Music and rhyme (Week 42)

"For we were spinning out our lines walking on the wire. Hand in hand went music and the rhyme."

When Bernie Taupin wrote those lines for Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, he and Elton John were already looking back on a music-and-lyrics partnership that had launched them to stardom. They had caught lightning in a bottle, and it was magical. With that as inspiration, I decided to spend a week trying to make a song, with my son Nic as the music and me as the rhyme.

So...what to write about?

The idea came during a text exchange with Nic. I mentioned that Barrow, Alaska had just seen its last sunset of the decade (on November 19!) and he replied that apparently, the sun does set on the American Empire. I asked if there was such a thing as the "American Empire" and we were on our way.

After a few disappointing stabs at it, I had something that I thought was workable verse. Here it is:

Wishing Hole

We heard voices calling in the national park

Looking for a leader who was lost in the dark

They shot out a lifeline but it missed its mark

And the slow decline began.

There was nobody lined up at the voting booth

Nobody there who could speak to the truth

And the only one coming was too long in the tooth

And nobody had a plan.

(CHORUS)

Oh, we all thought it would last forever

And the good times would always roll

Then the minute we turned our backs on it all

We fell into the Wishing Hole. 

The forest was echoing “This isn’t fair”

There were choppers and guns that were breaking the air

And all we could feel was a fool’s despair

In the fading light of day.

With everyone shouting that the man is a liar

We threw another log on the glowing fire

And watched the sun set on the great empire

It burned then died away.

So it's a bit of a downer. And it's not really meant to be about any particular empire, but more about the slow decline that any empire is fated to experience. It's also about apathy and the loss of leadership. And I wanted to make some subtle play on a wishing well, which is supposed to fulfil our blind hope that something special will happen based on pure luck and dreaming. Of course, if the well is actually a gaping hole, you run the danger of falling into it.

Bernie Taupin himself once said that he couldn't describe his lyrics as poetry because "that would be an insult to real poets" and I see what he means. But in the same breath, not every poem can be put to song. This would be the test for Nic. I told him I was hearing a Neil Young sorta song, and had "After the Gold Rush" in my head.

The whole process is so invigorating. Besides getting your creative juices flowing, it also builds a wonderful bond with your songsmith partner. Digging a little deeper online, I discovered that I was not alone in this feeling, and that people have connected health benefits, emotional benefits and social benefits to the process of songwriting. It's powerful stuff.

After a few days, Nic had some music for me. I loved it. It's still in early stages, so not as polished as the music he made with his band, Stranded Assets. A caveat here. I'm going to share the link to Nic's song with you, but understand that he does not fancy himself as a singer, and handed that job to his friend when he performed with the band. Anyway, I think he was maybe going for a Neil Young type of falsetto here. But I love the simplicity of the voice matched to a stark piano.

We'll leave it to someone else to fill in the choppers and guns.

NEXT WEEK: Birdwatching!