Reprogramming Directive

Some girls take courses at all the best schools in France
Riding their horses and learning their modern dance.
They’re clever and cultured and worldly wise.
But you see the world through a child’s wide eyes.
Their dreams are grand ones, you want what’s just in reach.
Some girls you learn from, some you teach.

—“Some Girls” from “Once On This Island”

Some girls grow up fighting about things like:

• Their choice of boyfriends
• The way the dress
• Maybe they get bad grades in school / didn’t get into the right school
• Drug or other alcohol related problems
• Going out/partying too much/too late
• Getting into trouble with the law
• Cheating on significant others / backstabbing friends

I have fights which are work/career related. Not “I’ve decided to become a stripper” or “I can’t be bothered and want to work at fast food counters” type fights. Just “I know what I’m doing right now is not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life because as crazy as it may seem to the rest of the world I really do want to write Broadway musicals so I would really like to get some reasonable sort of work/life balance and more time to myself so I can work on this” fights.

I like to think – and hope that I am not alone in thinking – that I am a reasonably mature, stable, high-achieving, independent, focused young woman who knows what she wants but doesn’t foolishly chase after it without triply thinking things through and several contingency plans. I’m well aware of the sheer virtual impossibility of this dream; and thus the proportionally greater effort that needs to be applied to actually get anywhere with it.

Unfortunately, I still have the same five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes as everyone else. On any given day, work and work related activities (including work done before, during and after the commute to/from work) consume 840 minutes; other activities necessary for survival (e.g. sleep, eat, personal hygiene) take up 600 minutes; leaving me with a scant – let’s see now – oh, ZERO minutes left over to do anything.

The insightful reader will probably point out that I’ve not specifically mention weekends at the moment. Kudos to you, I’m just going to say that I’ve not really had a full weekend off without doing any work since I’ve been back from New York. Not to mention also teaching piano on the weekends, dealing with massive issues with an apartment and somehow trying to fit some sort of social life in. The insightful reader might also point out that I obviously do not want this bad enough if I am still trying to fit a social life in. To you, I’m going to say two things:

1. We need rest and relaxation to produce anything worthwhile. No wonder I can’t write anything good – not only am I really new at this, I’m also sleep deprived and stressed.
2. If you thought that was an excuse, try this instead – I refuse to believe that in this day and age, we have to choose an extreme of one or the other. Yes, I am Gen Y and frankly, I don’t think it is so unreasonable of me to want a career that I love and that I am passionate about which still leaves me with ample non-work time for a social life.

Should I choose the smoothest course, Steady as a beating drum? Is all my dreaming at an end? Or do you still wait for me Dreamgiver? Just around the river bend.

Anyway. Somehow whenever the discussion about me taking my current job part time so I have time to pursue what I really want to do with my life comes up, I inevitably come across two viewpoints:

1. “THAT’S SO AWESOME YOU SHOULD TOTALLY GO FOR IT!!!” (thanks all who fall into this camp…much morale support needed and appreciated)
2. “…” – such silences can be split between
   • Those who think I’m an idiot for even considering it because how could you possibly contemplate a deviation from the tightly structured career path at a Big Four Accounting Firm (with all capital letters included) and that I must be lazy; and
   • those who think it means I’m not serious about and/or committed to whatever it is I am taking part time.

The former group of detractors normally come from the point of view where in their mind it is incomprehensible to take any sort of reduction in monetary benefits (i.e. salary) to gain in other benefits (i.e. work/life balance, time to pursue your life’s passion). This attitude is also welded to the concept of “sacrifice now, enjoy later” and the need to “secure the future”. A few problems I have with this argument are:

• Monetary benefits are all well and good, but as a senior manager I admire once said to me, “past a certain dollar value, it doesn’t matter how much more they pay me, it doesn’t make up for the extra time at work”. Of course, I’ve also spoken with partners who have said the exact opposite (“it’s certainly worth it, I get paid a lot”) but I question how in tune that is with my own personal values and the way I want to live my life.
• I appreciate the need to plan for the long-term but really, when is enough enough? Past a certain point, the dollar value earned just doesn’t give the same incremental gain to happiness or fulfillment. And it’s not like I’ll be able to take any of it with me anyway.
• This is all based on the premise of living for a very long time. Not that I am trying to jinx or ill wish anything, but we can make all the plans we want but we really have no idea what will happen tomorrow. There is No Day But Today. I don’t want to be forever working and waiting until that far off “someday” when I have enough money/security/other such and such to start pursuing my dreams. I don’t want to look back and have massive regrets that I’ve wasted my life.
• I don’t think just because I want to do something part time means I can’t be serious about what I choose to do in the time I’ve allocated to that part of my life or that I’m not committed. Although there is a positive correlation between time invested and seriousness/commitment to the task, it’s not necessarily causal; strategic focus, discipline, efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility are better measures.

