Musical Monday vol 2.

This weekend I sent Mom the setlist and lyrics for [moving all the same]. Yep, I have enough songs for an album now! Twelve guitar-arranged songs--unless you count emptiness / the only road as two songs, in which case it's thirteen. Check it out:

1. but the ghost
2. emptiness / the only road
3. distance
4. road don’t go
5. that bitch
6. give the people what they want
7. static
8. promise to keep
9. Morningstar
10. teeth of the storm
11. where home is
12. destination please

I love all these songs, and think they will make a wonderful album. Thematically sound, ordered in a way I like, covering all my bases: some of the very first songs I wrote right along with some of the most recent. Now all I have to do is practice them more...and record them...and play them in front of non family members. XD Not necessarily in that order.

This morning I have a song stuck in my head that I haven't written yet. Haven't finished writing anyway. I know generally what it ought to sound like and I have the chorus, but the rest hasn't shown up yet. This is exactly what happened with [teeth of the storm]--I was carrying that chorus around in my head for two years before I got the rest of the song. It goes (with G, C, F, Am on each line):

the phone repairman
ain't been there, man
and I'm calling, I'm calling
and I can't get get get get get get get
through

Every time I sit down to play I'll run through that a couple times, then experiment with possible chord sequences for the verses, then bitch poutingly about how I don't have the rest. Then Dave will snort and smile and shake his head at me, and I'll sigh and blow myself a raspberry and play something else.

Yesterday, it was [mama winter]. Wanted to play that and [teeth] back to back in honor of the year's first snowfall, which I did. I figured out the chords for [mw] on the keyboard, then looked them up in my handy-dandy guitar chord chart. (Dm C Bb, FYI.) I will need to work on finger-picking a lot more before I can make it sound close to how it's supposed to, though. [mw] is an aria, so I always imagined it with just a few drifty violins in the background. This is possible to recreate on an acoustic guitar, but will take practice. The song was demanding enough vocally all by itself, and the smoking and the pharyngitis do not help! :) But I will master it. Gotta have something to do till I can lay ahold of the rest of the phone repairman song!


Now I want to write about the thing I'd thought about writing last Monday.

Me, Mom, sisters and Dave had gone to see some Olympic gymnasts perform that weekend, Amber's treat. It was a wonderful show, full of highly talented and trained people who made dazzling feats of athleticism look easy and fun.

The band, however--the band stuck in my craw. Not because they are other than what they're supposed to be, but because I'm still immature and filled with envy. They got have the stage, see, and they got to accompany the awesome gymnasts and exhort the crowd (unsuccessfully) to go crazy. I got to sit in the audience and eat my liver. They are called KSM and are a Disney recording group. One of their songs, Permission to Fly, was actually quite good. It helped that the song was accompaniment to some of those acrobat ladies who suspend themselves from two long silk banners and swing and twirl and look awesome doing it. The acrobats started out the song wrapping one banner around themselves, holding out the other like a wing, and being lifted up into the air to swing out over the crowd.

But I was jealous of the band even before they ever came on stage, to the point where it detracted somewhat from my enjoyment of the show. Right at the beginning, when everyone was being announced, the lights went down and some people carrying glow-in-the dark dragons (the kind they have in parades) danced all around the performance area. Which I should have been deeply stirred by, especially considering how much Miller & Lee I've been reading lately. But there were two things fighting each other in the middle of me: the crying-cause-it's-pretty feeling versus the scowling-cause-I-feel-stupid feeling. Stupid, sadly, was not eradicated, and kept getting in the way when I wasn't forcibly shoving it out of the way. I still was able to be awed by things and moved to good tears or near them once or twice. I don't see live shows that often and this one had a lot going for it. Wrestling with my insecurities, however, is a dumb, dumb reason to stint on emotional impact from a show.

Not too long into it, it occurred to me that this is exactly the sort of thing my tower/turkey dream was telling me about. The turkey, in this reading, would represent emotional satisfaction, the recharging of the spiritual self which takes place when you allow yourself to be moved and awed by beauty. I deny myself spiritual nutrition when I let envy get in the way like that. The rich dreampeople I was mad at would represent people like KSM--people who have the audiences and the visibility I crave, but whom I feel I can outdo musically. The fact that I didn't have a ticket in the dream translates to me not feeling I have the right or don't deserve to have that kind of power. Or maybe that I don't have the actual right to count myself among them, since I am not a performing musician. So they are richer than me, even spiritually, in that specific way. Because what they have, they share with everyone who hears. And the storm is--gotta think on what the storm is. The emotional energy swirling around in a concert hall? The unconscious spiritual life of music-listening people? Something like that.

But I should cut this entry off now. Some of my co-workers want to hear me sing Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You again, and I have to brush up on the lyrics.

Thanks, universe. (And coworkers.) That really does make me feel better. :D