May 1sts

 5/1/1992

The Inner King

The eroded plain of this traveled land
Hides footprints of men
Blown by wind driven sand
Sunshine in my heart of light
Without your love
The emptiness encumbers the night

Torn between the forces that surround me
And the king that rules within
May he serve forever fighting
The wars I need to win 

Run through AI. It's sometimes clever how it add treatments to voices, and this one works well as an overlapping loop of verse and chorus where you can have two voices alternating them. I had never thought of doing that. 

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The original scribble. What's better about writing manually is that you're not boxed in by software limitations, as if it was a vending machine. No one's diet could come from vending machines alone. You'd be dead in a year. Manual music-making is the best diet option.

 

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Songday from phrases in Anne Frank's diary, Beatles' studio diary, and a Loudon Wainwright line, as a strange, ironic juxtaposition:

5/1/1943

 “...Tonight the guns have been banging away so much that I’ve already had to gather up my belongings four times. Today I packed a suitcase with the stuff I’d need in case we had to flee, but as mother correctly noted, “Where would you go?”. All of Holland is being punished for the workers’ strikes. Martial law has been declared...” 

5/1/1964

Beatles in the studio 6:30-9:30: taped eight numbers, including ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘You Can't Do That’’Can’t Buy Me Love’.     

Where would you go?
You can’t do that
You better get better
Or else you’re gonna get worse
Can’t buy me love
Can’t buy me love 

5/1/1995 (Mostar) (Brian Eno Diary) “This is the first time I think I’ve seen the face of fascism up close. “We do not want to know this’ - we do not want to know anything that might erode the pristine hardness and simplicity of our picture of the world.” 

5/1/2012

May Day. Arab Spring of OWS protests. 

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You better get better or else you’re gonna get worse.—Loudon Wainwright (From the song “Daughter”)     

5/1/2016

Mirror Rhythms idea

5/1/2022 

What is the sound of a place in an abstract sense? Motown had a sound. Philadelphia had a sound. Memphis had a sound. Glen Campbell “soundtracked” places like Phoenix, Wichita, and Galveston. Chicago doesn’t really have a sound all its own but it has “scored” my life.

5/1/2023

Many of my songs start with words or phrases that have a natural musicality to them, which can become the underlying framework for the music, but very often they end up as instrumentals. If music did in fact precede language in the development of intelligence, then rhythmicity drives it. Obviously, not all language is rhythmic, but when it is, music is more possible. As to tribal African culture, music is only used for tribal rites and storytelling and is not used as it is in the West. But any time we have to describe music (without notation) it has to be with some kind of vocalization, even with nonsense words. Sometimes the nonsense words start to have meaning. 

5/1/2024

I now am beginning to realize that all the new daily entries can become additional “data” for all the Songdays into the future, by me, or others in the future.

5/1/2043
            
 In Reset 2046, Neone has her first child, Sunshyn.

5/1/2046
      
The band is in the studio to write and record a song precisely at the hour of immortality. 

5/1/2059
            
Sunshyn has a baby, with Neone a grandmother at 23.