Sometimes I think I’m stuck living in the future so much that I don’t know how to enjoy the present anymore. I feel physically and mentally drained and utterly exhausted every moment of every day. I dread every morning because I know I’ve got a massive stack of things left undone that I’ve already pushed back and need to be done because I can’t push them back any longer. I’m feeling guilty sitting here and writing this instead of working, because I had originally planned on doing work tonight but I couldn’t bring myself to. Just like how I was meant to work last Sunday but couldn’t force myself past the massive headache and then subsequently felt deeply guilty for not working.

Most of all, I wish I didn’t care as much about not letting other people down. I wish I could just let go of it all and not feel a thing. I wish I could bring myself to go on and buy a plane ticket right now and just…leave…

In a cruel twist of irony, I get this in my inbox today from Velocity Rewards, telling me about the great V Australia sales fares from Sydney to LA.

The past few months have really been a whirlwind for me. Not long after I was done with my audit busy season, I found out I was going to the Times Square New York office for a short ten week secondment – something that had been on my goals at Ernst & Young ever since I started as a trainee just over six years ago. I’ve lived in New York before as an exchange student and I loved it; and now having lived there for ten weeks as a working professional, I love it even more. Not because of the work, but because of how absolutely amazing the city is.

Coming back to Sydney after spending months is New York is always such a bittersweet thing for me. It’s so hard for me to describe the dichotomy of the person I become when I’m there and the person I am away from it all. Life in New York just seems more vivid and more real; sometimes I drift through the days here in a grey haze and nothing registers. Even with the ridiculous working hours (ridiculous because they really aren’t necessary), when I leave work at 10 or 11 PM, it still feels so early because your evening plans start at midnight. Leaving work at 6:30 PM in Sydney – early as that is – still feels incredibly late. It’s dark, everything is closed and I’ve got a horridly long commute home. Most of my waking hours – except for a few cherished moments on the weekends and some times after dinner during the week – kind of feel like this intellectually interesting puzzle which is both surreal and meaningless.

Anyway. The reason things have been so quiet here (apart from the usual refrain of work, etc) is I’ve been planning a trip to NYC (surprise, surprise) to study at Tisch over the summer (northern hemisphere summer). I’ve wanted this so badly for so long – pretty much ever since I found out more courses like the Musical Theatre Writing Workshop focusing on the three different components of musical theatre writing are offered over the summer session. While EY is reasonably accommodating as far as large employers go, the full two year Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at Tisch has never been a realistic option.

Summer school, however, was totally within reach, after all the scrimping and saving, and begging to get time off work. And as soon as I knew I could afford it, I spent – goodness only knows how many – hours talking to managers and partners and clients, rearranging my portfolio and the timing of my jobs so it could all happen. My time off has been booked in for months and months in advance. All the paperwork had been done. While I was in NYC for work, I’d done my homework and gotten internships at theatre companies lined up.

Originally I had enrolled in three courses – plus internship time – which was probably a little too ambitious to begin with (classes from 1 through 7 PM, Monday to Thursday for four weeks, plus additional classwork and other stuff on top? Bring it on! Yeah…I never learn). So when I got the first email, I actually breathed a little sigh of relief:

Cancelled - Crafts of Musical Theatre: Bookwriting

Just over a week ago, after finalising all my visa paperwork and getting the visa appointment scheduled, I got this:

Maybe Cancelled - Crafts of Musical Theatre: Music

Yesterday, at 6:12 AM, I was sitting here, shivering in the pre-dawn winter freeze, about to walk out the door to catch the bus so I could make my visa appointment at 8 AM in the city, and I get this:

Cancelled - Crafts of Musical Theatre: Music

Too good to be true. I am not paying ~$3k in flight and visa costs and 1 month off work to study 1 subject. Thanks, common sense and economics. I think a lifetime’s worth of careful planning – with said planning paying off – has spoiled me. There’s only been once other instance in my life where perfect planning did not get me what I wanted. I remember being immediately and totally devastated. At the moment, I feel – numb. At least I think I feel numb. That’s when you don’t feel anything, right?

