Killing Civilians

Writing about writing songs is actually going to be a bit trickier than I’d anticipated, since I’m working on three songs at once. Since the process is a bit different for each of the songs, I’ll be blogging in triplicate throughout, and I’ll mostly leave it up to you, intelligent reader, to recognize the general principles.

A. REVITALIZE (the TV Theme Song)
When presented with a demand for an occasional song, the first thing I like to do is come up with a title. At this point, it’s totally tentative… basically, a working title. Having a title just makes any project seem a bit more real. So the title of this song reflects the assigned subject matter. Basically, this will be a song about fighting to obtain love, respect, and mass transit for the people, and the two main protagonists of the TV Show are on a mission to solidify their love and beautify their city.

I haven’t even STARTED thinking about how I’m going to write the lyrics, because just thinking about the subject matter makes me want to puke irony. But that’s the fun and challenge of the Commissioned Occasional Song: it’s not really about the songwriter.

OK, writing that last sentence did, in fact, make me puke. Let’s move on. With this song, we were given a very specific model to emulate: The Golden Girls theme, “Thank You For Being A Friend.” This is AWESOME, because we know exactly what kind of style and tone we’re shooting for. So the first thing I did this morning was figure out how to play “Thank You For Being A Friend.” It’s like two chords. So I took those two chords, reversed them, and came up with a basic melody for the… well, I don’t know what to call it. Verse? Chorus? I think there’s only two parts to the song, and they’re both kinda catchy. Anyway, done for the day. I’ll pick it up tomorrow and see what I think about it.

Oh, but wait! As I was writing this, I came up with a totally awesome idea for the end of the song: rather than end, it will fade into the TV Show. So there will be the announcer saying “Revitalize was filmed before a live studio audience,” and then there will be about thirty seconds of dialogue, complete with applause and laff track. So that’s a good day’s work.

B. YOU PLAY YOU, I PLAY ME (the Dedication Song)
Sometimes with songs, I’ve got nothing. This is supposed to be a peppy folksy number, and quite frankly I suck at writing this sort of thing. In most cases, I’d just pass it off to Djerzi (which means I’d give him a guitar and stand next to him, watching and judging, until he comes up with a suitable chord progression). But he’s busy as fuck, and I’ve got some spare time, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

So I pick up the guitar and start playing random chords. It takes a while, because I’ll occasionally get side-tracked into playing another song I’m working on that’s actually kind of good but not yet finished but as I said kind of good which means I don’t want to blow it on some shitty occasional song. And then I’ll get stuck just playing one or two chords for a while, wandering around the house. But after about fifteen minutes of grabass, I came up with a little three-chord verse progression that seems totally derivative yet blandly appealing. We’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow.

Later in the day, I looked over the proposed subject matter (it really helps that, as part of this process, the winning bidders were required to help us write the lyrics by providing personal information about the people we’re writing the songs for) and the words for a chorus occurred to me. This rarely happens. I usually start with a melody, then move on to the lyrics.

Anyway, here’s what passes for inspiration these days:

You play you, I play me, but baby we play with each other
Baby we play with each other

So now I’ve got to come up with a melody for that shit. What’ll probably happen now is this: I’ll record the verse progression, give it to Eloise and see if she comes up with something. That usually works pretty well; either she comes up with a melody or I, being impatient, will write one myself.

C. KENTUCKY WOMAN (the Birthday Song)
For as many birthday songs as we’ve written, you’d think this would be a piece of cake. But so far, nothing. It doesn’t help that the birthday in question is August 30 (or approximately 2 hours from the time of this writing). That’s what we like to call a BULLSHIT DEADLINE. Because it’s just not going to get done in time, there’s not really a sense of urgency to it. I mean, what’s the difference between saying, “Here’s your present. It’s a month late” and “Here’s your present. Sorry I didn’t get you one last year”?

Anyway, unlike the other two songs, this commission didn’t come with a specific genre. As a matter of fact, here’s what we have to work with:

Indie Rock, Lo-Fi, Dream Pop, Bluegrass, Grunge, and Trance.

If we could write a song combining all those elements, WE WOULD BE THE GREATEST BAND OF ALL TIME.