Here’s the 3rd installment of Talkin’ Headline. The lines are all from cnn.com again, but really they could be from anywhere. Foxnews, The NY Times, the 5 o’clock news. All those places use the same headlines, for the same stories, every day.
I’m beginning to see, though, that it’d be impossible to form any kind of opinion about anything if you read the news every day because there’s so much of it and it’s so different each day (and even each hour). How could you come to any conclusion about what’s going on or what needs to be done. If you focus on one thing then it’s already old hat by the next day and you gotta move on or risk being seen as behind-your-times.
Maybe it’s okay to be behind-the-times, though, if the times is gonna move so fast that it don’t matter anyway.
You can see I’m confused.
Hopefully by Friday I get it all worked out, though.
Maybe something big will happen in the second half of the week and we can all get excited about it.
In any case. Here’s Talkin’ Headline #3. Its slighty different then the other 2 versions. Both musically and topically. The themes are all pretty much the same. That’s what never changes, I guess.
Here’s the “Talkin’ Headline Blues #2.” Wrote this one based on headlines from yesterday. It musta been a pretty slow newsday, though, cause this song was kinda hard to get just right. I did with it what I could, though. I guess that’s a lot like a newsroom, though. Always scraping the floor for something if there ain’t anything much going on.
Which one do you like better? Number 1 or number 2? Got any headlines you’ve seen today that you’d want in the next installment tomorrow?
Okay. Today’s new song I wrote last week on Thursday. I’ve been thinking that I haven’t written a talkin’ blues song in a long time (maybe since “Songs about America week” back in July, and maybe not a good one since the “Talkin’ CTA Blues,” which is on my album It’s Chicago!), mainly because if you write a talkin blues about a particular topic, say, something in the news, a current event, the song is gonna be out-of-date in a day or two and you’ll never be able to sing it again.
So I haven’t really been sure about writing one. Cause what’s the point if I’m gonna wok hard to write a song and then it’s never given a chance at anything. All the news moving so quick. Gotta get the latest goings-on out to the public before they can even process what just went on.
So, I was reading a couple newspapers and I had this idea to do a song, not about a particular topic, but about every topic. About how it’s nearly impossible to write a topical song these days and have it be something lasting. How no one really has the desire or the time to actually read about something that happens and think about it in any type of way. How it’s all just reading the quickest thing possible. A headline.
I figured I’d do a talkin’ blues using all the headlines from one day’s news. Then, if any of that news was made obsolete because people moved on to something else quick, I could just take the next day’s headlines for an updated version (thus the “#1” in the song title).
So I went on to cnn.com (because cnn.com has about a thousand headlines each day, always different) and grabbed a bunch of different headlines all about different things. Grouped them together just as haphazardly as CNN had done. Tied them all together with a somewhat reoccurring last line and then wrote a couple verses that summed up the song in general (these probably won’t change in future versions).
And there ya go. The Talkin’ Headline Blues.
Gives me the blues that’s for sure.
I’m planning on doing a new version each day this week. So, I’ll take today’s headlines and write up a song and record it and post it tomorrow. It’ll be just like reading a newspaper. Yesterday’s news, today.
Music Vomit 