Lately my songwriting activity has been like that picture of Keanu sitting on the park bench. Now I’ve written a new song, and it’s more like that kitten in the Key and Peele movie. Or something like that; the point is I’m putting slightly more effort into songwriting than I am into thinking up similes.
Anyone ever notice how close the word “into” is to “intp”? It’s almost like you could typo one for the other. Just me?
Anyway, as usual the driving force behind getting me out of my funk and writing again — ironically, funk — is the SpinTunes competition. It’s free, it’s simple, you get a whole week to write each song, and the community is very interactive and supportive. Some challenges can be super weird, like writing a whole song in which all the words start with the same 7 letters, or changing time signatures. But they always turn out to be fun, occasionally trying to see how far you can stretch the literal meaning of the challenge.
(Incidentally, the fearless leader of SpinTunes, Travis Langworthy, has been running this thing for years. He’s done it for free, and he’s not even a songwriter! He just wants more music to exist in the world, to make it a better place. He’s also stepping down as poobah and handing over the reins to new management. As a thank you, some people have come up with the most awesome going away present: special glasses that allow him to see in color. We’re trying to scrape together a few hundred dollars for the glasses, and if you have any lying around not going toward a good cause, well here’s one for you. Please visit the page that Dave Leigh posted to explain the whole thing.)
This time around the challenge was pretty narrow thematically but left the entire universe up for grabs as concern the technicals: “Write a song from the point of view of someone who just won or lost an election. It could be a recent election, one from the past, or even a fictional one. It doesn’t even have to be political.” Bam, easy peasy. 1st person narrative, which when done well means emotion, becoming even more intimate when the narrator addresses a 2nd person.
I didn’t actually go all in on the personal connection, writing in the form of an election victor giving an acceptance speech. Still, my “2nd person” morphed from the crowd (less intimate) to “especially” a specific person. So somewhere in between I guess. In the process, the narrator betrays more about himself than would have been appropriate during his campaign, and reveals he’s caught up in anxiety from… I’m going to say adolescence? Maybe he was bullied and now means to abuse his power to get back at people? He’s definitely making up for something, but the listener can feel free to fill in the blanks.
This song is tagged NSFW, so if you have applied the “Safe for Work” badge, you’ll have to decide whether or not you agree never to hold anything you hear against me. I’ve consulted with my cat, and she agrees this is a legally binding dialog box.
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