We talked about many different aspects of being a part of SpinTunes. During the conversation, I got to cover my involvement in SpinTunes 1 and SpinTunes 3, including some discussion about a number of my SpinTunes song entries: Not Cool, Ballroom Dance, Another Universe, and Step Back Swooperman.
The full show is available at Jules’ website for streaming and download. Enjoy!
We’ll be discussing all things SpinTunes — what it’s like to participate in this type of competition, the pros and the cons, the overall creative process and more.
The interview will begin at 10 pm ET and will end whenever we run out of things to talk about.
Tune-in here, join us in chat here, and learn more here including info about some of the other contestants who’ll be participating.
 Caught Red-Handed!Warning! The Offhand Band usually strives to write satisfying songs that are cool for kids, fun for families and great for the grown on their own. In part or whole, we believe this song doesn’t fit that description. Proceed at your own risk! Learn more. |
| Play the song here!Not Cool by The Offhand Band |
| Play the video here! |
[tab:Lyrics]
Intro:
I’m a player; piano, that is; my apparatus
My forte, fo’ sho’; play for pay and also for gratis
There’s haters, not well-tempered, elevator relegaters
So raters, debaters, let’s talk Joanna status
Verse 1:
Keyboard so versatile, play almost any style
Clavier smart as Xavier with Cerebro guile
Far more than a C chord, still people be bored
Players deplored, ignored until we’re Eeyored
Waller would knock your socks; Jerry Lee genuinely rocked
Now it’s often mocked and even on the chopping block
Not a classical piano man? You’re pushing Tin Pan
In cool music country, you’re at sea instead of inland
Yellow Brick Road or 52nd Street
Have to face to face it, haters feel no heat; aces beat
Fiona, disown her; Rufus, doofus; no-one jealous
Of Hornsby or Amos or the famous Bareilles
Wonder, blunder; Newman, subhuman; Connick, bubonic
Carole King and Cullum, just the cancer kind of chronic
Benny was Bjorn to play, but people hate A-B-B-A
And Jims Webb and Steinman? Too passe, way
Now The Fray and Coldplay don’t get such profuse abuse
Nor do Queen or keen Keane or Radiohead or Muse
The eighty-eight’s not all they bait; they get fewer glares
But Ben and Nellie? Only swell ta fella piano players
Kanye’s are major, but as players, we minor
Said you want us fled? Fine, yer the headliner
To your eye, you see Marvin Hamlisch, Burt Bacharach
Wanting fly? You’ll be starvin’, famished, skirting snack attack
Chorus 1:
Not coolVerse 2:
Even less top for you than piano pop?
An album’s not the only flop some ivory-ticklers drop
Burt, Marvin, Elton, Billy, ABBA and more
Got cred for another bore: a musical score
Musical theayter, where they burst into song
And so say every hater, “It’s the worst, bang the gong”
But almost every art form needs disbelief suspension
Stand by and let me try some apprehension contravention
Andrew Lloyd Dubya, does he rub ya all wrong?
Post-”Phantom” fate, a bit bantamweight, but cat can comp a song
With Tim Rice, words splice and knit to nice writ benefit
A Brit wit who’ll make it fit and sometimes even land a hit
Do you know how fond I’m of Sondheim?
Like language was made for him, he goes beyond rhyme
Blazingly on-time with phrasing and scansion
When this Pieta of theatah’s in the house, it’s a mansion
Want cool? Cole, the top; which school? Ol’
And Loesser is more, even co-wrote “Heart and Soul”
Bawd to awed to guffawed you gotta applaud the Broadway songwriter
Roast-and-toasting most from coast to coast and boasting that they’re brighter
Not all cheesy junk, “Bring in da’ funk” had rap, and “In the Heights”
Even The Who, Green Day, Bono and the Edge have tripped the lights
I’d hope that you’re hip now that I’ve performed this patter
But I sense no evidence will dispense this anti-matter
Chorus 2:
Not coolBridge:
In the world today, no-one’d choose to be gay
With musical taste, I daresay, you also can’t self-betray
Pray and downplay as you may, try to spay, stray and sway
Say you want it nee? It won’t obey; here to stay
Like piano prodigy Gaga, me, I was born this way
First LP I ever bought: “Hooked on Classics”
Leave you sour as Vlasics? Get me ass kicks?
Sensibility Jurassic? So do you deem it daft?
You see a load of crap? To me, a lode of craft
On troubled waters, need a bridge away from “Ishtar”
In dire straits, I shoulda learned to play the guitar
Then, I bet, instead of fretting, I’d be getting it far
More portable, affordable, still chordable
Compared to a keyboard, a bull; unchortable
Then there’s the vocal: not my focal, I’m no singer
When I croon, don’t bring a socle, you’ll see soon I’m second-stringer
My Cletus voice a yokel, it’s my fingers do the zingers
Can’t I simply say the words, no-one run through the ringer,
With only short notes and no pitch on which to linger?
Verse 3:
But those who stir my slumber most, down to the apple core
You know their name and number, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Fab Four
So much to say, and I don’t have all day
But cross the nations and generations no-one cuts like they
Broke the rule then built the school, always so eclectic
Acoustic and electric, the keyboard and the plec trick
Want to hear the case they found the place where magic lives?
Not every act gives the language whole new adjectives
Arrangements and references show Beatlesque preferences
Distinctive details a disciple deploys
XTC, TMBG and ELO show deferences
The list is long, and some are strong, still they’re decoys
No-one can rule like the lads from Liverpool
For the masses, yet passes as full-of-joys geek noise
Realized what they prized, careless of cool
Yeah, wouldn’t it be nice? Wait, that’s the Beach Boys
Choruses 3 & 4:
Not coolThe challenge: a melody-free song when I thrive on music, an ultra-cool genre when plenty of what I listen to, play and write is often thought uncool. My solution: flip rap’s braggadocio into self-effacement, wearing musical uncoolness as a badge of pride, while also realizing I should be grateful for a chance to not worry about my singing voice.
I was one of 26 contestants moved into Round 2 of the SpinTunes #3 online songwriting competition. Only 21 completed Round 2 entries on time. On July 10, SpinTunes announced that six contestants were eliminated, leaving only 15 to move onto Round 3. My entry, Program aids food stamp users, tied for 4th, so I was really pleased.
