Neil Fein's Blog

Wrote it, learned it, played it, now I'm reworking it. It sounds good on piano and guitar, using a layering of the harpichord/piano sounds.

I'll Wait For You is killer on piano. I'm working on how to orchestrate the bass, piano and acoustic guitar together; this will make it onto my solo disc if it comes out well. And I get to have fun with left-hand technique; the bass lines are pretty standard, 1-3-4-5 quarter notes for the most part. But it's fun.

Interruption: I just bought a keyboard, a Kawai ESX 88-Key digital piano. I've been spending the past week re-learning all my old piano licks, and having a wonderful time. Between that and a sore throat last week, I've not been doing any writing. I hope to change that, and have something for this Monday.

Jack Hardy said, at the last Greenwich Village Songwriter's Exchange: "This is not group therapy." Of course, a songlet I Am Not Your Therapist popped into my head on the way home.

A lot of this is starting to take root and work subconsciously. While the last GVSE itself wan't very helpful, on the drive home (I see a pattern) I thought, the problem with this song as it stands is, who cares what happens to this whiny guy in the song? The fact that the plot isn't very clear doesn't help the situation.

In instrumental news, "Rock Creek" has fallen by the wayside, as has "On the Mall (Recessional)". I think that an equivalent to the Songwriter's Exchange focusing on instrumentals — or even just on the music — might not be a bad idea if I can find enough musicians locally interested.

The GVSE is enormously schizophrenic about how they handle music. On the one hand, I've gotten some good music ideas from them, but criticizing the music seems to be a fallback when one can't figure out what to say about the words. It seems to me both should be given equal footing, really. But most of them are indeed folk musicians and the words do take priority in that genre. As a rock musician, my focus is on both: I want to produce music that illuminates thougtful lyrics.

To paraphrase Gene Wolfe: I'm looking to produce work that will cause the listener to want to hear this again — and get more from it each time. I'm not there, yet, but I've got the "thoughtful" part down.

I wrote on 28 August that I would have to rip out about half of Dance in my Kitchen. I've done that (redone the kitchen ?) by: Deletintg the first two stanzas, sunstantially reworking the next two, and both prechoruses got deleted and replaced. (The first one with a redone version of the first two stanzas.) So it all makes sense, I think. It gets a little too clever in spots with lots of interconnected wordplay and internal rhymes (I actually had to pull out a rhyme, it got to be too much in one spot) but it works in context.

After playing Dance in front of Jack's group, I decided it was good. I followed up in a couple of more spots -- good criticism from the Songwriter's Exchange. For example, getting rid of "contused" -- there are indeed better, non-medical ways to indicate emotional scars. I also got rid of "eyeballs" inan earlier round of changes. Perhaps a song about unrequieted love, using all medical terms...? That would be odd. (I think Monty Python did a Medical Love Song.)

If I still like Dance this weekend, I'm done with the song. It will be, to speak, The Compleat Dance In My Kitchen. At the least, abandoned and myself stubbornly refusing to revisit it.

I hope.

The end bit of the title -- It's a really nice rhyme.