The Light of Day

Sometimes I actually write songs (who woulda thunk it?)
KeithHandy posted in Composing, Songwriting on January 28th, 2007

A new song began to emerge yesterday, and it’s really kind of unusual, and I love it. I should try to scrape together a quick demo so you can get the idea, but for now I’m tossing up a quickie post using the power of the English Language to flawlessly convey the sound to you.

For starters, the melody of the verse crashed in on me first. I was driving to the pet store to buy some supplies for the mice, and going over in my head what I needed. As I was driving, I became fixated on “water bottle holder”. I started singing/rapping “a watta botta ho-DA” and could barely get my brain onto the next thing. This of course is not my new song, but when I drive, I do wild improvisational singing. I need to start bringing that recorder along with me. You have to hear how absolutely twisted I get.

Anyway, just as I was pulling in to the pet store, this melody emerged out of the end of my improvisation, so I made a mental note of the intervals, knowing full well that once I got in the store it would be flushed out of my head by the muzak system. I was able to revive it when I got back out to the car, and worked it out a little further before I even got home to grab a guitar.

I try to explain to people that in spite of my rock influences, melodic inspiration seems to come from an amalgamation of the darndest things, like TV theme shows, movie music, commercials, whatever. So this melody being kind of croony-meets-theremin, I likened it to some of my favorite semi-eerie theme songs, like that from Fantasy Island, or the original Star Trek. But it also has a feel of a 1920s crooner — not just any 1920s crooner, but one with a big shiny time machine who knows time is really one big illusion anyway. And then in each verse, the last few chords start to rock out just a little, almost like the Stones did with Paint it Black, but more subtle. The actual rocking out happens in the chorus, which ends on big major seventh chords, so even though it’s big and in-your-face, there it will still be a “1970s game show” flavor to it there, and that will lead it back into the verse gracefully (he says with a wink).

This is what I have so far for lyrics (you can probably tell which of the three stanzas below is the “rock out” one just by reading them):

Soul peer
Welcome back, dear
It’s so nice to pass you on the same sphere
This thing called “time”
It blows my mind
And I truly hope that you’ve been having a fine one here

Sometimes
We get misaligned
When we stick to the same script with the same lines
We’re in a rut
It’s comfy but we know
We only need to change what’s inside our minds

I’ll meet you backstage after the performance
With the whole audience
We’ll take off our costumes and congratulate us
We were the greatest
We wouldn’t take less
We were the show, yeah, yeah, yeah!