I was feeling like I was, in a way, a round ahead of myself compared to SpinTunes #1. In Round 1, last year’s Step Back Swooperman was derivative and squeaked by, just like this year’s All Over. Then, Another Universe also more or less squeaked by Round 2, its solo piano and unspecific story not so well-received. But in Round 3, I found my footing with Will it, placing third with a well arranged pop song with a specific story fairly well told, a description which can also apply to my current Round 2 entry. Last year, pretty much everyone involved, including myself, though that my Round 4 shadow Ballroom Dance, involving a genre-based challenge, was my best work of the competition. Did I have that to look forward to now in this year’s Round 3, and then who knows what in a possible Round 4 if I made it through?
The challenge for Round 3 was, indeed, and coincidentally, genre-based: “Top That – Write a rap. For anyone who has any experience rapping, you get the added challenge of making your rap about a work romance. That added challenge doesn’t apply to those who have never rapped up until this point.”
My immediate thought was that I was sunk.
I don’t listen to much hip-hop and even less rap, and the hip-hop I do listen to is eclectic crossover stuff like Outkast, Gnarls Barkley, N.E.R.D.,, with lots of songs that have no rap at all. Outkast even once said of themselves that if they were white and did the exact same music, people would compare them to Beck instead of considering them to be hip-hop artists. I’d never even considered writing a rap before. I like lots of music, but my tastes, or at least my abilities, as a writer tend toward the traditional, sometimes stylistically, but almost always in terms of the foundations of song craft. And melody is usually a part of that. All too often, what I write ends up pretty uncool. And rap demands cool.
I quickly thought twice about hoping for my best work in the competition so far. But by the time the song was done, at least in my opinion, it would turn out that I’d made good after all.
For these challenges, I usually like to try to come up with a song that has two reasons for being. The first, that it meet the challenge in a meaningful way, and second, that it end up as much as possible a song I might have written on my own independent of the contest and challenge. I find this approach especially necessary with the technical/formal challenges where the lyrics could be about just about anything.
For me, then, the content had to go with the form, with rap. A song with no music, written by someone who prizes musicianship and song craft? Instead of that being a disadvantage, I decided that the rap could itself be about music and musicians that I like.
I recalled some notions I’d jotted down in the past about how I’m not a cool songwriter, the issues I just mentioned about song craft. This also seemed a nice form/content match, since self-aggrandizement is a common element in rap music, so here would be a twist: self-effacement.
This led quickly to a number of ideas. Piano pop as uncool. The piano as particularly less cool than the guitar. Musical theater, kids’ music, and classical music, all of which I like and inform my creative output, but all of which are often thought uncool. Shout-outs are common in rap and hip-hop, and I’d have plenty of opportunity for that.
While I was thinking about all these ways my work and my tastes could be looked down on by others, it seemed only natural for me to also ponder the many reactions I’ve gotten through SpinTunes about my voice. I know it’s not great, and that’s a big issue for me with these challenges, because I really consider myself a writer and not a performer, or at least not an entertainer, and in any case certainly not a vocalist. Now here was a rap, an opportunity to not have to worry about my singing voice. One more thing to bring up in the rap itself.
There seemed the obvious possibility of drifting into parody and irony here, but that’s not what I felt I wanted to do. Surely a lot of the content would come across with humor, but I intended to take things somewhat seriously, since I’d essentially be defending myself in various ways, at times uncertain, at times stand-offish, at times more confident. Given this tone I was planning for the words, it seemed clear that the music would also have to take itself fairly seriously. Minor chords and an overall menacing sound.
With rap and hip-hop often sampling other music, I thought I’d look for some of the more famous, older, public domain piano pieces to use as the basis for a fair amount of the music, twisting them into a serious rap underscore. Ironic that I said just last round how I shouldn’t do anything derivative ever again unless it was explicitly asked for in a challenge. It may not have been directly asked for here, but it’s certainly appropriate to the genre.
I often write a lot about the song itself, parsing the lyrics. If I were to start that, though, I feel like I could go on forever, annotating every little reference, every pun, every rhyme both end and inner, alliteration, wordplay, etc. Instead, I’ll talk mainly about what’s not there, and then just a few other things, and that’ll be plenty to say anyway.
Lots of ideas were adding up, yet I also had too many different angles, and too much detail in every angle I went with. As lengthy as the final lyric is, there’s lots that just never found its way in.
I would love to have talked about Schoolhouse Rock, the Sherman brothers, Menken and Ashman, and other Disney music, how Warner Brothers cartoons introduced me to so much music, including classical music. A number of the artists I did include have written family-friendly musicals and songs, but I didn’t mention any of that. In the end, only the Popeye reference has anything to do directly with entertainment I remember from my own childhood, and that only coincidentally for the appropriate quote, since I never considered his cartoons to be among my favorites as a kid.
You can imagine that I had lots of other artists in mind for the things I did talk about. More piano-based musicians, some obviously uncool and others with a more cool reputation. Some outside of rock/pop altogether like Joplin and Mancini. Gershwin, who I love, would have been an obvious mention, but for all his reputation, he’s not enough of a legend in musical theater per se for me to have mentioned him in the limited space I had, and I didn’t mention anyone specific in the classical world, so off he went. There were more Beatlesque bands, and also a number of songs I had in mind that were from more guitar-based rock bands but that famously use piano.
Each of these areas could have had a whole song devoted to it, and then there would have been more space to explore. But not for this song. All these things ended up going away.
With music, I’d thought initially of having each verse based on different music in addition to the bridge having a unique basis itself. I considered Listz’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” Beehoven’s “Fur Elise.” Some Gilbert & Sullivan for the verse on musical theater. Joplin’s “The Entertainer” to underscore the Beatles verse, since I was talking about them being such groundbreaking entertainers. I quickly realized how scattered the song would sound, not to mention how too much melody would detract from the words — not a problem in non-rap songs, but obviously a problem here. On top of all this, I also wanted the song to sound serious, and I wasn’t going to get that so easily with the G&S and Joplin tunes. Trying them in minor keys, they came across as Halloween parody material. Trying to reharmonize them, they’d just seem odd.
