I spent much of last week involved in a women composer's festival, and this afternoon, on my way home from work, I caught Nellie McKay on NPR's Project Song.
I am entranced by the process of crafting a song. It is like magic to me. I was speaking to one of the composers last week, and I told her that, and she was puzzled. "Haven't you ever had a tune running through your head?"
I had to answer yes to that question - but the tune is never one of mine. It's the curse of having a good ear and memory for music that anything that sounds even marginally similar will morph into a tune you already know.
Then there is the fact that I don't play an instrument.
I would love to write a song, and I'm going to make it a goal for myself, but from where I am now - it's going to take some magic. I hope I can get there.
3 comments:
it's great to be the turf ain't it?
anthony newley wrote whole musicals without playing an instrument or reading music. he would simply sing into a tape recorder and then pass it on to transcribers. in many ways, his lack of any training led his music to places where the rest of us, with the benefit of our educations and lessons won't go. he ended up writing songs that sounded like a regular person wrote them.
i've dabbled in writing. mostly they suck and i throw them away and shred the evidence before anybody can bust me. i have also had the experience of having somebody find the evidence i stupidly left laying about and listen to it and say "this didn't suck as bad as you think it did." to which i replied "is it any good?" they said: "i didn't say that, i just said it didn't suck as bad as you thought it did."
I definitely have this fear that I will reveal something that I would like to protect if I was to write a song - be it a soft, mushy core, the rage that simmers inside of me, or worst of all - that I'm a hack. Although maybe that comes from one too many viewings of the Buffy musical.
I hope you find your song-writing magic . . .but I am also awed by beautiful, expressive voices. That's a great gift, too!
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