Thought for the Day (Sept 29)

Subject: Thought for the Day (Sept 29)
From: Peter T.
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 09:21 AM

David Olney (Nashville songwriter, of "Jersualem Tomorrow" and "1917" fame):

Songwriting is not sitting down to write a heavy song. It is like paleontology. You run across this bone sticking up out of the ground, and you try and pull it up and out without breaking it."

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 29)
From: MMario
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 09:38 AM

I like that image. I've always thought of it as akin to watching an egg hatch, or a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 29)
From: Art Thieme
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 09:58 PM

Writing a song is like eating a butterfly. It's fun to feel the powdery wings beating against the inside of your mouth until, at last, they quit and you've got to spit out the mushy little dead thing !!

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 29)
From: Art Thieme
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 10:09 PM

No, writing a song is being so hungry that you order a 4-inch thick corned beef on rye and then realize, too late, that it wasn't that after all.---It was a venus fly trap on wheat bread and the damn thing is eating your tongue and you can't call for help no matter how hard you try.

Art

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 29)
From: sophocleese
Date: 29 Sep 99 - 11:01 PM

I leave my recorder lying around and a couple of times now there's been a tune hiding inside it when I pick it up. They're the best ones.

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 29)
From: bseed(charleskratz)
Date: 30 Sep 99 - 02:00 AM

I like the paleontological analogy: There is rarely anything new in good songs, just old emotions described in a new way. It also implies the need for care and patience--like the bones of a tiny dinosaur, the images and idioms that make a good song are fragile--a forced rhyme or inappropriate diction can mess up an otherwise terrific song: I love Townes van Zant's "Pancho and Lefty," but I am jolted by two word choices in one verse:

The day they laid poor Pancho low,
Lefty split for Ohio;
Where he got the bread to go,
There ain't nobody knows.

Pancho Villa was killed in about 1916, and if Lefty were his betrayer, he'd have been "growin' old" in the thirties or forties, maybe the fifties. "Split" for left suddenly and "bread" for money were jazz musician slang maybe in the sixties, and got picked up by hippies in the late sixties and early seventies. Van Zant clearly places the story teller earlier, so the diction strikes me as anachronistic.

This is a very minor point, and only struck me after I had heard the song enough times to have memorized the words without consciously trying to do so, and the song survives the flub quite well, thank you, thanks to the other five verses which are uniformly great. But a similar kind of thing could have the effect of a vapor trail in a western movie.

So finding just the right pieces of emotions and images for a song requires a very careful pick hand and a brush, not a back hoe.

--seed

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 29)
From: Art Thieme
Date: 01 Oct 99 - 12:47 AM

The problem is that my diction keeps falling out of my pants. Is there a song there, or what??!

Art

Subject: RE: Thought for the Day (Sept 29)
From: catspaw49
Date: 01 Oct 99 - 12:56 AM

Its a common problem Art. Depth perception is very poor with only one eye.

Spaw