you're gonna get worse.—Loudon Wainwright (From the song "Daughter")
As April comes to a close, so does my experiment for April generating a song idea per day. What has been most interesting is that working from the music of language, as opposed to the language of music (with music coming first in the form of a chord change or riff,) results in a wider range of musical styles. It also creates perhaps too many ideas, and they have to be triaged or converged and need to enter the full writing stage. Or they can be done live, where one player creates a riff based on it and the other players follow it as a form of improv. This of course is nothing new, but my spin is that it's a remix based on what happens on a particular day, regardless of year, and is an abstraction of it, not a literal storyline based on any one event.
4/30 Songday: Western Sky, initially inspired the line in the 4/30/1870 William James letter, as well as an entry by Brian Eno. "I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will, "The sustaining of a thought because I chose to when I might have other thoughts', need be the definition of an illusion." |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
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