Check out "Quarantine: The 15-Minute-Musical", composed 5/9/20 in response to a contest sponsored by the National Alliance for Musical Theatre call for NEW 15-minute musicals.
Watch as Quarantina, a corporate executive working from home for two months, unravels in her kitchen.
VIEWER REVIEWS:
"The neurotic Quaratina expresses what we all feel... We are all dancing with our plants..."
"That was amazing!! I loved it - the new normal, 20 seconds and unstoppable. Thank you!"
"So great....!!!!! I was riveted, and so wanted it to go on longer."
"Your humanity and heart beautifully expressed. Walk tall, walk proud..."
"Beautiful voice - love the music & songs! But poor [Quarantina] and her "Planty" and "Turtle" have gone round the bend. As have the rest of us!"
#TrendingOnTwitter [aka: Hashtag Trending On Twitter] is my latest song project.
The idea came to me in December 2019 and I finished writing ten songs by early March 2020. I've made acoustic demos and am currently in the "rehearse and produce" phase... somewhat stalled by the Global Pandemic (but we don't let such things stop us, do we?). I'm going to have to put together a remote band and record from afar. That will be a fun challenge.
I love this project because the idea came to me one night, and then-- all of a sudden-- my song-writing faucet simply turned on. Ten songs came through as though on their own. I think what made it "easy" was the structure of the idea, the limits of it. I gave myself very narrow guidelines, and with that I was able to make creative choices that I would not have otherwise come upon.
What follows is a description of the overall process:
(I may blog about specific songs later, because some interesting things "happened" I'd like to reflect upon.)
To create
the lyrics, I foraged through the collective consciousness
revealed through hashtags that happened to be trending on Twitter -- this took place between December 2019 and January 2020.
My process
for each song was to pick the first
hashtag which happened to be trending on that day. I would click
on the hastag, then simply glance through the various posts which happened to
be hashtagged by far-flung people “out there” who, for whatever reason, decided
to say that particular thing on that particular day and tag it to that
particular hashtag. Enough people must have been thinking about whatever it was
at that particular moment, for it was…as my title indicates…trending… on
Twitter.
BTW, I don’t actually use Twitter a lot, but I happened to check it
one day and came up with the general idea/concept. The rest was only a matter
of follow through.
I derived
my lyrics by culling words from statements and phrases that caught my eye … actually
in the order that they came up on my feed. My lyric-pattern-creating brain
sifted through the raw material and organically decided what would make sense
as a verse or a chorus, a hook or a refrain, a bridge, an intro or a coda, etc.
From some posts I found full sentences (or parts of sentences) that were
evocative, but from other posts I may have gathered only one choice word.
Later on,
in February and March 2020, I explored the material to find rhythms and
melodies through singing and playing guitar. As I developed the music, I
permitted myself to fine-tune the poems, add repetitions, adjust the order or
tweak the grammar as needed to better fit the flow of the emerging music.
Frankly it felt like some of the melodies just appeared to me… through thin
air. The unexpected topics, word combinations and resulting emotions seemed to
call those particular notes out of the aether. I don’t overthink melodies. I
just channel them. At various points when I needed to edit or hone the words to
better fit the music, I went back to the orginal hashtag and found a phrase or
a word that would finish out the lyric puzzle. I only rarely put in my own
words. Yet, now, they are all my words. I claim them for I have breathed them
into brand new context by juxtaposition.
Little by
little, I polished the music and made demo recordings, added percussion, etc.
I think,
in the end, it makes sense that this writing process would have tapped into
universal emotions. Yet, the songs ended up surprising me in how well they
turned out. I like my #TrendingOnTwitter
songs very much. I hope you enjoy them too.
Greetings. It's been a LONG time since I made a "Joy of
Songwriting" blog entry.
If you read the last one, it comes as no surprise. My
"strategic plan" took me away from planning and promotion and for a
few years I dedicated myself to "woodshedding" on my instruments.
There was no way of getting around it.
Beside the fact that my son was in high school and
transitioning into college/career training... that was a rollercoaster
deserving of it's own blog! As well, my
teaching job -- which I had been doing just fine for 15 years -- in the past
five years they have gone BALLISTIC on micromanaging us. Also another blog!
But I digress! It's all good.
I'm HERE now... because... suddenly the desire to write
songs bloomed again. It was like, a fog just cleared and there they were, fully
formed for the taking.
I'll go into that all in a sec... but just a crucial
note... right now... as I write on May 3, 2020, we have been in the midst of a
global pandemic due to the highly contageous Coronavirus Covid-19. Friday March
13 was the last day of "in school" instruction with students. We were
all sent home to teach through "distance learning" (with zero
training), and we muddle through that. So...
even though I'm HOME...(for 6 weeks now!) I still have to put in full days working on
school stuff, creating instructional materials, video-conferencing, learning
how it all works. I'm somewhat fortunate as I gained experience with website
management and YouTube etc over the years because of my music.
The songwriting I'm going to talk about actually started in
December... before the virus. The songs were completed in early March...before
the virus. ... .but the Virus has changed everything.... so... just putting
that out here for context.
Coronavirus topic would be yet another blog!
That's THREE that i've come up with all just in this
introduction. Re-introduction?
Anyhow... I will call this entry "prologue" and
then continue on.
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