名作記

終えた

I went to Café Caffeine tonight to see if I could eke out one more lyric. Unfortunately, there was a crowd at a nearby table making a lot of noise. I couldn’t concentrate, and it was about an hour before that party dispersed.
Even after everything had gone quiet, I came to the realization I just didn’t have anything. When the lyric I wrote last night began with the frank assessment, "I think I’m running out of steam", I kind of knew the streak was ending.
It didn’t help that last night, I started to pluck out some melodies for these songs.
So even though I feel far short of the intended 24-26 lyrics I wanted prepared, 16 is no number to sneeze at either. I’ve got a nice cushion with which to narrow down to 12. Or I could use all 16. Just as likely, I could end up scrapping half of them and require another session of marathon writing to make up for the deficit.
Regardless, I’ve got the seeds for 16 completely new songs. This work isn’t stuff that had a genesis elsewhere — no unfinished sketches, no reworked versions. It will be the work that reflects who I am as a writer at this point of time.
Scary, isn’t it?

「言葉はハートを刺す刀になる」 (June 2007)

Even in Japanese, that’s a wordy song title. It translates to "words become swords that pierce the heart." Profound, no? Once again, I didn’t have a gimmick going in, so I wrote the first line — the first stanza, really — and let everything else come afterward.
When it reached a point where a chorus would come in, I pulled out that clever gimmick of the bilingual chorus. It will, unfortunately, pose quite a challenge when the music gets written.

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「結果」 (June 2007)

I set out to write a lyric which makes no reference to a perspective — no first-person, no second-person, barely a third person. It’s really harder than you think. As usual, I really make no effort to make much sense, although a friend’s bad news seems to have influenced some of the verses.

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私は作詞者です

So I’ve updated this site more in the last week than I have since the beginning of the year. What gives? Well, I’m making good on a promise to write lyrics for the next Eponymous 4 project before I tackle the music. Now that I have a laptop, I’ve actually taken it to coffeehouses where I can do nothing but concentrate on the task. No TV to lure me away, no vast library of MP3s to distract me.
Back in high school, I was writing lyrics before the music because that’s how I thought Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran did it. I had a big binder of stuff, but I tossed most of it out by my senior year. I found them kind of trite. Not that I’ve improved much as a lyric writer in the convening years.
Honestly, I’m far more comfortable with prose than with verse. I can be breezy and informal with prose. But with verse, I can never shake this self-imposed requirement to go for the profound. And being restricted by the confines of rhythm? What a drag.
But I’m barreling ahead anyway, and I’m concentrating on quantity more than quality. In fact, I aim to write twice as many lyrics as required. I’m aiming for another 12- or 13-track album, which means I need to produce at least 24 to 26 lyrics. I figure a good number of them will end up with really crappy music, and whatever is left makes the album.
Here’s what I’ve managed to dish out so far. My gimmick is to title as many songs as possible in Japanese, even though I’m writing in English. It’s the inversion of Japanese songwriters who use English in their song titles. This list shows the Japanese title, the furigana reading in Romaji (where applicable) and the English translation.

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「スレノヂー」 (June 2007)

Even written completely in English, these lyrics make absolutely no sense at all. And that’s how I like it. I seriously don’t know whether I’m using the correct Japanese sentence patterns. I’m fairly certain the stem+始める pattern is how I want to convey "starting to blank." And the informal use of しまった is meant to convey an unexpected happening, because the first half of each line describes an event, which the second half then contradicts.
If I screw up, then we’ll have Japoneezu — the Japanese answer to Engrish.
Oh, and the title is a transliteration of the word "threnody." It’s as good a title as any.

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