So in the end I went with just one very famous piano piece for the verses, “The Celebrated Chop Waltz, ” by Arthur de Lulli. Don’t recognize it? It probably won’t help for me to tell you the composer name is an alias for a woman, Euphemia Allen. But it will help to tell you that the piece is better known by its own alias: “Chopsticks.” It’s there, under each of the three verses, the only difference being it moves up an octave with each verse, so it becomes more and more noticeable. The alteration of its waltz rhythm to a song in four helped give it a cool (if common) groove, and I drastically reharmonized it to give it a quality that’s both effective enough for R&B music and generally serious.
With the bridge talking about classical music, I felt it was a perfect opportunity for a separate musical reference. Looking for a similarly well-known piano piece that I could also move from waltz time into four, one was already there on my list of famous candidates: the Piano Sonata No. 14 in C? minor “Quasi una fantasia”, Op. 27, No. 2, by Ludwig van Beethoven, better known as the “Moonlight Sonata.” The consistent groove across verse and bridge felt great. Harmonically, I didn’t really change anything, since the piece had such a great, serious quality already, making it an ideal break for the bridge. I simply took stylistic liberties to make it fit with the overall song.
I knew I wanted a four-stanza bridge. The sonata starts with three relatively short, and familiar,”stanzas” before moving onto some longer ones that I think only those more familiar with the piece would tend to recognize. My solution was to start the bridge with the third “stanza” as an introduction, and then backtrack to the beginning and do the first, second and then repeat the third. The arrangement would make it all feel like natural development, with the first iteration of that third stanza a bit underplayed.
One ultimately popular piano piece I didn’t even allow on my to-be-considered list because it wasn’t in the public domain, but I was glad to have an opportunity to reference it in the lyrics: “Heart and Soul,” which though not from a musical itself had its lyrics written by one of the greats of musical theater, Frank Loesser.
Structure/development: The first verse starts off talking about how the piano, and well known piano players, can be looked down upon. The chorus stresses the uncoolness while also introducing the idea that for some it can’t be helped and may as well be embraced. Next verse segues with some of the piano players having done musicals, and there’s a conscious redirection to try to defend this art form which is even more widely considered uncool. There’s more confidence and optimism, but the verse ends with a suspicion that nobody’s convinced. The bridge gets more personal, highlighting the notions from the chorus about owning up to who you are, and also bringing in some of the tangential thoughts about classical music, guitar and singing. In the final verse, there’s much more confidence, since The Beatles’ status is certain, and based in great part on how they pursued what was meaningful to them regardless of what would be considered cool. And yet even that verse ends with the Beach Boys reference, which is at once maybe a bit funny but also reiterates the self-questioning that’s gone on throughout. So the song grows in optimism and confidence as it develops, yet with self-acceptance always being darkened by persistent self-questioning. Yeah, that feels like me, all right.
Arrangement: Appropriately, there’s no piano. Appropriately, with the song mentioning gong and guitar as foils, both appear in the song. In addition to some more obvious hits, all the cymbal-like noises in the bridge are actually gong sounds. The synth pad changes from section to section, and I particularly like the last two. I found one with a curious “backwards” sound that reminded me of some techniques associated with the Beatles, so that worked for their verse. In the final chorus, the first chorus to even have a pad, there’s a pipe-organ-like synth, which in addition to just having a great dramatic feel also echoes, with the i to Flat VII chords changes, the main theme from Phantom of the Opera. That musical is not only itself mentioned in the song but is, underneath it all, a story about a misunderstood composer who just wants to be accepted, and so also thematically appropriate for the song. Vocally, all that supplements the first-person rap is a little bit of singing in the chorus. The bass makes the title accusation, while the pair of harmonizing tenor voices add further criticisms. The rap narrator is sandwiched between the lower and higher pitches, defending himself from attacks on all sides.
Bridge: First, Hooked on Classics really was the first album I ever bought myself. Now I want to talk about the gay thing. Like Jerry Seinfeld said, “I’m not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” But this is a theme I’m fond of and actually wrote a song about before: Come Out. I think we could all stand to learn a thing or two from people who come out of the closet because they feel it’s important to acknowledge, rather than deny, who they really are, for better or worse, even if the world around them won’t think it’s “cool.”
Final verse: It’s shorter than the first two verses. There’s obviously plenty else I could have said about the Beatles, but I just didn’t think anything else necessary to say. After the long bridge, with the song already being pretty long, I also liked the idea of simply accelerating toward the end. One other thing that highlights the completion is the change in the end rhyme scheme for the final half of that last verse. For the first time in the song, instead of couplets (or related patterns of consecutive lines with the same end rhyme), there’s now an alternation, ABAB, and the B is even carried over across the two stanzas. Both of these things, especially the B rhyme — deploys, decoys, geek noise, Beach Boys — seem to help drive the song to completion.
There are probably a lot of objections and questions that the lyrics bring up. As just a few examples: Don’t people other than piano players like Ben Folds and Nellie McKay? Isn’t ABBA not a very heavily piano-based band? Who really lumps Stevie Wonder in the piano pop category? Plenty more. I made conscious choices, simplifications for sake of drama and color. Chalk it up to what I said in the song: art needs suspension of disbelief.
The song ends by talking about the Beatles not caring whether they were cool and how that would be nice. One of the thoughts I had throughout the writing process was that that kind of not caring about cool, that knowing others may think something uncool and you do it anyway and are fully okay it, that not needing others to think you cool, actually makes you as cool as it’s possible to be. Though I didn’t end up saying that directly in the song, hopefully that’s what comes across.
In the end, I have to say that writing a rap was a revelation. I enjoy composing so much, and really do enjoy and appreciate traditional song craft so much, that I automatically gravitate toward marrying music and lyrics fully. And rap is such a performance-based form, while I’m such a writer-not-performer. With all this, I just never really thought about rap. But as I dug in, I realized that I could still be very creative with music, had free reign to go crazy with lots of what I enjoy most about lyric-writing, and that I could deliver a song without any concern about my sub-par singing voice. “Can’t I simply say the words, no-one run through the ringer, / With only short notes and no pitch on which to linger?” Yeah, I can, with rap.
