I do hope everyone’s hangovers have subsided and that we’re all a little nicer to each other this year. If you don’t feel like being nicer, it’s ok– there’s plenty of nice people in the world.

Will be posting my first song of the #song365 project this afternoon… as soon as my lovely wife is awake, I’ll be making noisy vocals.

Songs in 20 words or less

In 2004, I played around with choosing twenty words at random, aiming to find interesting word-pairs that were visual or lent to a lyric perhaps. I didn’t write too many– a few dozen or so. I labeled them -20:1, -20:2, -20:3, and so forth. -20:9 was ambiguous, but I thought it might make for a lyric.

For -20:9, I sat at the piano and cycled broken chords of B major/B minor to Bb major/Bb minor. Constructing a scale based solely on those chords, I found some interesting progression possibilities. When you come across an altered scale like this, which has Major/minor possibilities for the same tonic, you can chuck diatonic theory out the window and let your ear be your guide.

I’ve daydreamed for years about a project to explore foreign tonalities within a restricted word count and this’ll be chance.

20 Words is perfect

Think of your favorite chorus or the verse you can’t get out of your head and you might be surprised to find that you’re not singing more than twenty words at a time. Let’s list a few choruses:

Come together… right now… over me    — John Lennon

Why don’t we do it in the road
No one will be watching us– Paul McCartney

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads   — John Denver

Pants on the Ground
Pants on the Ground
Lookin’ like a fool
With your pants on the Ground   — General Larry Platt

Some phrases just want to sing. Some names just want to sing.

Working with a constraint like this is surprisingly liberating. There’s the option to write as if for a jingle or for a commercial– something for the local hardware store. The blues form lends itself naturally to twenty words. Taking a simple phrase and improvising on it like an Eastern chant. The gospel tune Amen. These are obvious song forms that come to mind. Twenty words could even be enough for a punk song’s chorus/verse/chorus.

Twenty words forces care to make the music interesting. In 2006, I started paraphrasing news clips and getting unrelated articles to rhyme with each other– I thought it’d be fun to make a 60 minute song like that, but, it’d be hard to sustain interest in the music with that length. The verbose melody or rap would need some variety and ventilation.  If anyone knows of someone that has done this, please notify me– I’m interested to hear it.

Twenty words is a perfect portion for that casual browsing of the web.

One to three year pipeline

The way bands/artists write a couple dozen songs, weed them down to a perfect number of ten, organize and record an album with those tunes, take the album to the streets on tour with a team of supporters… that’s all great and exhausting and necessary depending on the project, but to release ten songs in a year or longer period is a little depressing.

Duke Ellington wrote Mood Indigo in 15 minutes. I imagine, he only would have needed a day to write/arrange/record an album of ten similarly beautiful tunes. I’m positive that the Duke could have put out 3,650 thousand quality tunes a year. Maybe he did and we just haven’t found all the recordings. But he left us with a trove of well over a 1,000 works.

You can’t force the magic, but when you show up it happens.

Anyway, enough of my babble.

I was working on the drums for today’s song for a couple hours… didn’t save the project… application crashed… give it a break for a couple hours and come back to start again. Ah, the joy of lost data.