About a month ago, I wrote1 about a new song that I've been working on. It seems that every weekend I devote several hours to rearranging the song, trying to find ways of maintaining interest throughout its five and a half minutes length.
Various external ideas have made contributions; I'm documenting this now so that I won't forget, but I doubt that anyone would make the connections. David Bennett has a video about songs with three bar loops that provided the basis for the bridge. The song "Captain of her heart" (1985) provided harp glissandi, and "Fade to grey" (1980) contributed a synth pattern to the bridge. If I'm assigning inspirations, then mention must be made of a song by Israeli singer Dani Litani that provided the initial impetus; unfortunately I don't know what this song is called and I couldn't find it by listening to the random selection of his songs available on YouTube.
Last weekend, after reading a few biographies of Kate Bush, I was tempted first to change various parameters of the sounds in the tune and then to create a completely new version that was very much "in one's face" (maybe I'll keep this as a bonus track). On Friday, I discarded all those changes and reverted to an earlier version that I then changed around, making it softer but also more interesting (I hope).
Being busy during the week - or at least, occupied - doesn't lend itself to writing lyrics. After several false starts, I decided to write about a scene that was in "The Lazarus project", where girlfriend/wife Sarah breaks up with George (this was probably episode 7 of the first series). In terms of the series, it's very important (George had to start a thermonuclear war in order to cause his wife - who was killed in an accident - to be resurrected). Here's a paraphrase of what Sarah says: "you've got the next five years of your life mapped out whereas I don't know what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow".
Actually, that's a phrase that could easily have been used by my mythological ex, G, way back in 1975: I did have several years mapped out (studies, emigration, kibbutz, army service) whereas she wasn't sure of what she wanted from life. I didn't realise this at the time, but in retrospect it's fairly clear.
Anyway, on Friday afternoon I started to write and with difficulty managed to
create two verses. Here's the second verse:
Your future's unformed Whilst mine is so clearly planned You feel quite unsure You don't want a helping hand Through all of life's turns When shadows will whisper doubts You'll forge your own path You'll find your own way out And now you must leave You're saying goodbye There are no more doubts You'll be your own guide
But then I reconsidered: after all, it's a breakup song, and there are an untold number of such songs; I've written several myself. So I dropped that idea.
Whilst walking the dog on early Saturday morning, a new idea popped into my life: using the development of the humble bell pepper as a metaphor for life. As the pepper grows and ages, so its colour changes: the green can be seen as adolescence, the red as adulthood, and the yellow as retirement.
But even if I had such an idea, how could I turn it into words? I have to admit that over the past few weeks I've been playing around with the soi disant AI program, CoPilot. If it can write computer algorithms2, then quite probably it can write lyrics, although it's debatable how good they might be (a confession: "shadows will whisper doubts" in the above lyric comes from CP, as quite possibly do other lines). So I 'told' the program about the basic metaphor of the song and its structure (how many verses, how many lines, how many syllables per line) and let it rip.
Let me say that the results are not bad at all. I've tweaked them a little in order to let the stressed syllables in the words match those in the tune more closely, and I have yet to finish this process. CP had problems with the bridge that is composed of the three bar loop: even though I told it how many lines there are and which lines should rhyme, the result was not as I specified. But I could take that raw output and shape it to my needs.
Probably during the coming week I'll start recording a demo of the lyrics in order to learn the tune better and see where there are words that need replacing/improving.
Internal links
[1] 1870
[2] 1875
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