Working on some music sequences today, tidying up the rough notes and transforming them into longer songs.
Nowadays I tend to work slowly on songs and focus on the lyrics and music separately at first; both should be good in their own right, then I modify the music and mood to fit the words. If you don't hear or understand the words of a song, the music should evoke them so that you can feel what the words mean and what the song is about. The melody should be catchy enough to hum, and sound pretty when played solo on an old piano. Conversely, the words should be good enough to work as award-winning poems.
In the night I wrote a few words to a very short 3/4 melody, a song called Eyes of Pity. It is very simple musically and structurally, verse/chorus/verse/chorus... it needs more. I've spent today working on this, and music for a second new song called Hitler in High Heels, which is also very simple musically (but at least has a few interesting chords and a beat which fits the mood perfectly).
Here is the first draft of the Eyes of Pity lyrics:
Eyes of Pity
When you look at me
I can only see
your eyes of pity.
I am full of love,
I am full of need,
but you reject me.
And yet you're more damaged than I
All you have is beauty
See how sympathetic I am?
I look at you with my empathetic eyes
and all I see is beauty
yet you still reject me
When your beauty dies
the world will look at you
with eyes of pity,
but I won't do that,
I don't think,
because I'll love you;
and I feel that I'll remember you for the next twenty years
and it will cause me sorrow.
See how romantic I am?
I look at you with my desperate intelligent eyes
but all I see is pity.
Your pity.