I don’t imagine this could possibly become an exclusive direction for me, but it’s great to know that it’s something I can pull off while having an absolute blast with every aspect. And I do think it’s my best work so far in at least SpinTunes #3. How glad am I that this challenge didn’t appear in SpinTunes #2, which I missed? Extremely.
And I’m proud to say that the entire rap vocal track in the recording was done in one take. Not the first take, but one continuous take. What you hear, though, isn’t exactly that full, uninterrupted take, but that’s only because a handful of small rewrites occurred to me only very late in the game, after I’d truly thought the writing was all done. “Compromising” that single full take was worth a few overdubs for the wordplay.
You can check out the Round 3 songs at SpinTunes, or more permanently at BandCamp, and you can get directly to Not Cool at Bandcamp — but you can listen and download for free from BandCamp right from the player at the top of this post.
[tab:Video]
I figured that a video would be a good way to help the song get some exposure, while also just being kind of amusing in itself. So I made one. You can play it at the top of this page right below the audio player.
At first, my attitude was to help clarify the lyrics as much as possible. But since I was essentially limiting myself to a slideshow, and since I was limiting my slide photos to whatever I could find through Google’s image search, it wasn’t always so easy to clarify everything. In the end, the video now has a bunch of its own references and visual puns beyond the lyrics. So be it, it’s fun.
In the YouTube video description, I added formal writing credits and a list of name checks and references just in case they might help the video be found a bit more often through people’s searches. Here’s all that below, since it might as well be here instead of only at YouTube, both for posterity and also to help along figuring out the lyrics.
“Not Cool” by The Offhand Band; Music & Lyrics by Mark S. Meritt; parts based on “The Celebrated Chop Waltz” (a.k.a. “Chopsticks”), by Arthur de Lulli (a.k.a. Euphemia Allen), and Piano Sonata No. 14 in C# minor “Quasi una fantasia”, Op. 27, No. 2 (a.k.a. “Moonlight Sonata”), by Ludwig van Beethoven
Name checks and references:
Pianoforte
Johann Sebastian Bach / Well-Tempered Clavier
Elevator music
X-Men / Professor Charles Francis Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X / Cerebro
Winnie-the-Pooh / Eeyore
Fats Waller
Jerry Lee Lewis
Billy Joel / Piano Man / 52nd Street
Tin Pan Alley
Elton John / Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Face 2 Face
Fiona Apple
Rufus Wainright
Bruce Hornsby
Tori Amos
Sara Bareilles
Stevie Wonder
Randy Newman
Harry Connick
Carole King
Jamie Cullum
Benny Andersson
Bjorn Ulvaeus
ABBA
Jimmy Webb
Jim Steinman
The Fray
Coldplay
Queen
Keane
Radiohead
Muse
Ben Folds
Nellie McKay
Kanye West / We Major
Marvin Hamlisch
Burt Bacharach
7-Up / Uncola
Cholula
Popeye
Jerry Herman / La Cage Aux Folles / Albin / I Am What I Am
The Gong Show
Willing suspension of disbelief
Andrew Lloyd Webber / The Phantom of the Opera / Cats
Tim Rice
Stephen Sondheim
Michelangelo Buonarroti / The Pieta
Cole Porter / You’re the Top
Frank Loesser / Heart and Soul
Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk
In the Heights
The Who / Tommy
Green Day / American Idiot
Bono and The Edge / Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark
Patter song
Hula Hoop
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Lady Gaga / Born This Way
Hooked On Classics
Vlasic Pickles
Simon and Garfunkel / Bridge Over Troubled Water
Dire Straits / Money for Nothing (“I shoulda learned to play the guitar”)
The Simpsons / Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel
The Beatles / Golden Slumbers / You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) / She Loves You (“Yeah, yeah, yeah”)
Apple Corps
XTC
They Might Be Giants (TMBG)
Electric Light Orchestra (ELO)
Joyful noise
The Beach Boys / Wouldn’t It Be Nice
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[tab:END]
I thought those papers would be interested to know about a song based on an article, and the Millerton News ended up interviewing me. The story appeared in the Millerton News and at the TriCorner News website last Thursday, July 7. At the site, only subscribers can read the full text, but the editors of the Millerton News have graciously given me permission to reprint the full article right here. Enjoy!
Incidentally, my song tied for 4th out of a field of 21 songs. Time to move onto Round 3.
Thu, 07/07/2011 – 9:16am * Millerton
By
Stefanie Giglio
stefanieg@millertonnews.com
MILLERTON — The Offhand Band, based out of Red Hook, was recently inspired to write a song about the Health Bucks program after reading about the program in the Poughkeepsie Journal and The Millerton News.
The program, which is run by the North East Community Center (NECC) and funded by Sharon Hospital, allows people who use food stamps to receive discounts at the Millerton and Amenia farmers markets.
The song, entitled “Program Aids Food Stamp Users,” was written for an online song-writing competition called SpinTunes, which challenged song writers who made it past the first elimination round to use a recent newspaper article as the basis for the song.
Mark Merrit, the songwriter and sole member of The Offhand Band, wrote on his website about the contest and his process of creating the song.
“I don’t subscribe to any newspapers. I hardly ever read any newspapers. I don’t watch much news on television or read much on the Internet,” he wrote.
He said that the reason behind that was because the news is “just not relevant in my life or the lives of anyone I know.” That lead him to search for a story that “exemplified the notion of little things meaning a lot, a story that might be as especially impacting for someone’s life as the vast majority of news stories, especially the larger ones, are fundamentally meaningless to most of us.”
In an email conversation, he said he hopes that his song shows people how much the little things can make a big difference.
“The basic idea is that what’s really important are the things that can make a significant impact in the lives of ourselves and others,” he said.
On his website he described the story he wrote into the song about a person who is receiving food stamps who is also “aware of the difference between globalized, factory-farmed foods and local fare which [is] healthier both physiologically and economically.”
The lyrics of the song are written in the same style as a newspaper article in terms of the word choice, style and punctuation. Merrit stated that the use of attributions in the song, like “Johnson said,” gave “some nice newspaper ambience while also stressing that the song is giving voice to someone who normally might not be covered by the media.”
