Monthly Archives: July 2016

Listen, New Song

Trump Is Working On A Building

Audio

Super-Classy Un-buh-leev-able Amazing Failure

Donald Trump's hair is just so super-great.
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.

Remember when Google set up search results for “miserable failure” to link to George W. Bush? Apparently that was called a “Google Bomb” and miserable failure isn’t linked to Bush any more. But don’t you think there’s another miserable failure lurking around these days? Or maybe an amazing failure? Or super-classy failure? Or unbelievable failure? Yes? Me too. So I wrote a song about lumpy bag of moldy clementines Donald Trump. Have a listen:

Woody and the Carter Family

Now, you may notice, if you’re familiar with old folk tunes, that this new song I wrote about Trump is very similar to the Carter Family song I’m Working on a Building. There’s a few very good reasons for that.

First is, it’s one of my favorite tunes. I play it often and, so, it pops up in my head a lot at random times during the day.

Second, it has some good phrases that I figured I could update to be relevant about today. That’s the best thing to do when writing a folk song. Find an old one that you like, that has a catchy melody and an interesting message and then replace a few words to make it relatable to something currently in the news or your life. I barely even had to change the repeating chorus because Trump does work on buildings. Only thing different is that instead of building a house of good and a structure of hope and faith, he bankrupts everyone and everything he comes in contact with.

Like Father Like Son

Trump and his father Fred
Two severely balding orange men standing close together.

Now, the last reason, and maybe the reason that got me writing this new song is closely linked to the idea of creating new songs by rewriting old ones. Last week I was thinking a lot about Donald Trump because of the Republican National Convention and I remembered a news article I read about how Woody Guthrie had written a song about Trump’s crooked landlord father Fred Trump (read all about him here). So I went in search of that article to listen to the song because I thought maybe I could update it to be about Donald.

Only problem is, when I found the article, it turns out Woody didn’t so much write a song about Fred Trump, he just maybe reworked a verse of his tune I Ain’t Got No Home. His “song” about Fred Trump amounts to little more than a few scribbled ideas in his notebook. Not much for me to use. Plus, Woody’s song I Ain’t Got No Home was already a rewrite of the Carter Family song Can’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore. Do you see where this is headed?

Woody took a lot of ideas from Carter Family tunes (and from a lot of other people) and that’s something I picked up on really fast when I started writing my own songs. I didn’t have to try and come up with something completely new and different. I could just update old songs to fit my times and the troubles and triumphs I saw around me. So that’s what I did with I’m Working on a Building.

But that’s STEALING

Yeah, it probably is. I admit that. Although, folk music (and maybe most music) is all stolen. Every new song rests on the shoulders of something that came before it. You might go as far to say that everything rests on the shoulders of what went before it. As we move into the future the past is what we have to stand on. Forgetting that, you fall into a pit of nothing and may never take another step in any direction. I guess it’s only really stealing if you take complete credit for all the words in a song and say all the ideas were yours alone and no one  ever did anything like you ever before. No one does that, though, right?

Listen, Rewritten Song

Mother Mary (Version 2)

Audio

I first wrote and recorded Mother Mary way back in 2012. I vaguely remember that I got the idea for the song whilMother Mary (Version 2)e watching an episode of the TV show Kitchen Nightmares. No, really. REALLY. I think one of the people that had a NIGHTMARE
KITCHEN was named Mary, but she was also an
older lady, so the host of the show, in all his frenetic glory kept calling her Mother Mary.  Anyway, that just stuck in my head and the original version popped out. Have a listen to that here. Then listen to the new version:

So why do a rewrite?

Well, it’s how I practice. How I teach myself to write completely new things. How I keep myself interested. I have a need I think to tear things down and rebuild them. Even if I really like or love the first creation. And I do really like the first version of this song.

And that made it hard to rework. Because I didn’t know how to even start to change it. Maybe that has something to do with letting my practice of songwriting slip into the trash heap the past couple years, but maybe also because Mother Mary is a song I still occasionally remember and play around the house to entertain myself.

Usually if I get stuck at rewriting a tune I’ll change the tempo and time signature. And that usually means the song becomes a waltz, but that didn’t really work for this one. All the words and names I had in the original lyrics fit too well with the original guitar part and melody and I couldn’t get that out of my head. So, I did the easy thing…edit out all the names.

But then can you still call this Mother Mary?

I think without any of the references to the Christian religious figures it’s still basically the same song. You can look at it two ways:

  1. Without the names the song just becomes a little more broad in asking for help from someone unnamed.
  2. The song becomes even more about Mother Mary since the title is the only reference to who it might be that the lyrics are talking about.

Now, that sure is a lot of explaining for a song that originally took me about 14 minutes to write and that I didn’t ever think about the meaning of. I still don’t ever think about the meaning of the first version. It doesn’t really mean anything to me. I just like how it sounds.

Listen, Talkin' Headline Blues

Pushing Daisies: The Talkin’ Headline Blues #178

Audio

The Talkin’ Headline Blues is a weekly series of recordings using unedited headlines from CNN.com written as a song. This week’s topic: Pushing Daisies.

Pushing Daisies: The Talkin' Headline Blues #178
Pictured here: Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump pushing daisies out of his mouth.

Silent president crisis!
Girl tests man.
Why flowers killed, tear-gassed?
Email diabetes: A death to Yahoo.

And here are your ever-relevant (for today, at least) CNN headlines:

Listen, Talkin' Headline Blues

Fart Trumpets: The Talkin’ Headline Blues #177

Audio

The Talkin’ Headline Blues is a weekly series of recordings using unedited headlines from CNN.com written as a song. This week’s topic: Fart Trumpets.

Fart Trumpets: The Talkin' Headline Blues #177
Two fart trumpets gesture at each other in a race to blurt out the longest and loudest wisp of noxious gas.

Convention will blame mob in shooting.
Demand these Trump-Pence sulfur guns for killing.
Cure policing again?

As if enough people didn’t already make plenty of jokes about the stench of Cleveland during the Summer when it’s hot and humid. Now they have to put up with an entire group of fart trumpets descending on their city for four days this week. Imagine the smell of all that wind. Imagine the foul taste in your mouth if you were one of the fair citizens of that town.

It’s somewhat similar to the blowhards in Chicago who have recently been making the rounds to insist that the 2016 Olympics would have been great for the city. But, also to insist that even though Chicago failed miserably in getting the Games, the city benefited handsomely.

Yes, everyone who lives in Chicago is benefitting. That’s why everything in Chicago is just so wonderful and works so well. The entire country, no, WORLD, looks upon Chicago as a bastion of hope and compassion and prosperity and equality and peace.

It’s been said before: Chicago is the city that works…for about one percent of the people.

Now, enough of that. Go read some happy headlines!