September 2009

I have written some songs.  One song that I wrote is called Bartlett's Tale. When I composed Bartlett's Tale, I wasn't feeling particularly inspired. I didn't have a clever story or situation in mind, but I wanted to write a song.

At other times I have not had any problem with inspiration or subject matter. I wrote a song about wanting to star in the next Tarzan movie, called Tarzan #19.  I wrote a song about eating a peach that tasted like a baseball.  Well, that's what peaches taste like in February, right?

So anyway I grabbed my copy of Bartlett's Quotations (the actual title is Familiar Quotations -- A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature) and started thumbing through it, looking for an idea.  At the time I only had one copy, the 1937 edition.  

Familiar Quotations was first published by John Bartlett in 1882, and has been revised, updated, and republished many times since.  I now have a 1990s edition on CD, and it may well be available online by now.  (I think much of it shows up at bartelby.com, though why a fictional character gets credit for hard work done by a real person is beyond me.  He happens to be one of the great, great characters in literature though...)

Then after stumbling through numerous turgid verses (Friends of my youth, a last adieu!  Haply some day we meet again; Yet ne'er the selfsame men shall meet; the years shall make us other men.  Joseph Warren Fabens) and such I thought...Forsooth, this is begetting me nowhither.

So I turned to the index, and found my song.

The short phrases in the index seemed perfect for song lyrics, so I thought about it for a few minutes, and decided to just let Bartlett write the song for me. I just had to choose where to look. I started with She.

 

I figured that the first verses of many songs starts this way, and it's tried and true.  (This is an inline footnote; She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, She Drives Me Crazy, She's About a Mover, She, She Loves Me, Dancing Barefoot, and many more).  And, it will set the subject of the song in place; She, whoever She is.

Here's what I found:

So, here's the first verse:

She played on the banks of the Yuba,

She sways level in her husband's heart,

She that had no need of me,

She, that not-impossible...

She that was ever fair,

That was the world's delight.

Next place I looked, for the second verse, was in the index under He.  I figured, logically, that this could end up being a She / He song.  But it wasn't to be.  There were actually many more quotations indexed in the He section than under She, but too many of them had a proverbial or Confucian feel....he doth, he hath, he that giveth... he who sees, he who strives, he who takes off his shoes...(??) 

So, the He verse did not materialize within the index, and by this time I had decided, after the half-decent outcome of the first verse, that all the verses should lift straight out of the index, in whole chunks.

And so, under I (yes, another pronoun. But thus was my pronoun), I found verse two here: 

And so, verse two, like so:

I can cheerfully take it now,
I can take it if they can,

I cannot see nor breathe nor stir,

I cannot stand alone, where

I can't tell a lie,

I can't think why...

I celebrate myself.

Now I needed a bridge/chorus.  If I were writing this out of my own imagination, I would be groping for a an aside, a junction, something to tie the first two verses to some greater wisdom or truth.  To bring She and I  together....

So for the chorus I looked under We (the pronoun that unites!),  and found this:

Giving me my bridge, thus...

We are born to wander,
We are men my liege,

We are ne'er like angels,

We are not amused,

We are the music makers...

We are waiting for you there.

Finally, I needed one more verse, that summing up verse, the last verse, the verse that moves on, that leaves the yearning behind and looks forward, where our narrating character, having changed and somehow grown wiser, with enlightened eyes, muses on what was, what could have been, and what will never be...

I looked and looked, thumbing and peering through the index, and finally found the section of quotations beginning with, of course, And--a word that conjuncts, that adds, that says a little more.

Which gave me this, my final verse...

And so and my opinion is,

So can I,

So dies a wave upon the shore,

So have I,
So is good, very good...

so it is, but so

it might not be.

And then, of course, we sing the chorus again.    
     
We are born to wander,
We are men my liege,
We are ne'er like angels,
We are not amused,
We are the music makers...
We are waiting for you there.

* * * * * * * *

(By the way, you can listen to the song, in a streamed version, at the very bottom of this page. Or here... I tried to put the streaming object here, but Internet Explorer seemed to choke on it and wouldn't show the rest of the Thingamablog post...)

I purposely haven't expounded here in any depth about what I think the song says, what each verse seems to mean, to imply.   But when I was "writing" the song, I was looking for the bare framework of intention, of a shape, just enough of a nugget of narrative that it would work as a song. 

Usually when I write a song, I write the music first.  Sometimes the words and music come about together.  Rarely, I write the lyrics first.  Bartlett's Tale had been sitting there in the index of Bartlett's Quotations since 1937, waiting for me, so I guess this was the rare case, for me, when the lyrics came first. (...and if you have other versions of Bartlett's Quotations, you won't find this song in the index. Not in the 1948 version, not in the 1882 version. Other songs, maybe, but not Bartlett's Tale.

Some songs don't need much cohering substance, it seems.  The music itself carries flavor, nuance, emotion.  Simple songs don't always need to be crystalized distillations with clear and obvious motives or stories or symbols. Think...She Came In Through The Bathroom Window....

And that's how I co-wrote a song with Thomas Holley Chivers, William Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Richard Crashaw, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walt Whitman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Masefield, Edmond Rostand, George Washington, William Schwenk Gilbert, William Bolitho, Thomas Dekker, Queen Victoria, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaunessy, Sam Walter Foss, Diogenes Laertius, Charles Mackay, Anna Letitia (Aiken) Barbauld, and John Godfrey Saxe.

Here are the lines quoted, their authors, when they frolicked, an odd link to more info, and what poem, statement, rant, drama, comedy, essay, yarn, or lament the line came from.