61. In A Storm I Lost My Love (Song-Study)

DAY SIXTY-ONE

DAMN THE ENTER KEY!  I pushed it and it posted an unfinished entry too early!  Don’t be thrown off: it’s just my fickle fingers flying!

Good evening or good morning.

Writing/Recording: This mainly started out as an improvisational piece, and I guess it still is, in a way.  This is hard to explain: I love rhythm.  It’s just one of the coolest aspects of music and life.  Though I love it, I’m no drummer: I feel like I have a good sense of natural rhythm, it’s just when I start involving other elements like singing or intonation, I get lackadaisical about it.  So, I thought I might do a piece that involved mainly percussion or beats that I would play myself to challenge myself.  I got out an older/new notebook and found the words on the first few pages.  I’m not sure what I had done that day to write lyrics like this, but here they are.  I started doing each vocal line separately, but I realized it would take me all day, so some of these lines are live, but most are using the pitch in garageband.

The original lyrics for the “chorus” were:  “In a marvelous, decadent storm.”  Too much!  So I changed it.

From www.etymonline.com:

“marvel (n.)

c.1300, “miracle,” also “wonderful story or legend,” from O.Fr. merveille “a wonder,” from V.L. *miribilia, alt. from L. mirabilia “wonderful things,” from neut. pl. of mirabilis “strange or wonderful,” from mirari “to wonder at,” from mirus “wonderful” (see smile). A neut. pl. treated in V.L. as a fem. sing. The verb is attested from c.1300. Related: Marveled; marveling; marvels.”

My other Song-Study aspect was less commonly used  intervals: perfect 5ths, perfect 4ths, etc.  Though there are intervals in use here, they don’t generally fit within each other perfectly, which I find interesting.  I like that there is really no central key to focus on, but also that this is kind of weird…I like that it’s not totally acoustic either, or natural.  I like that so much of it is artificial and wandering and imperfect.

*I understand how this song may sound a bit like the vocoder, Imogen Heap thing… this wasn’t point and, honestly, didn’t even occur to me these might be related until I was nearly done.

There are a million things I considered doing with this- one of them was start totally over from scratch because the performances on all tracks seem too off (drums), but that would have taken forever.  It was an interesting learning experience.  I have this feeling this isn’t quite done- mixing and a few more additions to drum parts to accentuate vocal changes.  I was less picky about its perfection than most others I’ve done because it was a study.  Even studies start out as one thing and end up deviating.  It’s funny: though this is about rhythm, the rhythmic aspects of this  song are some of the weakest!  Oh well!

So, here you go: I’m falling asleep as I’m typing… blah… goodnight!

In a Storm I Lost My Love

In a storm I lost my love

It was marvelous, marvelous

In a storm I lost my love

On a perch did I sit and I watched

From on high did I wish, and I mourned

In a storm I lost my love

That he, as an oak, would not swim

And drown in the sea as I hoped

In a storm I lost my love

It was marvelous

For my love was a ghost

A haunted reminder for me

In a storm I lost my love

It was marvelous, marvelous

“My soul,” did I say,

And I said it again,

“May you drown in the arms of the sea.”

In a storm I lost my love

It was marvelous, marvelous