Lyrics

A nice night out with the friends. Apparently they din know it was my bday but just as well we had something to celebrate. Well I am now as old as Franz Schubert was when he died. (I'm also 10 years older than Evariste Galois who managed to scribble all his algebra theories on a piece of paper before he died in a duel.) Had a great time.

And the great thing too about Facebook is that it tells the whole world about your birthday and you get ppl who you thought had long forgotten about you popping up to say hi. That's great too.

Now I had written a few melodies last year, no lyrics. Couldn't figure out what to do with them. Maybe I will in the end try my hand at writing the lyrics myself. It just so happened that I had had a few mugs of beer earlier that night and this time when I sat down to think about what to write it became a little clearer than before.

There was 1 song that I had previously decided was going to be about a guy breaking up and listing down the reasons why the relationship has to end. I came up with a few more lines, although I wonder if "You don't have to make it up to me / Tell your point of view of things to me / Just get out of my face before I count to three" sounds a little harsh.

There's another song, kind of frantic, and the only thing I've come across that made me really frantic was last minute studying. Guess it will be a "let's bitch about the education system" song. There are lots of syllables on each line so putting the words in should be fairly easy. "It's a little hard to see how learning all this stuff will help me get ahead in life / I got ninety marks and it's not good enough because the other guy has gotten ninety-five".

Another one, I decided, will be about a guy knowing he's about to fall in love and thinking out loud about his hopes and fears.

Another one was going to be loosely about a song about vampires, but I think I will put a slight variation on the main theme. Sometimes he's a vampire because when he's with people he makes them a bit more depressed. Other times he's a vampire because he's in an unhappy relationship and it's taking a toll on the girlfriend. Or he could be a sadistic army drill sergeant who whacks his trainees left right centre upside down but gets depressed because he's not enjoying it as much as he thinks he should.

Music can convey emotion, that's true. But words are something more tangible and solid than those abstract emotions. I think one of the hardest things is you get a piece of music and then taking that first step of imagining a situation that will suit the music. The other way around, where you have words first, and then the lyrics I haven't even tried, although apparently that was the way Burt Bacharach wrote "Alfie".

I read a tip about writing lyrics: especially pop music, you want them to sound like something that will come up in casual conversation. Not everybody subscribes to this of course. Some want their words to end up sounding like poetry, but I never did understand poetry, so I think I will say things very direct, in plain English. Because I won't be able to dress my words up in pretty language, I need to think of interesting content to put in there.

Now ppl who know stuff about Chinese culture (and a few who don't - like me) know that Li Bai is THE MAN. Like he can't write stuff when he's sober. Maybe other people are like him too. (Although they are not THE MAN.)

Random thought of the day: A very likely result of seeing the light for the first time is that you go blind.