Monday, April 29, 2013

When I was a fool

I'm not going to lie to you, the idea behind which I conceived and launched Sick Tartar was for it to be the promotion, meta-commentary and monetization (the foulest word in any language) hub for the Songs of Days, but whoa, I'm really bad at that.  And seriously, do I have a product?  One of three critical legs of the Kickstarter stool* is that by buying in, you will make this thing happen, and if you don't, you know, maybe it won't.  And if you have an investment in whatever it is happening, then you feel responsible if you don't support it and it doesn't happen.  I've written almost 4,000 lyrics in virtual obscurity, I have a backlog of well over 2,000 songs to post.  I would be pressed to construct a compelling narrative that anything short of death or disaster would compel me to abandon it, and anyways,  if I did give up on the project and just kept posting the rest of what I had, nobody would know for 6 years.  This is a difficult situation to build tension around.

I guess that's not the real reason but anyway, I'm tired of thinking about what things aren't or why I don't.  While I continue to withhold my hilarious parody Sick Tartar campaign complete with bizarre non-pitch video and goals from the few hundred I'd need to finally get the fabulous home studio of tomorrow mark two set up all the way up to the final stretch goal of $100 billion that will render me the richest person on earth by a comfortable margin, I feel like the one component of the blog I can get behind is the meta-commentary.  Which is what this is.

To be able to write effective songs in the fashion of traditional classics, things like Scarborough Fair, Pretty Polly or When I Was In My Prime, is an aspiration as dear to my heart as to be able to write a pop lyric with the ear-worm hook of a One Hit Wonder.  While my efforts at the latter tend to be purely satirical I have taken regular stabs at the former that are embarrassingly earnest.  A bad wannabe catchy pop lyric merely falls flat but a fabricated "traditional" effort adds a mawkish buffoonery of ersatz old-timey-ness.  Still if I'm going to cringe and wince every time the tone of a song of the day is pure tin clank I could never go on.  I am reminded of the line (I think from an old edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide) that noted Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" as something to the effect of being their first blues rework that didn't sound like a "bizarre parody".

This being said, an interesting thing that's happening as I post songs these days is that I hardly remember writing any of them.  The first series of 1,001 songs wasn't like this.  I'd held onto the finished series for over 5 years before I started posting it online.  I'd done other things with the songs, some versions, some performance, and I'd picked the books up and read selections of them many times.  I'd picked my favorites.  These days though I'm looking at songs I've generally looked at once (with a few exceptions) since I wrote them, the day I transcribed them into an electronic text document.  Sometimes they stand out in that process but I tend to be pushing to transcribe things as quickly as I can.  Most of what I'm posting was transcribed something like a year ago.  It's fun, meeting these songs for the first time (well, when I like them it's fun, not as much otherwise although some things I hate so much that it's funny).

In any event, it is only to observe that I think that Narcissus may be my first pseudo-traditional effort that I actually like.  I don't know that it's quite a classic, but I like it.

*I forgot at the time to list what the other 2 legs of this theoretical "stool" are and have since forgotten.  Someday I will perhaps reconstruct this thought and enlighten everyone.

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