The Evolution of a Song
Part 2: More Than Words
One of the poems that stayed with me from high school was Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill". I liked it then, I like it even more now. Maybe it's a benefit of being able to look back over the years, but Thomas' words resonate perfectly with me. I sat down with my simple melodic idea and my "once we were dreamers" line and just started writing. Words and phrases came pretty easily at first and I wrote, shuffled, reworded, and rearranged them. From a few minutes' worth of writing came:
Once we were dreamers able to fly
Eternal summer beneath endless sky
Nothing we cared for tomorrow –
Once we were dreamers.
Hearts still unbroken, songs yet to sing
Innocents soaring on gossamer wings
Lords of the fields and the backyards –
Once we were dreamers.
Encouraging. I liked the imagery and I'm still pretty happy with this part. It's somewhat Fern Hill like, but not a complete rip-off. A celebration of youthful innocence. I like it. However, at this point the muse was starting to fade. I find it's a good idea to get ideas down as quickly as possible as soon as they manifest themselves. Every idea that comes along isn't going to be useful, but the good ones frequently just pop into your head, seemingly out of nowhere, and if you don't capture them they disappear just as quickly. I struggled a while longer and finished the basic form of a song:
Fair summer rising up with the sun
Kick off the blankets, and barefoot we’d run
Marking a trail in the grass of dew covered morning
Till one day we woke when September had gone
To chill in the air and frost on the lawn
Somehow the summer slipped by with hardly a warning.
Words in a yearbook – awkward clichés
Scrawled in the margins of simpler days
Promises made by a child – once we were dreamers.
Dropped in the dust with the plans that we made
Marking out cadence in pointless parade
Feeding the fires of the furnace – once we were dreamers.
Tearing off time from the calendar’s face
Pushed to the limit and losing the race
Avoiding the gaze of the eyes looking back from the mirror
Reckless in spending, the child betrayed
The price of the passage is too much to pay
With every echo it seems the answer rings clearer.
Once we were dreamers able to fly
Eternal summer beneath endless sky
Nothing we cared for tomorrow –
Once we were dreamers.
Hmmm. I like some of the lines, but some are pretty stretched. In addition, I'm not sure I like the path that the overall idea takes. The idea is to use poetic imagery to describe growing up - from youthful innocence in the first 8 lines, transitioning to adulthood in the next 9 lines, then middle age regret for lost innocence in the next 9, finally ending with a reprise of the first 4 lines, either a continuation of the sadness or implying a kind of conscious returning to simpler things and a hope for reawakened innocence within.
At this point they're good enough to work with. I'll probably change them before I'm finished, but maybe not. Who knows? I may throw out the whole second part of the song and rewrite it. Well, I won't literally throw it out - it'll be sent off to the island of misfit tunes :-)
continue with part 3: Stuck In the Sixties
Words
and Music
Pictures
Go Home