I’m not sure the full impact has really sunk in – I think I’m still in shock. Maybe it’ll start to hit once I start emailing my friends in NYC to let them know I have to cancel on the plans we’d been making (like all the restaurants we didn’t get to try the last time around, the events we wanted to go to or trips we were gonna take), or my cousin who has also booked in leave to fly down to NYC from Canada so we can hang out for the second time in the fifteen odd years we’ve been apart since we were kids.

Or you know, we could go with the “I’ve-grown-as-a-person-and-learned-to-be-mature-and-resilient” and I’m dealing with this in a rational manner. I kind of like that idea more anyway, but my gut is telling me that I’m in denial.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do. Everything at work has been scheduled with absolute precision so that I can finish everything by the end of June – since I’d wanted to fly in just in time to experience the crazy American-ness of the Fourth of July. It seems pointless now to take four weeks of leave, but I can’t think with all the noise going on. I feel like I need some time off just to meditate on what I’m going to do.

Maybe for once in my life I should do the irrational thing – caution be damned – and go anyway, just for the hell of it and see where I end up. You only live life once, right? It’s moments like this that I wish I could just let go of the constant analysis, weighing of pros and cons, drawing up budgets, logic, planning – all of it! – and just do what every single atom of my soul wants and run off to New York with nothing but $100 in my pocket, my laptop, keyboard and some clothes and live the life of a starving artist. Right up to the point where my inner cynic pulls a reality check on me.

Sometimes I really hate being the sensible and mature person. It feels like I end up with more work and having less fun. Usually some level of my mind understand that being sensible and mature pays its own dividends in the long-term, but this is not one of those moments.

This is an I am meant to be going to New York to study musical theatre in TWO WEEKS for a whole month where I don’t have to deal with numbers and accounting standards and audit methodology and being an intelligent automaton ticking off checklists and can actually go and do something creative but everything – EVERYTHING – I have worked for over the past year has just…collapsed…and there isn’t ANYTHING I can do about it moment.

This post has been really hard to write, in part because my thoughts are going everywhere and I have no idea how to structure this mess into anything cohesive; and in part because some of it I don’t really want to think about. I keep hoping that somehow when I go to sleep that I’ll find out I’ve really been having some sort of weird extended waking nightmare and this hasn’t happened; but even though it’s two in the morning now, I don’t – can’t – sleep because, well, that would make the next day come faster and facts are always harder to deny during the day, and the fact remains that I am not going to go back to New York for the summer.

A big thing I had really hoped for this July was to get clarity on what it is I want to do with my music – whether it’s something I can really look at pursuing as a viable career or whether it’s something that I have talent but no genius for. “Talent isn’t genius” and I’m so scared of finding out what the answer is that I half wonder if I don’t subconsciously make myself work stupid hours so I have all these excuses as to why I’m not trying hard to find out the answer here, that I have to push myself to go all the way to New York to find it (or maybe it’s just that I really, really love the city).

But now I think my thoughts are pretty much going in circles and I can’t really say anything else that I haven’t already said. I guess I should start the process of telling everyone that I’m not actually coming and try to get some sleep. Work and its deadlines make allowances for no one. Sometimes I wish I had less work ethic/scruples and more willfulness/self-interest; then for a penny I’d throw my arms up in protest and call in “sick” tomorrow…yet despite all of this, I’m still going to be at work by 8:30 AM.

C’est la vie.

Dropped - Crafts of Musical Theatre: Lyrics

Earlier this year, around my birthday, I felt like things were happening and life was taking off. Recently, I feel very much like life has slowed to a crawl – in terms of progress. The days are still passing by much faster than I would like (my mind still boggles at the thought that I’m now 24), yet strangely not quite fast enough (I can’t wait until I fly to New York next year).

At any rate, I guess it’s always easier to show progress at the very beginning, because there’s so many steps you can take – and most of them are fairly easy. But when you’ve gotten started and you’ve dived in, it’s sink or swim, and swimming for a long time gets tiring.

Anyway. I still want to try and write a song every two weeks. Since 30 September has just passed, my submission this fortnight goes out to my fellow auditors. We have survived another three months of the craziness that is busy season.

Image by Horrgakx on Flickr.

I originally wrote most of the lyrics in late August, right after I finished what has probably been my toughest engagement ever – and I think I’ve had some pretty tough jobs before. Every day, I got up at 6 AM to catch the 7 AM bus so I could arrive at 8 AM, worked through lunch until 7:35 PM at night so I could catch the last bus at 7:48 PM (and oh boy, if I missed this one, I had to take the train which would take even longer). I would keep working on the bus for another hour before I had to walk home, force myself to eat and fall straight into bed.