The song debuted during the SpinTunes Listening Party on Tuesday, July 5. It will be available for a free download on www.theoffhandband.com and on the SpinTunes website, www.spintunes.blogspot.com.
Merrit said that the main purpose of The Offhand Band, particularly the first album, “Everyone’s Invited,” is “to create songs that could be enjoyed by all ages, together or on their own, and that would provide a generally positive outlook that would encourage people to make good things happen for themselves and others.”
He noted that not all of his more recent songs were created to serve that original goal.
| Caught Red-Handed! Warning! The Offhand Band usually strives to write satisfying songs that are cool for kids, fun for families and great for the grown on their own. In part or whole, we believe this song doesn’t fit that description. Proceed at your own risk! Learn more. |
| Play the song here!Program Aids Food Stamp Users by Spintown |
[tab:Lyrics]
Northeast resident Mary Johnson uses food stamps,
putting groceries on the family table.
She said, “I’d felt ashamed, but when you need, the shame goes away.”
Though she’s grateful for all the help she’s been receiving,
still, whenever she reads a food product label,
she’d like more healthy options for her children each day.
Now, North East Community Center has a program,
and all users of food stamps qualify for it,
with discounts on the freshest local produce in town.
Health Bucks coupons are good at area farmers markets.
Whether Johnson would like to serve fresh or store it,
her family now eats healthy local food all year round.
“The same world that makes breaking news of moms who kill their babies
makes cans from distant factories and beans and broccoli grown
in other countries so much cheaper than the farm stand down the road.
We’ve no place for a garden, but best as we can, I believe we should tend our own.”
There were 60 sign-ups for the SpinTunes #3 online songwriting competition. Only 37 completed Round 1 entries on time. On June 26, SpinTunes announced that 11 contestants were eliminated, leaving only 26 to move onto Round 2. My entry, All Over, placed 22nd, so I more or less squeaked by.
Judges generally liked my song, with standout qualities being a strong keyboard performance, the story, and some judges enjoying the Beatles referencing. On the other side, the drums were thought too quiet, the vocals too loud and not very high quality, and there was some feeling against the Beatles referencing as derivative. I can’t say I’m too surprised at any of this, including the relatively low ranking.
It occurred to me after I’d submitted the song that I’d started SpinTunes 1 with derivation as well, with my Round 1 entry Step Back Swooperman being heavily influenced by John Williams’ Superman film score and also having a first line that directly quoted a well known song. Since it hasn’t stood me well yet, I suspect I’ll avoid that level of referencing in songwriting contests from now on, unless it’s explicitly asked for. Just as in that previous contest, I knew I’d need to make SpinTunes 3′s Round 2 a real departure from Round 1.
The challenge for Round 2: “BREAKING NEWS! – You‘re writing a topical song. The challenge is pretty wide open, but there are some restrictions. Topical is going to be defined as something from a headline in a newspaper no older than 2 weeks from today. You can use your local newspaper or a major publication. You‘re even allowed to use the online versions of major publications. You will be required to include a link to the story that inspired your song, or attach a scan from the newspaper.”
My immediate thought was that there was too much possibility, and no particular news stories coming to mind that I’d want to play with. I started what could have been an extremely long slog researching, only to have the researching, and my initial thought, soon enough lead me to an unexpected idea.
I don’t subscribe to any newspapers. I hardly ever read any newspapers. I don’t watch much news on television or read much on the internet. My first step was simply to visit the New York Times website to browse the headlines. The challenge came out on a Sunday, so there was plenty to look at. Nothing, though, leapt out at me. A few possibilities, but nothing really grabbed me.
I thought about why I don’t keep up much with the news. It’s because I find that most of it is just not relevant for my life or the lives of anyone I know. What is relevant I usually find out about somehow. So what was I going to do, find some big news story that I didn’t really care about and that other contestants might use anyway? Look for some quirky story out there to purposely try to do something novel, keeping my fingers crossed I might find something I actually cared about? I could be looking for a needle in a very big haystack.
Instead, it occurred to me that I should look for an ultra-small, ultra-local story in an ultra-small, ultra-local newspaper. Not simply to find a unique story that other entrants wouldn’t cover, but to find one that exemplified the notion of little things meaning a lot, a story that might be as especially impacting for someone’s life as the vast majority of news stories, especially larger ones, are fundamentally meaningless to most of us. It wouldn’t necessarily even matter how I personally felt about the story — if it could be highly meaningful to someone, that in itself would make for a meaningful song for me for this particular challenge.
The only newspaper I had around was the Northern Dutchess Focus, put out by the Poughkeepsie Journal and delivered for free, weekly on Saturdays, containing a few articles but mostly ads. In the Focus from June 25, the day before the Round 2 challenge was announced, I found a small article I thought might work really well. On this scan of the original page, there’s a tiny article in the lower-right corner about Health Bucks, a program that helps food stamps users save extra money at a couple of farmers markets. There’s a very similar article on the Poughkeepsie Journal website. If you’re curious, there’s a more extensive article about the topic at the TriCorner News website.
So here was this edition of the Focus, distributed just to a few towns in Northern Dutchess County. Here was an article inside that could hardly have taken up less space. Yet it was about something that could potentially make a significant, positive difference to some people, as well as to the area in terms of fostering local farming and business.
Since my whole notion was to show a big benefit to someone’s life, I decided the song would involve a fictional beneficiary of the program. Someone who had fallen on hard times and was now a food stamp user, but someone who was aware of the difference between globalized, factory-farmed foods and local fare which was healthier both physiologically and economically. Someone who lamented that the same system that made ridiculous stories into big news also led to his or her own hard times — and also made local food cost, ironically, more than food grown using all sorts of chemicals and machinery, processed in factories, shipped across highways or even from other countries, sold in giant buildings air conditioned year-round, etc.
I pondered having the character find out about Health Bucks in a free weekly paper just as I did. The character might naturally be thankful because if it had only been publicized in a paid daily publication he or she might never have found out about it. There could have been a nice opportunity to comment about how free papers are all they could afford, and yet that means there’d be little chance they’d pay for anything in the advertisements that make up the bulk of the publication.
