Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Q's quota/The Thelonius Fabdul sessions

Hello, Agent Q here in my first post...
The first thing I must alert you to is that Stella was incorrect about the chords to "Roaming free in Rome"... She wrote something like G, F, C, when really it's G, C, D, in that order. So that's that.

Today, the eleventh, we've been belting out songs all day, bringing our catalogue to thirty-eight rockin' tunes. (When we reach forty, we're going to do a cover.) Here's a rundown of three of our songs today:

Walpurgishnacht...
...is the german word for the night when the witches come out and rape and castrate the men, and this piece describes just that! Stella supplied the vocals, whilst I, Q, played an oom-pa caliber bassline (one of the first songs Stella taught me on the bass guitar, actually). Short but sweet.

Get off of my property
Our early Nirvana piece. I explained to Stella how to write such a song. I told her, "You just do a riff that goes up and then down a bit, and for the lyrics, you come up with a phrase, sing it, then alter it slightly 3 times and you've got a verse. Then you come up with something a child would say in an argument [in this case, the title], and you've got your chorus." It wrote itself from there.

Pride comes before a fall
I was going through the CDs in our living room, looking for a band we hadn't "done" yet. And I came up with an easy one: Radiohead. So I said to Stella, "What's a cliche they haven't used?", and she suggested the title. So, keeping it in mind, I started with the word "We" and wrote from there...

We've seen your kind before...
You've seen one, you've seen 'em all...
It doesn't take a lion to know...
Pride comes before a fall...

Quit while you're ahead, kid...
Drive yourself home...
Just don't kid yourself, kid...
Grow a little backbone...

I was impressed with my ability to squeeze 7 cliches into 8 lines, if you want to know the truth.

In another note, we had my friend Thelonius Fabdul over for a few sessions yesterday. We did what was supposed to be a Slipknot-type song called "Boa"...but we realized afterward that we forgot to include excessive percussion (Slipknot has nine members, two of whom play percussion). Our next one was similar, we decided to do a song that would incite riots. What came of it, though, was a song designed to sound like the voice in your head (and everybody has one) that tells you to kill! Kill! KILL! We called it "The Urn", and here's the words:

I pass the torch to thee,
Child of armageddon,
Orphaned brat of the new millenium,
Insolent anarchist with gum,
Chew on the cud of your mindless future

Go forth and do my bidding,
You know I'm not kidding
The children of tomorrow
Will thank me when this is done

Set the city alight
Watch the fires burn
The ashes of the bygone world
Shall be carried in the Urn

Go forth and do my bidding,
You know I'm not kidding
The children of tomorrow
Will thank me when this is done


The last song we did with Thelonius was titled "The sense of love". We were aiming for a song of the same ilk as "Garden of love", but of course, all we could really do was come up with repulsive words we didn't use last time. For example: taste, honey, dove, supple, nectar, slip, feathers, the phrase "let me", and that's just the first verse! Of five!

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