Monday, February 26, 2018

The Song Should Go Where No Song Has Gone Before


There is a Piano Vocal Chord Book, “Only What We Need, The Songs of Peter Dizozza”
Take it home and enjoy at your parlor piano at your leisure, after dinner, or in this case after dinner and a show. It's dinner theater.

Life goes on while I write songs.
I confront issues with success, with failure,
Revealing my character, and its flaws.
How bad can be the portrait that I paint of myself?
This can be one of many nights.
Tonight we share the Fast and Upbeat songs.
THE 1960s... I barely get a few songs in this decade...
1. A Day (Guitar), anticipating the future in 1969
Other early songs include A Christmas Carol called That's What It's All About. Monica's Yuletides sang it at the Forest Hills Station Square Christmas Eve Celebration. That may be my first song.

I came from a time when the songwriter was glorified. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley didn't write their songs, the Beatles and their friends did.
It's weird now to discover so much of pop songs were played by the same band of musicians, the wrecking crew, but we didn't care about those songs. We only cared about the bands that ostensibly did play their instruments. The Beatles really did, and they played independently together. It's a chamber ensemble. I felt close to them although all I had of them were their albums. Their movies bought them that much closer to me.

Also in the 1960's Burt Bacharach explored radical harmonic progressions, perhaps arising from James Bond Secret Agent music. Radical chord changes. Bacharach enhanced that with asymmetrical rhythm, creating surprise and new momentum. Pop music became asymmetrical. The patterns became hit making. EXAMPLES?

Recovering an Opera, dated from the possibility of writing one.
When did Tommy write The Who, or rather when did The Who write Tommy? It was 1969
Before I heard Abbot and Costello ask Who's on First, my friend Frankie, who was older than me, looked like George Harrison, and played guitar, told me about a band with an un-pronouncable name one day just gave up on it to become The Who,
and they wrote a rock opera where they destroyed their instruments at the end..

In hushed tones, my mother's cousin, Joy, told me about people undressing onstage in Hair. Then we listened to the soundtrack.

I was frustrated by what I was hearing. When I heard something I liked I couldn't find it again and when I heard other things I wanted to improve them. I definitely wanted to write the dialogue for the movies, because they didn't say what I was thinking. Like the girl Mathilda, on Broadway, I wanted to write my own story.

Combining rock intensity/aggression with symphonic fidelity became my preferred approach.
I searched for the illusive song that I heard on WNEW FM.
Radio began playing album tracks, instead of just the hits.

Lyric: I can't seem to get away, I can't seem to know
but somebody up there must not want me to go.

Important lyric:
Say I've Done It with the Help of No One
and the thought of that makes it even more fun,
to think that I have done it alone,
well that is something new.
Oh yeah that is something new.
Because the reality was I was doing very little for myself. Even today I am happy to defer to others, but if no one is going to do it or knows what to do then I'll do it, and that's how I approach songwriting, which is to say, I supply what's missing in music, an ambitious aim.

Oh let me get away from here, you don't know what I've been through.
Oh let me get away from here, I don't know just what to do.
Hey hold on, Hey Hold on. I don't know why you're all so hung up.
Hey hold on, hey hold on. I don't know jus what to say.
So let me go. Oh please just let me go....

The search for the elusive song played once on FM radio became a driving factor in my writing songs.
However, other sound became mine. The song should go where no song has gone before.


Can it work that I am speaking to the phone?

I know what I'm doing! And what I'm doing has a ring of upsetting the table, as if the sound of a bell could upset the table -- that I have some creative thought or new way of looking at things, and communicating that can influence an outcome, can help shape the world as it continues to reformulate.  In a song you have a place to experiment.  It touches upon the random when it is written without training or instruction, but even in the most formulaic formats there is chance, however, as professionals we have left as little as possible to chance. 

I feel today that there is more of a fear or at least a rejection of the random because we live in an intentional world.  We intend to accomplish in an age where chance is no longer thought of as having Integrity, but rather is an act of perversity, like the flip a coin fellow in the Christopher Nolan Batman movie.

But we are on firm footing in the universe.  Believing that is an act of faith. 

When I notate songs I wrote at an early age I see that there is order in the universe.