Plaid Creature

The Word – Song Development

Over the last few weeks I’ve laid out the skeleton of how Jubilee is going to be structured. I’ve got a starting batch of songs, a bunch of writing, and some overall thematic arcs. The first song on an album is without doubt the most important. It has to illustrate everything a project is about (both lyrically and musically) in a three minute chunk that excites the audience for more. I’m going to start the assemblage from there.

For both the meta-construction of an album and the sculpting of a song, I try to work both additively and subtractively. I iteratively construct something from a central idea (an additive approach) while at the same time subtractively evaluate the influences for each piece, thinking how I can process them through my voice into something that is new. Some songs are more additive, some are more subtractive – but most meet somewhere inbetween.

Subtractive

The influences for the first piece are spread between lyrical and music. Lyrically, I’ve been interested in how timelessness is achieved with biblical and naturalistic imagery. The song New Madrid (about the New Madrid earthquake in the late 1800′s that was so strong it caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards) is a great example – it uses loaded words like ‘fountain’, ‘bury’, and ‘death’.

This piece is also strongly influenced by the more ecstatic writing of Vladimir Nabokov as well, specifically his short story The Word. It’s vivid, feverish storytelling, and I totally dig it.

Musically, I’m seeing the influences spreading over a few areas. The song is going to be entirely accapella, but there are many different things all feeding into this – here are the big four examples:

Strident vocal techniques – William Elliot Whitmore – Cold and Dead

Strong Melody – Neutral Milk Hotel – King of Carrot Flowers Part 1

Harmony – Brian Wilson – Our Prayer

Renaissance choral music

Additive

I’ve been iterating on the story for the lyrics, and this is what I’ve come up with so far:

A beggar is walking in the woods at dusk near his village and stumbles into a group of angels whose job is to paint the darkness onto the daylight every day at dusk, and erase it every morning at dawn. He sees the angels, and approaches them to ask why they aren’t instead handling the problems of his village – the day to day toil, darkness, and death. An angel comes up to him and whispers a single word into his ear – he is suddenly covered with warmth, and changes into an angel. The man swoops over his village and sees it from the perspective of the angel – the simultaneous pathos and joy – the full wonder of humanity courses through his veins and he screams out the word as he flies through his town. He awakes the next morning in his bed, covered in feathers, and can’t remember the word.

It’s heavily based on the Nabokov story in spirit, but takes his brand of magical realism and pushes it out a little further, integrating it into an allegory (hopefully).

The music is, as mentioned, all acapella. I’ve got some melodic sketches, but nothing I’m really ready to share yet. I’ll work on that for next week.

OPTIONAL AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

• How does something become ‘timeless’ – look at 2001 – it holds up better today than sci-fi films made in the 80′s. Why is that?
• Additional ideas for the story. I’m trying to wrap this into a relatively tight allegory – any ideas for further research or edits much appreciated.