This would be the pattern of my existence for an entire month. As the deadline drew closer, weekends did not necessarily offer me any respite. It all culminated in what I can only describe as…hell. I will never, ever forget how it feels to start the day with a 7:30 AM meeting and work at a feverish pace in a meeting room, ticking and bashing my way through a set of financial statements until 3 AM (~19 hours). I got home at 4 AM, slept for 2 hours and went back to work until 1 AM the very next day (~17 hours). Yup. That’s nearly a full week’s worth of chargeable hours (which is 37.5 hrs) in just two days.

As you can imagine, I was in a really weird head space when I wrote these lyrics. I was feeling so overwhelmed, exhausted, angry, frustrated, fed up and yet giddy, light headed and perversely satisfied that I had gotten through the torturous experience with no visible damage (though how many years I’ve lost off my lifespan and mental damage sustained due to the stress…well, I have no idea).

Audit Busy Season by Leng

Audit Busy Season

Stumble outta bed in the morning
Walk in with my eyes closed and yawning
Triple shot of caffeine while my empty stomach’s reeling
How I hate that busy season feeling

At nine o’clock my phone starts ringing
By one, all I’ve done is nothing
Every fifteen minutes my internet is dropping
How I hate that busy season feeling

It’s dark on my way in, dark on my way out
Got a massive suitcase I’m carting about
“We’re not ready” goes the client’s tune
They didn’t read the audit pack ’til today at noon
How am I gonna get this done?
I gotta get this done!!

It’s three and I’ve finally got something
The client says “We’d better be signing”
Deadline’s moved ahead two weeks to Friday evening
How I hate that busy season feeling

It’s dark on my way in, dark on my way out
Got a massive suitcase I’m carting about
“I’m so sorry, I gotta cancel again”
“Think I’m gonna be working at least until ten”
‘Cos I gotta get this done
I gotta get this done!!

It’s seven P.M. we’re still reconciling
These TB accounts don’t agree to a thing
This formula’s wrong and the spreadsheet’s confusing
And now my computer’s crashed without saving

It’s a quarter to three A.M.
Finally signed the accounts for them
I’m collapsing into bed
Is this what it’s like to be dead?

It’s dark on my way in, dark on my way out
Got a massive suitcase I’m carting about
“I’m so sorry, I can’t come in today”
“Think I’m gonna be going somewhere far away”
‘Cos I’ve finally got this done
I’ve got this done!!
I’m done
—Music & Lyrics by Deborah Lau

Lyrically, I wanted to experiment with identities. The first real song I wrote with one of my classmates from the NYU Tisch Musical Theatre Writing Workshop (hi Chiara if you’re reading!) had these fantastic lyrics that all ended in “-tion” in every line. It gave the whole song this driving rhythm and a frenetic feeling. I don’t know how to shorten “They didn’t read the audit pack ’til today at noon”; one day when I figure it out, I will come back and fix it.

Formwise, I was tossing between the classic AABA and verse-chorus-bridge. In the end I went with a compromise – the chorus doesn’t kick in until the verse has been repeated twice. The bridge is in two parts, which I guess is kind of weird, but it was the only way I could think of to convey the surreality that is working at 3 AM. Seriously. The chorus was originally going to be the same every time, but since there’s a built in narrative, I thought it would make more sense if the middle lines changed every time.

Musically, I had a few things running through my head as I was writing the lyrics. For a long time, I’ve felt like everything I write musically is always very lyrical or classical (thanks, 15 years of classical piano lessons) so I tried to do something a bit different. In my head, I had a cross between Smashmouth’s “All Star”:

…and Busted’s “What I Go To School For” (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. At least it’s not the Jonas Brothers’ version).

Somehow when I ended up at the keyboard, Ben Folds Five snuck in with “Brick” and it ended up being a lot less pop/rock and more soft piano rock:

Here’s to surviving another busy season.

Okay, so this is not actually the first song we wrote. The first song we wrote is still in too terrible a shape to be released for public viewing. Here is the second song we’ve written instead.

Jonathan was struck by inspiration and composed this beautiful piece of instrumental music a few weeks ago for me to write some lyrics to…and I am very, very late (I’ve got a myriad of wonderful excuses, revolving around work, being busy going out, being busy going to uni open days, etc etc etc). I wish when I get inspired, I write stuff like this.

Anyway. The first image I got in my mind when I listened to this piece of music was “Final Fantasy” (and I promptly was very jealous of Jon being able to channel Nobuo Uematsu), as one of those poignant, wistful character themes…but the more I thought about it, the more the music sounded full of regret/melancholy.

When I initially wrote these lyrics, I was thinking along the lines of when Kim sings “I’d Give My Life For You” in Miss Saigon. I first saw a fellow student perform that in our Broadway music production and it took my breath away. Thinking back about my grandparents and my parents growing up and growing old, thinking about how I grew up and will grow old and how – when I have kids – my kids will grow up and grow old and what kind of world it would be…it reminds me life has become so much “easier” on the surface but so much more complex, competitive and difficult. Then I started thinking about what it would be like to grow old and simultaneously look back at my past and into my children’s or grandchildren’s futures. And a few weeks ago, when I saw “Gwen in Purgatory“, the picture that was painted of growing old in today’s society was truly bleak.

The scene in my mind as I wrote this was an old woman cradling a sleeping child and singing a lullaby. Her husband and the friends from her youth are long gone, her children are grown and have grown distant, busy with their own lives. But while she sits here, this small scrap of humanity in her arms makes her feel as if she is not alone. The past is a hazy golden age lost to the passage of time, which has stolen along more swiftly than she thought possible. And already she can see the babe in her arms grown into adulthood and herself fading away.

Image from Wisconsin Historical Images on Flickr.

I thought for a long time about whether I should post this and I almost didn’t:

1. It would have been easier to just…forget all about this project. To be honest, I haven’t seriously worked on project 26 Songs for the last few weeks.
2. I have never been a really good singer, nor have I done any serious singing since high school. I am so embarrassed by my shocking vocals that words fail to describe my mortification (poorly pitched, poor breathing, poor diction, poor/strange accents, very bad “switching” in registers…the list goes on and I won’t bore you by going into detail, I’ll let you fill in the blanks).
3. Criticism always feels personal (even when it isn’t) when you put a lot of your soul into something, so I hate sharing things I’ve created when I feel like they aren’t good enough.
4. I am really bad at expressing myself eloquently through words and hence one of my goals for doing this challenge was to improve my lyric writing. There aren’t a lot of “real” songs that I have written. In fact, this one would be something like number…6. I look at the lyrics I’ve written and I just want to cringe, but I don’t know how to do any better yet. Please bear with me.

In the end, I decided I would go ahead and blog this because:

1. I really need some sort of kick in the pants to keep myself accountable. This is just one way of getting it.
2. This isn’t about my singing. This is about me trying to become a better songwriter, and I need feedback.
3. One day when I write a real Broadway musical, some people will like it and some people will hate it. And they will write mean, awful, hurtful things about my songs, my music and about me and I will probably cry about it. I figure I could use some practice in getting used to it, getting over it and working on drawing out the valid criticisms and points for improvement.

And to be honest, I don’t really know how many people actually read what I write here in any great detail, so without further ado, here it is.

With (my terrible) vocals: Remember Me (Music: Jonathan Ong | Lyrics: Deborah Lau) by Leng

With only Jonathan’s beautiful music:
improvisation 1 by Jong85

Remember Me

I remember me, a girl begun to dream
Long before you came to be
I remember me, when life used to seem
Full of roads I’ve yet to see

I remember songs, the melodies we made
Stories from before your time
I remember sunlight, I remember shade
Summer rain and star shine
Before today
Before decay

You could spend your life in vain
In grasping for the sky
Or you could spend your life in pain
As every chance bids you goodbye

So many paths, unsure and shadowed
Many choices and mistakes
Some sacrilegious, some hallowed
All yours for you to make

I could tell you which ones to choose
Which ones where you would lose
But I know for sure that you’ll refuse
Want to walk in your own shoes
In your own shoes

Remember me, when I’m too old to dream
And the songs we used to sing
Remember me…
When my memory takes wing
Remember me
My memory

—Music by Jonathan Ong. Lyrics by Deborah Lau.

Not the standard Broadway AABA structure (more of an AABACA rondo form with a long extended instrumental bit in the middle), but worked alright. I think some of the phrases are odd:

• I’m still cringing at the false time/shine rhyme.
• I like idea of shadowed/hallowed but honestly…who says that?! And quite frankly “sacrilegious” is a stretch.
• When I was playing it over and over in my mind, the words sounded okay, but when I got around to singing them, some of them didn’t feel natural to sing.

So plenty of room for improvement! But I’m happy with where it stands as a first attempt.

Series photo by Jon Bragg on Flickr.

A few things have happened over the last two months to keep me busy and too tired to blog, not the least being passing my final CA exam and audit busy season hitting me like a ton of bricks.

Now everyone knows to be any good at anything, you either have to have talent or a lot of practice. To be brilliant at anything, you need both. Since no one starts off chasing their dream with the intention of being less than brilliant, theoretically I should be spending all my spare time practicing writing musicals.

Which I have not. Because not only do I succumb to procrastination far too often (and generally on the pretext of exhaustion from work), I am also too scared to write anything that is less than brilliant. I am terrified that all my years of drilling in classical piano has retarded my ability to improvise and create and I’m left only with the ability to interpret what other people have written. I am petrified that my long hiatus from anything musically serious has killed off what little ability of that is left. I am convinced that whatever I write is inevitably going to sound horribly cliche, awful and bland.

The fact is I have never written a song music first. Ever. This majorly bothers me. Someone who aspires to be a composer like Stephen Flaherty or Andrew Lloyd Webber should be able to write music first.

The other thing that bothers me is I feel like I can’t write lyrics first either. The last time I wrote anything creative was six years ago in my final year of high school. I’m paranoid that the last six years of being analytical and writing boring technical accounting memos and business reports have killed my ability to write creatively and to express emotion. As you can see by this long-winded ramble, I am horrible at expressing myself.

Anyway. At the beginning of the month, I got talking with a friend from my piano eisteddfod days about these debilitating fears and we decided we would stop whining and do something about it. Every week, one of us will start off by writing a rough set of lyrics and the other person has a week to come up with some musical ideas then we’ll work together on both music and lyrics until we have a half way decent song. Hopefully at the end of a year, we’ll end up with around 26 songs, some of which I can put in the 20 minute portfolio I need to get into the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at Tisch, New York University.

We’ve started working on our first song already and I’m feel very, very rusty. Things I have realised over the past month include:

• I can’t write music for unstructured lyrics, at least nothing that ends up being a cohesive song. It must be in some sort of variation of a song form. I like the typical AABA structure of musical theatre numbers.
• I do not have a gift for melody, unlike some other people I know who have this marvellous God-given talent for coming up with great melodies. I have to work really, really hard to come up with a passable melody. I am also horribly unoriginal because everything I am writing comes out sounding the same. The accompaniment is pretty blah. I have a total of like…3 chords in the song. Ugh.
• I fail at writing bridges. At first, the “B” sounded so much like the “A” and actually reprises the middle bit of the “A” towards the end that I don’t really know if it qualifies as a proper “B”. I left it for about 2 weeks while I got smashed during audit busy season and came back to do some more work on it tonight. Now the first part of the “B” sounds okay, but I can’t bring it back to “A prime” in a way that musically makes sense.
• I think I might be trying to go for something too fancy with the complicated rhyme scheme. I am crying inside for using the false “time/mind” rhyme. I’m also cringing a little at the use of “page/stage” since it sort of feels like it’s there just to fit the rhyme scheme.
• I fail at improvising awesome piano instrumental solos. I tried for a few hours on my keyboard and just didn’t really get anywhere that I wanted to get so I’ve given up for now and written “placeholder” in my notes. It’s really the highpoint of the whole piece though so we need something much better. I hope Jonathan has some ideas!
• I fail at bringing a song to a satisfying conclusion. The ending is horribly weak. It sounds unresolved and then the ending sounds way too sudden. I feel like it’s not musically interesting enough to drag in a B prime but the way the last A just tapers off and has no real conclusion sucks.
• The best songs, just like the best prose, show, not tell. I think part of the problem is we have really obvious lyrics at the moment, like “I am going to do XYZ”. The line is not inspiring and so I can’t find any inspiring music for it. More rewording of lyrics to follow!
• Hammerstein and Sondheim are right on the money. You cannot write what you don’t feel; if you don’t feel it, then you don’t believe it and the whole song comes off as fake. And it is really, really hard to write music for a lyric you don’t believe in.

Anyway. I will be posting up the stuff we write…when it’s a bit more polished and I don’t feel like I want to die on the spot any time someone hears it. At the moment, only 3 people in the world have seen the first iteration of the first song and it’s all I can do not to try and dig a very, very deep hole in the ground whenever I think about it…