Instead of posting a list of particular songs, I'd rather describe a bit of how this happens for me and what happens as a result.

I'm the main song-finder for our band. Makes sense, since I'm also the main lead singer. Our band, as most of you know, is primarily a songleading band as opposed to a perfromance band. One place we do that is weekly, in church, in a unique kind of service only a pair of Mudcatters could come up with!

I find our songs by hearing them. I range all over the internet, airwaves, and recorded world listening my way through everything I can. And often, say maybe several times in a week (in weeks when I am devoting time to this), there will be a song that grabs me in the first bar, carries me onto a cloud in the first verse, and blows me away totally by the end of the first refrain. By the middle of the song I know how our band will do it.

By the end, I know we will learn it and do it very soon. And I know the tune, never to forget it. Don't need no stinkin' dots. At most, to recall it, I will eventually play a line or two of the chords, and it's all right there, in my own version of it complete with variations. Years have sometimes passed between hearing it and playing it (myself, on autoharp) again. I thank God regularly for this amazing tune-memory I'm blessed to have.

So-- after being blown away, I keep listening to the song (or group of songs for that week), for a few days, singing along, doing dishes, driving.... playfully, experimenting with it. By then, it's mine, all mine. It's completely in my head, every instruemntal and vocal nuance, in layers of what I heard originally and what I now hear our band doing. Sometimes there are three or four songs in my head all playing sequentially or at once, overlapping, echoing. Not a good thing! It's maddening, and I know then that I have overworked my mind. And it wakes me up!

Next, I stop listening and let it rest for a few days. In that time I usually can't tolerate hearing any music at all, and poor Hardi suffers when I tell him to please, stop practicing his fiddle where I can hear it!!! For those few days, I will not be able to recall the tune of the song(s) "in process" at all, and if I listen to the song(s) again during that time, it will hurt somehow, and mess up the storage process. I've learned it's like bread-- the song needs calm and warm quiet to rise.

Then it's on to arranging, once it comes back into recallable memory. By now the tune may have morphed (and that "new" tune will also be recallable forever). The style may also have morphed, into a style that will better fit our band and our use of the song. I may be hearing instruments by this time, too-- side parts, a rhythm section, whatever. Not from the original-- it's making itself up.

THAT arrangement is what I "hear" in my mental jukebox as I start finding the right key and chords. The lyrics have been found or transcribed by this time (sometimes in the first day's hearing). At this stage, tho, I'm editing, adapting, sensing out the message and extending it for enough verses or to fill in the gaps of the message a bit, or maybe changing the emphasis to something closer to our band's mission. Not all of our music or performance is gospel or church, but there is a basic underlying mission of positivity and I may use my editing skills to punch that up. (I don't change the basic thrust of the song, even if it's a real pretty one. If it doesn't fit our mission, I will usually go ahead and arrange it just to get it out of my system, but we won't do it unless I later see a way to make it work for us without crapping all over the author's creation.)

Once the arranging is done it's time to try the piece with the band. Sometimes I have mis-estimated either our capabilities, the key, or the right style for us to use. Those go back in the binder to consider at another time.

One like that-- for "later"-- is Isaac Freeman's astounding song, "Beautiful Stars." I've worked on it, off and on, for years, but its time for us has not yet come. By now I know it is surely an offertory/solo piece for me, not a singalong song, but even knowing that took awhile.

A recent one that took only a few days to go from hearing it to performing it was a song Allison Krause sings, "A Living Prayer," by Union Station member Roy Block.   It went so well and was so much MY song that it went into the set list for something we had agreed to do months previously. The set list had been dutifully and laboriously planned, rehearsed, etc. I threw that whole setlist out when I did that song in church the night before the gig-- it went so well it became the centerpiece fo an entirely different set list for the gig. A band member came to me after the church perfomance and suggested the same setlist-change. When we did it at the gig-- the people hearing it..... there were tears.

When the people are as moved as I was (at least the second time we do the song, since it improves each time we do it), it confirms for me that whether this process works this way for anyone else, it is MY process and it works for me, and for our band. Until I dioscover something even better.

And once we have done the song, or once I am done fooling around with the arrangement, it no longer plays in my head incessantly, and I can move on to evaluate more new material.

~Susan