If there was going to be a story, though, I thought that it might as well be a newspaper story. Song-as-journalism: with a headline as its title, and the lyrics taking on the familiar combination of newsy prose and attributed quotes. Visually, except for line breaks, it could look just like an article in terms of upper/lowercasing and punctuation, right down to the “down-style” headline.
Were I to use the inverted pyramid and write a proper article, though, song structure would be a bit of a nightmare. It would almost have to be simply an article set to music, more of a recitative than a proper song. Instead, I decided it should be a proper song that was fairly newspaper-article-like.
The “article” — which, to be clear, is my own creation and not an actual published article that I set to music — is written as more of a human interest piece than a news brief, more like what in much magazine or television news, not what we’d typically see in a newspaper article of this size. Rather than opening with the core facts, the stage is set with a fictional subject, Mary Johnson, and her general situation.
A local article would normally say where Johnson was from, and that would need to have an obvious connection to the story. With the North East Community Center running the Health Bucks program based on a donation from Sharon Hospital, and the coupons being accepted at both the Millerton Farmers Market and the Amenia Farmers Market, I felt I needed to economize, even though it meant leaving some relevant parties out of the song. Since the community center runs the program, and since Northeast is the town in which the Village of Millerton is located, I made Johsnon a resident of Northeast and ended up referring by name only to the community center and its Health Bucks program. Apologies to the hospital and the farmers markets!
It might be unusual for someone to talk publicly about using food stamps, so I gave Johnson a quote specifically about how she’s over any shame about it. She’s grateful to have the help but wishes she could afford healthier food for her family.
The chorus is written as a quote, where Johnson makes the core point of the song: the importance of little things even in the face of bigger stories in the world. The quote, and the chorus, ends conspicuously with the attribution, “Johnson said,” making for some newspaper ambience while also stressing that the song is giving voice to someone who generally would be ignored by both the media and society in general.
The song kicks in with a new groove, and the second verse reveals the happy development to Johnson’s story: the introduction of the Health Bucks program. Her hope for healthier options “each day” is now fulfilled “all year round,” amplifying the happy direction the story is taking. A second chorus, though identical in lyric, now takes on a little more optimistic tone, with the Health Bucks program being a little thing that’s actually making a big difference for the Johnson family.
In the bridge (which incidentally sneaks in the challenge title, “breaking news”), Mary talks about some of the larger issues and connections I’d pondered. I realized that an “article” of this length just wasn’t the place to go into a detailed anti-globalization screed, but here she at least hints at those notions. There’s reference to not only large-scale agriculture and food disrtibution but also, obliquely, to the Casey Anthony trial, an actual current “big” story. All of it is posed as wrapped up together in dysfunction.
Mary concludes the bridge by pointing out that, although their home doesn’t have enough room for them to grow their own fresh produce in a garden, she still believes in the more general point about “tending one’s own garden.” This seemed a nice connection between the farm/produce topic of the song and the more metaphoric sense of tending one’s garden relating to a focus on the local in terms of farming, business and news.
As the song develops, Mary gets much more voice. Looking at the first three sections, she has the small quote in the first verse and the long quote of the first chorus. The last three sections are essentially entirely Mary’s, with two repeats of the chorus with the brief attribution, and the bridge being entirely in her voice. The repetition of chorus throughout, and the bridge with no quote attribution, are not at all what we’d find in a newspaper article, but they suggests a sense of escaping the bounds of the article on the written page for Mary to be increasingly heard.
Musically, the song has a feel that I quite like but seems to me not typical of most things I’ve written. Maybe the title led me to think about Sufjan Stevens and his odd, longish titles. Maybe the newspaper conceit led me to think musical theater. Maybe last week I was listening to too much of my Badly Drawn Boy station at Pandora and heard too much of him and the Flaming Lips, whose influences may not be so obvious here, but I feel them. Or maybe I’ve just heard too much 1970′s mellow gold and educational documentary background music in my lifetime.
The verses involve a fairly simple underlying chord progression, though the chords are decorated for a more colorful, uncertain sound. The melody note that ends each verse stanza is one of these more decorative “off-chord” notes, drawing out that sense. The melody shifts a bit in the second verse, with “food all” rising to a higher note than the parallel “children,” echoing the new optimism. The same happens with the word “well” in the final chorus.
The chorus change keys a few times, with a lot of similarly colorful chords and inversions. Where the verses were in E major, the chorus starts in G major, then moves to D major, then at the last minute comes back to E major again. Throughout, the melody is more fluid than the verses, appropriate for Johnson’s extended quote compared to more formal journalistic prose. It’s worth noting that “little things” are the only words in the chorus sung quite so quickly, on “littler” notes, highlighting that crux of the whole song. The second and third choruses have a small change in the D major section of the chord progression, adding some clarity.
The bridge also has a rambling melody, even more appropriate for this mini-rant on globalization. The first three lines are all sung on one breath. It’s as if Johnson can’t get her thoughts out fast enough. The section is in E minor, with much more conventional chords, progressions and harmonies, almost giving the aura of a traditional protest song, though there is some more colorful harmonic tension toward the end. All of this is meant to underscore (literally) the comments about globalization as being systemically fundamental to all in the world that gives rise to the situation in which Mary finds herself.
You can check out the Round 2 songs at SpinTunes, or more permanently at BandCamp, and you can get directly to Program aids food stamp users at Bandcamp — but you can listen and download for free from BandCamp right from the player at the top of this post.
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I work hard on the songs and the site, giving away a lot of stuff for free. If I could make a living by making art, I could make — and give away — even more. That could actually happen if everyone who listened contributed just a little bit. If you’ve enjoyed some of my free music or other content — on the site, through downloads, however — why not take a second and make a contribution to support me in making more? Just click on the Donate button in the right sidebar. Thanks!
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Either way, I really appreciate your support.
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| Play the song here!All Over by Spintown Tunes |
[tab:Lyrics]
Jo Jo was a man
Who had a best laid plan
Such amazing things he could become
Alas, there was a lady
Power mad and so shady
And she kept him down right under her thumb
When she failed to duck
A sanitation truck
Ding-Dong! She was finally gone
Without that witch Loretta
Jo Jo knew he’d be better
Off he went to turn his happy life on
Found a gal named Sal
To boost his own morale
What she’d do for him, there was no end
He headed for the top
It seemed he just could not stop
But not only Jo Jo needed a friend
Stumbled on her cries
He saw it in her eyes
How he’d take but he hardly would give
He saw what he’d become
He kept her under his thumb
He wondered, was he still deserving to live?
