I'm almost done with my second song! And by almost done I mean the lyrics are finished (unless I change them), the chord progression is pretty settled, and I kind of have the accompaniment composed. I'll finish that tomorrow and (if I have time) start on the next song.
I'm actually pretty pleased with the progress I made today, especially since I didn't get nearly as much as I wanted to done yesterday. I got two of three pages of lyrics written, but I probably could have done a lot more if I had wanted to, so that was frustrating. But today I finished the lyrics to this song, and I actually like it a lot. It's the one Marion sings as she's deliberating whether or not to steal the $40,000 and bring it to Sam. Even though there are a lot of parts of it that repeat, overall it's actually a lot less formulaic than most of my other songs. Whereas the formula I (kind of inadvertently) usually use goes something like verse/prech/chorus/verse/prech/chorus/bridge/chorus/finale, this one is more like A/B/C/A/B/C(1)/A(1)/C(2)/B (you can kind of see where I diagrammed that as I was working it out in my notebook).
One thing I noticed as I was writing this one was how much it made me think of the Dogfight soundtrack. I mostly kept hearing "Nothing Short of Wonderful" and "Dogfight" - both female-centric songs. Nothing Short of Wonderful does a lot of interesting rhyming things I pulled from; also, it's another solo song for just a woman as she's doing a lot of internal monologuing. Additionally, both of the songs I've written tend to feature a lot of words that go up and stay held for a long time at the end of their phrases; I'm pretty sure I pulled that at least partially from the song Dogfight.
My biggest issue in writing this song was that instead of doing more traditionally structured verses, I was sort of just working with a lot of little components - the A, B, and C sections - that I had to use to make a much longer piece. When I hit my stopping point yesterday, the song's runtime was only about 1:15 or so; even now, with another page of lyrics, it's still under three minutes (maybe 2:45). I would like for it to be longer, but I also think that adding more would make it feel forced. I'm also likely going to reprise it later, so I can play with it a little bit more then.
Also! It doesn't really feature a chorus. I sort of see the B section as the most chorus-y component of it, but none of the lyrics in the song are ever repeated, and for the most part no one section gets more airtime than any other. This really is very unusual for me, and it's probably one of the things I'm happiest about in regards to this song. My one problem with the lack of chorus is that the song doesn't really have an obvious title (not a problem in Lunch Hour, where I repeat the phrase "lunch hour" like 8,000 times). The two I'm deliberating between right now are "The Money" (the topic she's grappling over) or "While You Can" - pulled from the lyric, "Don't think, just get away while you can." I always sort of liked when musicians use titles that are literally just phrases that occur once - i.e., "King of Carrot Flowers part 1" or "Twin Size Mattress" - and I feel like that one is vague but also pretty indicative of what she grapples with over the course of the show. I'll probably play with them both for a while mentally and then settle on one.
Anyway. I won't post audio yet - it's still very, very rough - but I will post the lyrics in their original form:
As for posting songs in general - I'm probably going to end up setting up a bandcamp specifically for this music, and embedding each song in that way. Ideally, I'll later record this soundtrack for real and then make a BETTER bandcamp for that one, but for now it'll just be the horrible recordings I make on my phone. It is more helpful than me just describing what I'm working on, though.
I think that's all for now. I'll check back in in a few days.
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