High School Music Project

Yesterday I finally got to listen to those records I bought at the library a month ago. Great Stuff. The Wild Swans single was excellent, hardly as synth-heavy as the plain, almost sterile cover led me to believe. They play around with the speed of the vocals, and the b-side, 'Revolutionary Spirit,' with the vocals slowed-down, reminded me of the music project we had to do in my last year of high school.

We had to write and record two songs, one a possible graduation song, and the other a song about anything. Being the only one in my group who could play an instrument, I took my guitar to my computer whiz groupmate Luigi (who is now doing molecular biology or something at UC Davis) to record our songs on his computer. At the time I was very interested in city blues-type music, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, etc., so I decided that our graduation song be a blues song, with me trying to be Clapton. There was no drum track. I first played a couple of minutes of that standard A blues riff, that dun-da-dun-da-dun-da-dun stereotypical blues thing and later on overdubbed guitar solos. We added our vocals using a computer program with a digitized voice that reads aloud whatever you type into it. It was such a horrible song. The lyrics were terrible, and the music had no recognizable time signature, and my playing was one horrible blues cliche after another, but we got that song out of the way pretty quickly.

The second song I wanted to take seriously. At the time I was just getting in to the Velvets, so I wanted to do something around a Sterling Morrison-type, Waiting for the Man/Creedence-Fortunate Son lick. I wasn't getting anywhere with the melody, so Luigi and I worked on the lyrics first. Writing verse is one of the most uncomfortable things to do in the world for me, because I feel that if I can't sound like Shakespeare or something, then it just sounds plain hokey and so it's better to make it sound just plain absurd. We first considered a really stupid Lord of the Rings lyric a la Zeppelin. After that Luigi and I randomly looked up words in the dictionary. One lyric was going to go, 'With the transmisometer I measured the transmundane light.' So it's alliterative for a reason, we were looking through T then!

In the end, I used the lyrics from a game I would play at the time with my cousin Meg. I would have a guitar and tell her to name anything she saw in the room and I would make a song up about it on the spot. One time she was eating a muffin, so she told me to make a song up about a chocolate chip muffin. The lyric went, 'eat a chocolate chip muffin, eat a turkey with stuffing, you go home with nothing.' So we used that horrible lyric for our project! As for the 'melody' I ended up making it what was in my mind a Sonic Youth kind of thing. I'm not sure if I'd messed around with the tuning of the guitar, but in hindsight it sounds nothing like Sonic Youth, just very noisy and unlistenable.

So where do the Wild Swans come in? Well, last night, I remembered our song, and thought that with the digitized voice and the weird, culinary stream-of-consciousness lyric, it would have made a pretty good new wave tune, if only I'd been into new wave at the time. Long story about nothing. In defense of Luigi's good taste, I did virtually all of the shitty lyrics.