SCP #59: My Grandmother's Earrings
One of the difficulties with this project is that each day's work is brand new. Starting from a seed, a new piece of music must be realised in whatever time I have available that day. This means that more complicated ideas that need some time to workshop are not really compatible with the way I'm working right now. There is the possibility of writing a song in sections, adding or revising sections with each new day's work, and this would be within the rules I've set myself. So far, however, I haven't worked like this, as I'm finding myself excited by the possibility of doing something new each day. I'm only 16% of my way through the project, so perhaps that will change as I find myself running out of ideas that can be executed in a day.
This song came out of the writing exercises I abandoned when working on #58, so instead of taking something from the previous day's finished song I took something from the work that led up to it. This gave me time to think over what had not been working with these ideas, and I was able to approach them the following day with a fresh perspective.
The day before I had drafted the story of the song into three sections:
- In the bedroom getting ready for a date, and dinner starts burning on the stove
- In the hallway with the smoke alarm going off when the doorbell rings
- In the kitchen making baked beans on toast instead
I had also conducted a two minute writing exercise for each section, evoking some of the sensory details present in the song's world, and this is where I picked up. The main difficulty I'd had the day before was fitting the lyrical ideas with music. The story is quirky, and I was having a hard time finding the right balance between sincerity and comedy. I'm not quite sure I got there, but I'm fairly pleased with the result. Like piece #58, the key ideas in this one all came from my FOIL mind map, which I'll share again below, as it's quite interesting to see how the (often unrelated) ideas in the map could be manipulated into a song: