Number 2 – True Love Waits
I had a lot of fun with this one – here are a few interesting tidbits from the birthing process
Three Strings – When I started piddling on guitar to get a melody to write to, I decided to limit myself to playing on only three guitar strings. It was totally arbitrary, but without that kind of artificial constraint I never would have arrived at this chord structure.
Lyrical Content – Another limiting factor was, of course, time. Typically I *meticulously* craft and recraft my lyrics until everything is perfect. I draft the thematic structure of each lyrical verse (and sometimes each line) ahead of time, and end up spending a lot of time figuring out how I can cram a certain idea into seven syllables that sound right. If I employed that same technique on Plaid Creature posts, I’d never get anything done, and Dr. Conspicuous would wait outside my house to throw his shoes at me for punishment. I started with the line ‘fill my pockets up with seeds and bury me’ and worked my way out quickly from there. I had no idea where the song would end up, and when I was about 2/3 through I realized it was becoming about two people discussing whether or not they wanted to wait to have sex. It was totally not what I was intending to write about, but I ended up chasing it down and am really happy with where it ended up.
Orchestration – I decided to give this one a bit more flourish in the instrumentation, so I added mellotron, tambourine, sleigh bells, melodica, and an electric guitar part that I edited to run backwards in time with the chords (it’s that kind of swooshy sound coming from the mid-right channel).
Let me know what you think!
If I pass away before you baby
don’t you waste your time with tears
just fill my pockets up with seeds
and bury me
and i will make a maple tree
with limbs to shade your tired feet
with leaves to pray over your head
every day
and i will wait for you if
you’ll wait for me
and when you fade away baby
would you make yourself a vine
and wrap your body around me
idly
how i phrase this i know is a
little strange especially
given that we’re only
seventeen
But if I wait for you
just wait for me
That accordion sound works quite well.
Also… what’s this song about?
Is it about abstinence??? Or is it just about waiting for true love? Or perhaps a play on the slogan.
The title “True Love Waits” is like a huge slogan pushed on teens and college kids by the christian conservative movement to tell them to wait to until marriage to have sex.
+TRANSMISSION END+
The additional instrumentation really lends itself to this song extremely well. Even the sleigh bells fit in there very nicely. If this is being prolific, I think you’ve hit it off without a hitch. Nice work! Change some of the lyrics to something about Santa Claus and put out a Xmas album for big money, big prizes
I am really impressed with this song. It comes together very well. Interesting to see that you would have preferred more time with the lyrics. I wonder where else you could have taken them. I like the imagery: praying leaves and wrapping vines.
I agree, the melodica is a nice touch — sounds like a bit of Paree, no?
Glad you boys liked it – ‘True Love Waits’ was a slogan I grew up surrounded with in Pensacola, and as the song evolved, to my surprise, it turned into an abstinence piece. I’m really stoked about the one I’m working now – it’s about Jesus coming back as a midwestern trucker.
Oh – and sleigh bells – if it’s good enough for the Beach Boys and Radiohead, it’s good enough for me. But it *does* end up sounding Christmasey – damn Christmas music…
The combination of all the various instruments really held this piece together. I listened to the song at first without reading the lyrics, and it totally painted a scene of some kids sitting on the bed actually talking about what the song was about. For me if a song paints an image in my head, it’s golden. Not that every song has to do that, normally its just a message heard aurally but I connect to it more when I can see what the song is about rather than just hearing it.
I absolutely love the melody and the theme is so symbolic of many things – seeds, vines, leaves… the melodica between stanzas makes for a great transition. It is just perfectly beautiful (from a totally unbiased reviewer).
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