Add-verse Conditions

Writing bulletin!

I'm now about half-way through tooling and retooling songs for what I'm foolhardy enough to consider my next album. As you may know, I have never released any album. That hasn't stopped me from making a double album, however. Even if it never sees the light of day, its existence alone is important simply because I can consider my current project, "my next album," making me sound pretty cool and seemingly confident in the realm of sticking music on a tape. We'll see.

Anyhow, in typical Rob Morrison fashion, I've ironed out most of the musical aspects of the album to a pretty definitive point. It's all written! But where are the lyrics?! Ack! That's right: I always put off writing lyrics. Call me crazy, lazy, or just plain bad at it; I'm not sure of the cause, but I'm pretty tentative about lyrics. Part of me loves to rewrite and revise, and the other part loves to quit milling over a song and hurry up and record it already! The latter typically wins. Only he doesn't really because I get noncommital about the whole thing around that time, and the song I'm working on is completed six months to a year later. Sheesh.

That's a habit I'm stomping from here on out. But there's a hidden danger to nixing that sense of censorship: I can't stop. I started writing a song last week that consisted of five verses and clocked in at 7 and a half minutes. A tad lengthy, yes. Tonight I unearthed my notebook to revise a couple lyrics, and voila: now it's eight verses and surely over 10 minutes. Yikes. No one writes songs that long. Well, they do, but probably not when they're trying to get signed to a folk-friendly label. Oh well. Better add another verse and an mellotron solo and hope that some Prog label will want me.

All was not quiet on the busking front this evening. In fact, it was downright rocking with good times. Some lady sang along with me to "Mr. Bojangles" and another patron told me it was the perfect song for the subways, citing that it brought back a lot of memories. As I mentioned several posts back, I love that song. It's an incredibly sincere slice of Americana that dates back a ways and has been covered by everybody who's anybody. That's right -- me included!

After a rendition of "Sad Eyed-Lady of the Lowlands" (talk about a long song), a guy walked up to me and proffered up a Scooby Doo lollipop. I was pretty content with that alone -- hey, if it puts off dinner for another hour or two, great! -- but he also donated some free insight. Apparently the lyric regarding "the kings of Tyrus with their convict list" was not a good idea to cite because in his words, "a lot of ex-cons live around here." I informed him that the author of the song was Dylan, and that I didn't play it with any intention of getting a rise out of a demographic that's more likely to shiv me with a payphone than quietly grumble as they board a subway car. He nodded and wished me good luck.

And that was the evening as it was.