Weekly Newsletter #3 (11.04.2025)

Four for the Rook

The new song is progressing well; the lyrics I have assembled so far are:

Intro: Ten seeds are in a row
Lying in the earth below
Which of them will start to grow
And which of them will fail to show

Verse 1: ‘Cause there’s four for the rook
And there’s three for the crow
Then there’s two that’ll wither in the heat of the sun
Leaving one that’s sure to grow

Verse 2:
And though it seems a shame
It’s such a wasteful game
To start with all those seeds there in a row
To finish with just one that grows

Oh, but that one seed. 
Is all the earth needs
Before those winter winds and spring showers
Bring along those summer flowers

Mm… Mm… Mm…
 

Although I have labelled the sections above as verse 1, verse 2 etc I don't feel that this is a song which conveniently fits into the verse/chorus structures which usually underpin my songs. Of course, it may do - I'm not ruling anything out at this stage. The “Oh but that one seed” line is already starting to feel like a chorus.

I originally had “Before those March winds and April showers bring along those May flowers” but I felt this was lazy lyric writing and strayed perilously close to Disney prettiness. I often feel that song ideas are like people knocking on my door. Some ideas I will instantly slam the door on with a firm “Not today, thank you!” but some I will welcome in for a cup of tea and a biscuit. The "March winds" idea fell between those two extremes; I knew that something was wrong but was prepared to accept the line for want of anything better. Once I had “winter winds and spring showers” this ticked all the boxes and was welcomed over the threshold. Apart from anything else it contains some nice alliteration and onomatopoeia; you can almost hear the wind whistling in the tree-tops in “winter wind” and the gentle splash of raindrops in “spring showers”.

I originally ran straight on from “one that's gonna grow” to “Oh, but that one seed” but listening back to my transcription (using the score-writing software Sibelius) I realised that the "one seed" line needs to be placed a little later in the song and that inserting another verse here would do that job. Incidentally the tune for “Oh, but that one seed is all the earth needs” is quite an earworm and one which I plan to capitalise on in the arrangement.

I am often asked which comes first in my songs: the tune or the lyrics. The simple answer is that I work on them both simultaneously. As lyric ideas arrive I listen to the tune inherent in the words so that when I have a complete set of lyrics I also have the tune. I also have a pretty good idea of the arrangement with vocal hamonies, changes of instrumentation and other tricks I have learned over the years. For instance an idea that occurs to me for the intro is to have a solo voice singing the first line then gradually add an extra harmony voice for each line so that  “And which of them will fail to show” will be in four part harmony. This intro is rather like those in a few early songs by the Beatles such as “If I Fell”, “Do You Want to Know a Secret” and “Here There and Everywhere” - a trick they learned from songwriters of the 1930s and 1940s.

Wake Up!

I am not good at multitasking with creativity. So while “Four for the Rook” is in my mind I am merely doing mundane but essential work on “Wake Up!”. I am steadily accumulating a wealth of AI-generated images and have laid down markers for every word of the song so that images can be synced more easily and exactly.