A full day of work in one new song. 'The Paper King' can't really be adapted to another song easily, so I decided to rework many parts and the broad chord arrangement, but change a lot, including shifting the entire song up 5 semitones. For lyrics, I chose my most recently written song, 'She Held My Hand Under The Desk'. As with all of my songs now, I write the words only, then later fit music to them. To think up a tune and words tends to lead to writing the same song over and over, but this poetic method creates better lyrics and is more challenging.
In this case the original words were:
She held my hand
Under the desk
I was too shy
But I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love
If only I'd known
How lonely I'd be
The love I could give
The love I should have given.
Years later I discovered
She killed herself
Perhaps too lonely
As I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love
If only she'd known
If only she knew
the love we could have shared.
Only I know
the love we could have shared.
I started to fit them into the chord arrangement, and it worked surprisingly well. I had to move some lines into other lines to make everything fit, and change the odd word for scansion. The words are now:
She held my hand
Under the desk
I was too shy
But I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love
If only I'd known
How lonely
I'd be, the love
I could have given
I should have made
In passing years
I found out
Took her own life
Perhaps too lonely
As I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of our love
If only she'd known
If only
She knew, the love
We could have shared
We could have made
And only I know
I only
The loss and the love
We could have shared
We could have made
We could have made
We could have made
The only real accompaniment is an analogue-saw based bassline, which was crafted to fit the melody and give it some rhythm, and a lead synth instrument which acts like a sub-melody. There are some stabbing chords, and a gentle pad sound for the chorus. Unlike 'The Paper King', the melodic lines are adjusted for the circumstance. One thing that's recently grown in my music is the use of standard, staccato, and long sustain versions of each instrument to convey feeling. This is partly the result of my scoring and study of scores. Staccato and sustain can really transform a feeling, and here the bass and main lead have those three versions of each instrument to convey rhythm. The drum pattern, by comparison, is ultra-simple and has almost no bearing on the song rhythm. Rhythm is conveyed by the melodic lines; the whole song sings and dances.
In style and substance, it sounds, as I've said, something like a Yazoo or Alphaville track; perhaps closest to my songs like 'House of Glass'.
I'll complete and record 'The Paper King' too, even though the words and music are silly, and ancient, and simple. 90% of that song is complete, so it won't be much work, and it's very much of its time compositionally, so it can be (like 'Written on Rice') a reflection of those times.