To leave her like that
Would just be one more selfish thing
He had no right
But if he stayed ’round
To make it up, that just might bring
Him to the light
From that very day
The two would find a way
To be giving as good as they’d get
Yeah, Sal and good ol’ Jo Jo
Found the way to their mojo
Was to live a life they wouldn’t regret
Even at the end
They still could both depend
On each other to see it all through
The worse as well as better
They forgave even Loretta
And when they were gone, the two of them knew
After participating in its first go-round but being too busy for its second, I got involved with SpinTunes #3, an online songwriting competition where people submit original songs they write to meet challenges handed out by a panel of judges. The challenge for Round 1: If You’re Happy And You Know It Raise The Dead – Write a happy song about death.
Immediately upon seeing this challenge, I smiled. My interest in psychology over the last several years has taught me about the connection between fear of death and dysfunction in life. Also, for the last several months I’ve been reading a lot of Joseph Campbell, in whose work on mythology recurring themes are death as necessary to support life and therefore something that must be embraced in order to really live, and also ego death as the path toward all of that, i.e., both being okay with death and fully living life. So the idea of being happy about, or least very okay with, death is often on my mind.
The challenge arrived on Thursday, June 9, with submission due by the end of the day Sunday, June 19. I was due to be away from Friday through Sunday of both weekends in between, and behind on a bunch of other things. I often do an Appreciative Inquiry to foster the creative process, and it’s even helpful to do it when ideas are flowing, to help develop and focus them. In this situation, though, the time constraints and the familiarity of the topic left me feeling okay about both simply incubating over the weekend and likely moving ahead on Monday without an AI.
With time to think, I started pondering different ways one might be accepting of death. There was simply looking forward wisely to the close of a life well lived, taking comfort in the good that can happen while one is alive. That reminded me of Billy Joel’s song, “Goodnight, My Angel,” which had echoes of the Campbell perspective. A hated person could die, making life easier: “Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz. Even suicide, where clearly one is choosing death as preferable to a very sad life.
Initially on learning of the challenge, I thought about a quiet song, with a heart-beat percussion, and the rest would come in quietly, meditatively, communicating the basic ideas from Campbell, and then all would go out except the heart-beat, showing that death is just life continued, not an ending to fear or regret but a transformation.
As I spent the weekend pondering these other things, though, I realized I had something else on my hands. A story, in which one chorus communicating the “okayness” of death could reflect the different ways death was okay as the story progress — and I always like it when a lyric can take on different meanings as it recurs. The story would be about someone who thought life would be much better after a hated influence dies, but then it would turn out that the hated influence lived on through him doing similar things to others. Feeling guilty, he’d become suicidal. Finally, he’d realize that the only way out was to break the cycle, to transcend his own ego, to get free of the past, and do good things for himself and others. And through this, a life well lived, and being okay with his own death.
Now that all sounds rather lofty, and I suppose it is, but there was another aspect to what I had on my hands after those few days of incubation. Just as those other songs had popped in my mind, as I pondered this challenge, I found myself seemingly inexplicably singing The Beatles’ “Get Back” to myself. Soon enough, I realized that its theme of getting “back to where you once belonged” was relevant. Getting back to your source, before poisoning influences and ego inflation, to a state where you could be one with yourself, with others, and even with death. And after all, this was to be a happy song. So rather than the mystical meditation I was originally pondering, suddenly, I had an upbeat pop-rock story song on my hands.
I obviously ended up using “Get Back” as more than just a thematic inspiration. I like playing with genres, mimicking other things. And here I was having pondered The Beatles and Billy Joel, two of my favorite musical acts, and both of whom are known for their own wide-ranging use of pastiche. When there are countless Beatlesque songs that riff on various of their stylistic tropes, I figured, why not “Get Back”? Thus, not a sequel, but simply an alternative, as if Paul McCartney were to have written the song instead about the new story I now had in mind.
The story of the song is pretty self-explanatory. I sometimes like to go heavy into analysis mode here and pick things apart, but it seems mostly superfluous here. So I’ll just note a few things.
The first few words of “Get Back” kick things off here as well, but things quickly change. Soon enough, it’s clear that Jo Jo and Loretta have been recast for a new story. They’re simply not the same people as in the original song, and a new character is also introduced. A different story, a different song. One of the other song inspirations finds its way in as well, with the “Ding-Dong!” and “witch” references.
Repeating the rhyme of “become” with “under his/her thumb” reinforces the fact that history is repeating, that the witch didn’t really disappear. If Jo Jo can become what he despises, then the implication is that Loretta was just another victim in a chain. Just as Jo Jo comes to see Sal as worth giving to rather than taking from, and himself as worthy of life rather than death, the same goes for Loretta, who they come to see as deserving forgiveness. All are humanized rather than dehumanized as demons unfit to live or tools only to be used.
There is some illumination imagery in both Jo Jo’s wanting to “turn his happy life on” and also in the notion that setting things right could “bring him to the light.” Older notions of a happy life are giving way to newer, more mature ones that can break a vicious cycle. In the end, “when they were gone, the two of them knew” — they somehow still know even after they’re gone, suggesting that their illumination transcends death, that death is further along a continuum with life rather than marking an end.
The line is even more important because, though the song has three choruses to reflect three different ways of being happy about death, there is a fourth way in the song which is the most crucial of all, hiding a bit without its own more obvious chorus to draw it out. It’s the ego death, in which the “I” is gone but life goes on, that allows one for the first time to “finally be free” to connect with others, and even death, without fear. So the line can also be read, when their egos were gone, the two of them now knew something they could put into practice for the rest of their lives, finding transcendence not only in death but in life as well: Heaven on Earth.
Musically, there are a number of motifs from “Get Back,” though my Billy-Preston-inspired solos are far sloppier than his. Still, despite the parallels, it’s once again clearly a different song. The verses and choruses are more involved, with added length and/or less repetition. A bridge is added as well as a third verse, all in the service of telling a more complete story.
