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 n...