Kaiden Fox: I'm pretty sure the Lost Pianist is J. Alfred Prufrock. He's just returned from walking along the shoreline, imagining how nice it would be in summer when he can wear flannel jammies and peaches are in season. Songs of Susannah: You know? Maybe he is. Kaiden Fox: @Songs of Susannah If that is the case, then the "you" in "let us go then, you and I" would be his mom. We carry a simulation of our parents within us, because it's impossible for a species as neotenic as humanity to exist without them and remain sane. Songs of Susannah: @Kaiden Fox Now I'm thinking about writing a song about J. Alfred Prufrock missing his mother. It's an interesting interpretation, perhaps I'll read the poem and see what other inspiration it might yield. I already have a verse and a half written in my head.Pretty much the entire song came to me when I sat down at the piano a few minutes after this conversation, although I took a lot of notes afterwards, planning to write a lot of verses and choose the best ones. I marked the places where I thought that I needed to add some additional verses, and came back to finish it five days later, only to find that the change of a single word was all that it needed. I thought that I was pretty far from finishing the lyrics, when I changed the word, "Shore," to, "causeway," and then suddenly, I realized that the lacunae that I saw in the lyrics could easily be closed up with just that one change. For anyone interested, here are the notes I took for the additional verses that I didn't write. Perhaps they will find their way into another song of mine in the future. They were poor, they got evicted a lot and ended up staying in cheap hotels, but she always dreamed of Michaelangeo and other fine art that they would never be within their socio-economic situation to ever see in person. She might have been a waitress in a diner (a sawdust restaurant with oyster-shells), and she wasn't actually a smoker herself, but she died because of the secondhand smoke that she encountered absolutely everywhere. Pressing on the outside of the window panes, and on the insides of the window panes and curling up to sleep at night like a cat or dog. A faithful companion. He used to want a yellow dog, but only yellow smoke curled up to sleep at the foot of his bed each night. She dreamed of Michaelangelo, While coffee soons and yellow smoke Pressed at every window. Yellow curling smoke pressed up against the window panes, the footman of the eternity Cheap hotel to cheap motel, With dreams of Michaelangeo The yellow smoke that curled up to sleep like a cat at night had taken her away from me. He is telling his mother about his role in a school play, Hamlet, then years later he realizes that the role he was cast, as Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, was really apropos to his life as an adult. The yellow smoke is tobacco smoke, on the insides and outsides of window panes, curling up at night like a cat or dog, turning circles to make itself comfortable. He remembers his mother's eyes, and her arms, and how she used to wear a shawl when she was cold, and how her arms looked at different times. "Indeed there will be time." "But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed," it's what a child does when they don't get their way; it's also what you do when your mother is dying. "They sing each to each, but they do not sing to me." It's been so long since there was anyone to sing to me.
Noah: I believe Nirvana's "Drain You" just might be the most perfectly written song. Top 500 for sure. Susannah: I accept the challenge. .... I will analyze Drain You and write something inspired by it. We'll see how I do.The lyrics are pretty dark. They're about living with PTSD, specifically, triggers and night terrors/nightmares. In writing the lyrics, I thought of the songs, "My Skin," by Natalie Merchant, and, "Paths of Desire," by October Project. My Skin: "Your face-saving promises, whispered like prayers, I don't need them. I need...." And Paths of Desire: "In your eyes, all of the promises, all the lies. Will you keep all of the promises in your eyes?" When the first lines came together, I just knew what the song was about, and I drew from my own past trauma and created the lyrics. For the bridge, I drew on a quote of mine: "I can't trust what you say any more than I can trust next week's weather forecast. Maybe it's true, and maybe it isn't. I'll find out later." (Using the Farmer's Almanac is a reference to the Nirvana song, "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle.") The song also borrows ideas from another song that I wrote in 2016, called, "Where's the Door?" The speaker in Looking For a Way isn't still in that situation, though; they are just trapped in their past trauma and keep reliving it in nightmares, unable to find the way out. When I wrote my melody, based on the chord progression from Drain You, the lyrics did came along with it. I wanted to make sure that the notes and the note values were different from Drain You, yet, that it sounded like something that Kurt Cobain might have written. I began by playing Drain You by ear on the piano, accompanied by simple arpeggios. I quickly figured out the melody and chords, so I studied that for a while. I knew that I would be using the same chord progression, but I needed to analyze the melody so that I could write something totally unique, yet taking something from Drain You and making it my own. The first thing I looked at was the melody itself. It struck me that he repeats the same musical phrase 4 times in a row for the verses, and then another musical phrase 4 times in a row for the chorus. This is using, "Impact from simplicity," in a major way (not something you'd expect, with all the instrumentation). Usually, this gets monotonous, so most composers will have perhaps the 1st and 3rd line identical, but the 2nd and 4th line are usually entirely unique. They might be retrograde or inverted versions of the 1st line, but they won't sound the same. One trick to get around this is to change the instrumentation from line to line, though I usually do this between verses, not across a verse. Of course, lyrics help shake that up, too. An orchestral composer will bring different instruments to the fore and then have them go silent while another instrument plays the same melody. That's what Kurt Cobain is doing with the arrangement on Nevermind. Looking for a Way uses the chords from Drain You, which also uses accidentals at the end of each musical phrase, in the same way that I've often used them in my own original music. I wonder if this is common in grunge music, or in Nirvana's songs in particular. Regardless, I immediately recognized it and knew that I'd incorporate it into my new song. (An accidental is a sharp/flat/natural that isn't indicated in the key signature of the piece.) In playing Drain You as a simple piano piece, I find that (as a piano melody accompanied by accented arpeggios) it's something that I could've written. That really surprised me more than anything else.