bad

Finally going a little bit insane. It's been five days since I started trying to write the fifth song, and I still barely have anything. Actually, that's not true - I have ten pages of lyrics and notes I may or may not use, at least three chord progressions I've tried out and abandoned, lists of songs I want to emulate, and many, many fragments of melody. It's like this little graveyard of ideas for a song that I thought would be incredibly doable, and isn't.

Here are some theories about why this is proving to be so difficult:

• Musically, I'm trying to counterbalance all of the slow, boring songs with a poppy, upbeat one, and it's not working. Which says a lot about all of the slow, boring songs I write.
• I've sort of been married to one chord progression over the last four songs - one that pops up pretty prominently in each song - and I tried to not use it for variety's sake this time. Once again, it says a lot about my songwriting abilities that it's not getting anywhere.
• A song every three days was a nice idea at the beginning of the month, but January is almost over and I've seen basically the same 10 people all month and logged more hours in my room than I ever have and have forced myself to write more quickly than I ever have and have been essentially organizing all of my time for a month now, and I'm burning out. I need external structure, and I don't have it. Apparently, I need class time - and I don't have that, either. I thought living in Oberlin all month would drive me stir-crazy, and the first 2.5-3 weeks seemed to prove me wrong, but I guess I just hadn't waited long enough. It's here now, and I'm going a little bit insane.

Honestly, it almost feels like I'm waiting for permission to stop. Like I'm waiting for someone to say, "good job, you tried, you can take a break and come back in a week or two." I'm not going to get it, and I'm not even sure that I deserve it, but I feel like it's what I'm waiting for after five days of almost useless ideas.

To be fair, they're not necessarily useless. I do legitimately like the chorus I have right now - a riff on the fact that both Marion and Norman's mother are dead, and neither man realizes it.

I'll backpedal. To the beginning, with all of my ideas and goals and whatnot (for this song). I think I stated them in my last post, but I'll do it again.

Right now, the song is called "Alive." It's a duet between Norman and Sam, sung to each of the women they love as Sam heads to the Bates Motel to see if he can find Arbogast. They each sing about how hard their lives had been before they found love - how Sam was bitter about his ex-wife, and how Norman felt stepped on and used by the world. For Sam, things changed when he met Marion; for Norman, things changed when he embraced his life with his mother. Norman's part is especially fun because it's so oedipal, although I don't like his lyrics quite as much as I like Sam's. A big part of the song is the juxtaposition between the two relationships - Norman's with his mother is very dark and creepy (because of the oedipal quality), while Sam's and Marion's in contrast is very normal and traditional.

I had a lot of trouble figuring out a hook for the song at first. I always start with something - a melody, a chord progression, a lyric I like, a sort of clever in-joke with the movie. For Lunch Hour, it was the phrase "this isn't love, it's just our lunch hour;" for While You Can it was the opening melody; for PIPT, it was the phrase "private island, private trap;" and for WYC2 it was the music I already had, as well as the narrative direction I wanted the song to go in. Here, I had none of that - no clever lyric, and no interesting music - for about two days. Finally, I figured it out - Sam and Norman are both in love with dead women.

That led to the chorus:

Let me hold you and touch you and never let you go
I could never live without you - that much I know

Just let me repay you, 'cause you've helped me survive

Let me make you feel alive

Maybe it's a little bit...not corny, but sort of overly obvious and clever in a bad way. I kind of like it, though. It's given me the "you saved me angle" from which the rest of the song has come. Additionally, I throw in a vague reference to the fact that Norman's mother is dead - in the bridge, the line, "and they say you're gone/they say hope is lost/but I'll pull you back whatever the cost." The cost being, of course, that Norman has developed a second personality that ultimately consumes his own. Also, in the middle of the song is a modified version of the dialogue between Norman and his mother when he decides to hide her in the fruit cellar. It comes just after the bridge, and leads to a second version of the bridge, in which it's just Norman singing to his mother about how hard it is to live with her. But then Sam joins back in, and they repeat the chorus, and the song ends.

In my head, this is VERY similar to Bare's "Are You There?" The harmonies will be similar, and I want it to have a similar upbeat feel. I'm having a lot of trouble writing the verses, though - both the chord progression and the melody. I'm afraid that part of it has to do with the meter of the lyrics, and that I'll have to modify them yet again (I'd gotten slightly more attached to these ones) to make it work. I actually already have modified the first couple of verses, to see if I can fit them into a melody more easily, but no dice just yet. I guess we'll see how it goes.

It's now January 26, which gives me six days left before classes start. If I can finish this song by then, I'll be happy. I have a very strong feeling that if I don't finish by then, I'll never finish it - it'll be this huge road block in the project that keeps me from wanting to progress at all.

I do think I'll take a break once the month ends - give myself a couple of weeks off before I come back to things. At that point, I might rewrite parts of songs, or add the 2-5 I won't have written yet (I keep thinking of more places for songs to go). It's been suggested multiple times that I start thinking about that now - about either skipping over this one for now and moving on to a later one, or going back and doing some of the rewriting now. But I don't know if those would be any more constructive. Of the next two songs I know I'll write, one was supposed to be a reprise of this one (I'm starting to rethink that now, though), and the other has a concept I've barely fleshed out and am not even sure how to approach. I want the final song to be divided between the psychiatrist's end-of-movie speech and Norman's mother's end-of-movie speech, but I'm not sure exactly how yet. Once again, I feel like it's going to be very slow and grave, and I have too many songs like that already.

I feel like that was the biggest unprecedented challenge with this project - taking a grave story and filling it with (at least some) upbeat songs. Somehow, it was easier with TIAMAZ - maybe because I had more time, and I was writing all of it, and somehow it was just easier because of those things to inject more humor into it. I do feel like one of my biggest issues right now is injecting humor into the show - like the lyrics I'm writing now aren't as clever as the ones I wrote for TIAMAZ. Maybe it's just because I'm rusty.

I sort of feel like TIAMAZ was doable because it built up a sort of momentum. Even with the most recently written songs, I had the strength and the comfort of the rest of the show to back me up. I was adding songs to what I felt like was already a very strong list. I had a script and lots of good feedback and lots of support and somehow all of that confidence made me feel pretty great about most of what I wrote. A year later, I don't have that yet. I'm back at the bottom of the ladder, and I'm floundering. And I know that's normal, but it still sucks.

I'll keep trying today, and tomorrow, and the next day - and ideally, by that day, I'll have at least a very rough recording. And then I'll be done. My project will be over. I sort of feel like doing a bunch of self-reflection and whatnot now, but I'll wait until then.

For now, I'll just keep writing, and hope for the best. Take a break, come back, play around with chord progressions and lyrics, rinse, dry, repeat. Try to stay optimistic for a little bit longer.

But oh, god, I can't wait for the semester to start.