There’s also a bit more to the harmonic progression, though it doesn’t take much when “Get Back” was essentially a two-chord song (I and IV) except for the brief use of a third chord (VII) in the “crash-crash” moments. I used that third chord to make more thorough three-chord progressions, I-IV-VII-I in the verses and I-VII-IV-I for a little variety in the chorus. A few extra chords are brought in for the “crash-crash” and the bridge.
The chorus progression is a very common one, maybe best known to many listeners from another Beatles song, “Hey Jude” and its “Na-na” coda. With that song also being very life affirming, I took the opportunity to make an additional reference by bringing in the symphonic horns from the “Na-na” section for the final chorus repeats.
Before I seized on the “Hey Jude” reference, the song was in the key of A, just like “Get, Back.” With “Hey Jude” being in F, I decided to split the difference and move the song to G, which was just as well since the high notes would be a bit easier on my voice. A side effect of this key change happens at the very end of the bridge. Here, just as in “Get Back,” a few electric piano chords quiet things down, followed by a signature Ringo Starr drum fill. In “Get Back,” those chords were built on D, which was the IV for the key of A. Here, those chords are the V for the song. Had I kept the song in A, they would have been on E. Because I transposed to G, here they were back on D just like in “Get Back.”
The last musical element I’ll mention is the final fade. In my SpinTunes 1 Round 3 entry Will It, I talked about how the Pet Shop Boys led me to only use final fades when I thought there was a really good thematic reason. In that song, emotional pain had “just begun” at the end of the song, so the fade suggested its continuation. In my Songwriting Cycle 1 contribution Do It (Duet), the characters had just found a new groove that felt like it would go on and on. Likewise here, with the notions of transcendence and a continuum of life to death, a final fade seemed appropriate.
You can check out the Round 1 songs at SpinTunes, or more permanently at BandCamp, and you can get directly to All Over at Bandcamp — but you can listen and download for free from BandCamp right from the player at the top of this post.
[tab:Donate]
I work hard on the songs and the site, giving away a lot of stuff for free. If I could make a living by making art, I could make — and give away — even more. That could actually happen if everyone who listened contributed just a little bit. If you’ve enjoyed some of my free music or other content — on the site, through downloads, however — why not take a second and make a contribution to support me in making more? Just click on the Donate button in the right sidebar. Thanks!
If you’d rather buy some music, that’s great, too! Visit the Shop.
Either way, I really appreciate your support.
[tab:END]
There are four rounds, each with a new challenge. I’m just now submitting my entry for Round 1. We’ll see what happens.
Though there are judges, there is also a popular vote that can affect who goes onto future rounds, but I’m not going to put in quite as much effort as I did last year in trying to get people to go vote for me. Each song will get its own post just like all the songs here do, and I’ll also mention each new entry through social network status updates, and that’s about it. I hope you’ll check out the entries in each round and vote for the ones you like best — and I hope one of those will be whatever I’ve contributed!
Over a year ago, I learned about a documentary film that was in the works, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth. The film seeks to help people understand how growth is unsustainable. Since I wrote a masters thesis with the same goal, I was really interested in the project and touched base with producer/director/writer Dave Gardner.
Talking with Dave, I offered to contribute some music to the project. It turned out I wasn’t the only musician who ended up making that suggestion. Dave decided to release a special soundtrack album of music inspired by or inspiring the film, including songs relevant to sustainability, consumption, sufficiency, simplicity, overpopulation or urban growth. The album would celebrate Earth Day while also helping raise funds for the production of the film.
Turns out I didn’t have all that many songs that directly expressed these themes. Some I’d written over the years were somewhat relevant, some less so, and most lacked decent recordings. I found myself without enough time to write new songs or even rerecord. Luckily, the song of mine that fit the best was also the one with the best recording: Aggie and Timmy. The song was very much about “how much was enough,” fitting in nicely with the notions of consumption and sufficiency.
I was actually a little concerned about submitting the song, though. Even with its theme, it wasn’t very directly “ecologically” oriented. It was also “kids music,” and I wasn’t sure how well that would go with what Dave had in mind for the album. Finally, it was one of two songs on Everyone's Invited that had technical problems while recording vocals. I’ve always regretted going ahead with those lower audio quality vocal tracks rather than rerecording them. Now here was a chance to contribute to something, and the one song with the best lyrical fit and a decent enough recording itself was compromised in its sound quality. But Dave liked it and included it along with another song as one of two bonus tracks especially for kids.
So now I’ve got a song on an album along with a bunch of interesting and talented musicians, including the iconic folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. Go figure.
Learn more about the GrowthBusters Earth Day 2011 Soundtrack. Remember that proceeds will help fund the film’s completion, and the album is available only for a limited time and in limited quantities. Buy it at the GrowthBusters Store.
Souvenir download card features original album artwork and includes a code redeemable at www.digstation.com/redeem for a complete album download in MP3 format. Bonus: Includes PDF files of the complete cover art, album artwork and liner notes. Note: Not redeemable in Canada.
Also includes immediate download of 12-track album in your choice of 320k MP3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire. Keep whatever you like for yourself, or give the Digital Download Card away as a gift!
Small in size and price. Big in musical enjoyment. Hurry, though! This special offer is good only while supplies last, and quantities are limited. Buy Download Cards at Bandcamp!
Souvenir download card features original album artwork and includes a code redeemable at www.digstation.com/redeem for a complete album download in MP3 format. Bonus: Includes PDF files of the complete cover art, album artwork and liner notes. Note: Not redeemable in Canada.
Also includes immediate download of 12-track album in your choice of 320k MP3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire. Keep the immediate download for yourself, and give the Digital Download Card away as a gift — perfect for the holiday season!
Small in size and price, it’s great as stocking stuffer. Big in musical enjoyment, it’s great as a gift no matter what.
Hurry, though! This special offer is good only through December 31, and quantities are limited. Buy Download Cards at Bandcamp!
Update January 4, 2011: The $1.99 album download offer is over, you can now get 2 downloads of the album for just $4.99, while supplies last! Learn more about this special offer.
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