Sunday 10 April 2011

Spent

  Embarassingly, I overscheduled myself this week.  Dentist appointment.  Last minute marking before report card mark calculation.  Making some form of parental contact for kids who aren't doing work and want to pass anyway.  Taking the Reach for the Top (Canadian high school trivia show like Jeopardy) team two hours away all day to play on TV.
  Friday was the worst (as I'm sure Rebecca Black would agree).  A day of teaching school which was the deadline day for work counting toward the report card, a three hour session recording George's drum parts on my songs (which he had to learn, and I had some weird ones for him.)  Then off to the school to stay all night chaperoning a fundraiser (30 Hour Famine.  The kids take pledges to not eat for 30 hours, and Friday night is like a huge campout/sleepover in the school, ending with a breakfast Saturday morning.  XBOXs and iPods as far as the eye can see).
  So today I slept until midafternoon (after getting in at around 8am after having stayed up for the whole night), ate really nothing besides some muffins left over from the breakfast, and eventually got the energy together to tackle the song George had recorded a drum part for me, about which I was most excited.  I found myself hitting a beer bottle with a drumstick, singing girlie vocals, played dropped-D crunch chords on what was formerly an acoustic song and otherwise doing the whole thing myself, mostly with first-take stuff, just to find out what it would sound like.  I am now shockingly exhausted, and, foolhardily have put up my rough mix on the Internets though I'm not fit to type words, let alone decide if the mistakes are fixed enough. (in the song AND the blog entry)
   The song is called Proud Someday. It was about how once one starts to grow, to change, to take one's life in a new direction; family, friends and others around suddenly get looks of disapproval and discomfort, and start a lot of sentences they don't finish. ("Don't you think..." "You used to be so..." "You know we worry when you..." "Why can't you just..."). This was a surprisingly snarly little acoustic song and now that I got George to do some quite aggressive drums to it, a barking, roaring managerie of crap joined the acoustic to make this cacophony. I struggled with how to try to make the incomplete sentences clearly be that.  Putting sentence fragments into a song structure means they sound oddly OK.


Proud Someday
You know what?  You can't, can't just…
It's not that… 'cause you need to, have to…
Because you should just stop the… and then go back to…
You know there's nothing quite so…as never doing anything that…
Anyone could ever…or feel that it's too…
We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought
We thought you'd make us…
We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought
You'd make us…
We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought
We thought you'd make us…
You know we worry when you..you used to be so…
We're concerned about your…you're doing things that…
There's a look in your…and we just don't know any…
Why can't you stop the..come back in and try to…
Please just, please just…and we could all be…
We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought
You'd make us…
We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought
You'd make us…
We thought, we thought, we thought, we thought
You'd make us proud someday, but now you're…



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

always loved that one, and the energy in this one is delightful. no wonder you're spent, sweet dreams :)

Gandolf said...

Nice one.

ducq said...

But I didn't... Couldn't you have... I mean, it's not like... But obviously you... It's just that... You see, Mike, You have to understand that most people...

...because that's just the way people are.

Gandolf said...

"because that's just the way people are"

Except for me! :)