TME Tuesday: Random, Mundane Song Topics
One of the things that I do in my life is write songs based on random things. I might write a song about the floating plastic bag that danced around my backyard last Friday. I also have a collection of advertisement pictures from the 80's and beyond. I pulled pictures out of magazines, cut around them, and then glued them onto white paper. I keep my images book for inspiration.
There are times when even an image is not enough to get my songwriting juices going. I tend to be someone who needs some sort of inspiration to compose, but there are times when I can get those juices gushing with just a random piece of something. For example, that plastic bag. When I saw it last week, I had an immediate flash to American Beauty, a film that I watched only once because I found it pretty uninteresting, but the bag part stuck. So, I am watching this bag float up and down in the air, trying to get over my fenced backyard, and I could hear music going through my head. I didn't write it down or try to capture it in any way, but the music arrived.
Do you know how there are memes out there that talk about how nice it would be to walk around with a soundtrack to accompany you wherever you go? I think that music therapists have more of that sort of life than others in the world.
I have written many ridiculous songs in my life. I will start with a random topic or object and then write a song about it. I have a Snickers bar song that happened during a workshop I ran in 2005. I have never revisited that song since I wrote it, but it was great fun to write it in the company of about 200 other music therapists. I have written more stupid songs than good ones in my life, and that is perfect. You never know when a stupid song is the way into musicking with a resistant client.
I tend to be someone who finds it easier to work on lyrics than on other aspects of music, so I often start with words. I like writing the occasional poem, and some of them have turned into songs. Others have remained poetry and will never be songs. There are many times when songs come into my head fully formed, though. When they do, I enjoy capturing those songs and sharing them with my clients. Those are the songs that end up being requested by clients more than the ones that I worked over and over again.
This is another way that I use my favorite ever office supply - super sticky post-it notes! I keep them around so I can jot down ideas and solfege outlines for songs. I have lots of little pieces of ideas that I transfer from my car dashboard to my ideas book (in the TME section). I took several of those ideas and completed the composition process for those songs. I still need to transfer them into my composition software before they are complete songs, but at least the melody, harmony, and [shudder] rhythm is notated. All I have to do is transfer it into my program and figure out if I got the rhythm notation correct. (Rhythmic dictation is often my downfall.) When all of that is transferred, then there will be a couple of TMEs ready to publish and share with the world.
In the next four days, I will be moving back into the office that I had from 2017 until last July. While I have enjoyed sharing a space with my interns, I am finding that I really need a space of my own to be creative and to stretch out. I will be transferring two cabinets, my desk, and the large instruments to my office space. For now, though, it is time to take a shower and get started on this day.
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