I – III7 – vi – I7 – IV – iv – I – V

(“Siren Song” by Stella Stillwell)

For a minute there our language was music. And we didn’t really know what we were trying to say or why but were said to be good at songwriting.

Not just said by The Grandma (who gave me her guitar and record collection) but musicians, better ones, sometimes famous ones.

Our goal was to seek out ways to convey some nuanced emotions while being accessible.

Nah, that’s not it.

Like we said: no idea what the goal was. But sounding new without sucking must have been part of it.

Being fanatically on guard against doing the same-old mediocrity: that trite, cliched, basic, belabored crap everyone else does while thinking it’s special or needed or pleasant in some way because it came from them.

Terrified of exhibiting that sort of pathetic bias that seemed to plague almost every other musician we knew or saw in the coffee houses we frequented; how self-entranced in their spells, eager to project that “We sound like (famous name) but slightly worse” nonsense to their world. We suspected we were in that category, but it’s impossible to know you’re “good” unless you make it all the way, which we didn’t, allegedly.

For us, “new music that didn’t suck” meant new chord/melody combos and that’s it. That’s ALL we focused on to the point of fixation. Just the bones. Abnormally so. Weirdly. Fatally. Catastrophically.

We still certainly did have some appreciation for the framing: the texture, timbre, instrumentation, rhythm, groove, phrasing, lyrics. But it was secondary.

Most have that reversed: people LUV that stuff we just mentioned—the goop around the chord/melody payload.

Messing with those sonic variables is sometimes a key reason for how “new while not sucking” gets done.

We were and are devastated by the breathy weightless sheen of Gilmour’s “the distant ship smoke / on the horizon,” or Mojo Risin’s shadowy-sex hypnosis Soft Parading its way through our subconscious terrain without bothering to wipe its feet. The stately libertine organs mad-swirling thru Procol Harum’s Shine On, or the fun-effortless muscularity of any given bar of D’yer Mak’er. Sympathy for the Devil emits acrid centuries of grown-ass pain and beads of pheromones wet the windows of our windowless Liebnizian monads. The haltingly how-the-hellism on display in Wilco’s Radio Cures, the naked, interminable, obnoxiously flawless execution had us nostalgic for cozy childhood flus. The goofily emo stanzas of Bowl of Oranges tinged our tongues with salt we didn’t see coming. The Kinks’ uncannily disobedient Australia, Syd Barrett’s Opel, Big Star’s Stroke it Noel. Crimson and fucking Clover. O-o-ver and o-o-ver.

The feels, doll, not the mere theory. Yes, we really do get it, the window dressing, on the window letting in the plaintiff barbwire breeze insisting we miss bitterly the sisters and prisoners we’ve never seen. But again, all still secondary in our book.

What really gets us going is the chord progression.

Stripped of accoutrement. That’s the fetish; freebasing the bones of the thing.

Here’s some bones below. Let it dissolve slowly in your broth.

This old friend is very common and balances sophistication with singability. Not new at all, but holds newish melodies sometimes. We’d get it as a tattoo if we weren’t nervous about staff infections. 😜

I – III7 – vi – I7 – IV – iv – I – V

This primordial line of chordal prayersmanship gets the unmapped (unmappable?) body parts settling, releasing, while something else subs in for the breathing, purring. Let’s look at it a sec.

So right off the bat: Don’t know of a more ordinary place to start a journey than dumb old C Major. So let the first step in our 8-bar be a sophisticated tip of the hat from C to E7. Unironically.

It wounds us sweetly if we recognize it from that time we went from C to E7 in life. As in not F, not G, not “just staying on C.” Not directly to Am. Not melodramatically to the adjacent D minor.

But to a sadly smirking E7; goofy, holy, versatile, ineffably dramatic, tin-pan-alley-tired dominant dominatrix of a 3-chord. We’ve been paying for that chord choice ever since.

And we’re still just getting started. But that bit of shrewd, impulsive E7-ish three-seven-ESQUE calculus had us not knowing whether to say “sorry” or “you’re welcome” to the “audience.”

We still don’t. And that’s okay. So instead, we say A minor…

Or more specifically:

E7 → Am for emotional movement sans sounding jazzy or academic, G-d forbid

C7 → F for classic bluesy tension, the old familiar surprise and surrender

F → Fm → C for Nowhere Gal’s melancholy sag into the inevitable

C → G waits loyally, the indomitable reset, we live another day to do the same damn thing. (With a slightly different baseline.)

Nestled in this 8-bar fuselage a precocious bass line can make out like a bandit. Let that be a lesson to you, Grandma.

A bass line to stalk the sublime with the wide-open berth of a snow leopard, covering vast swaths of temporal real estate in a floaty, bouncy, soaring Greek chorus of one. Framing the Cloud Giant, darting in and around its celestial strides thru hallowed halls like cherubs in tuxedos, a.k.a. Paul McCartney on a regular Tuesday in the mind of God.

Not sure what we’re trying to say here or why.

Maybe this: The 3-minute pop song will have a place in our hearts but not our futures. There are things best said by being left unsaid. But are those things best unsaid yet said as things not said in said-like ways? Now? What with the world doing all this worlding?

Imagine all the people / living in a world that’s heard the song Imagine seven billion-fold and continue to behave unimaginatively in spite of it.

The ache in our non-dualist soul has moved onto more concrete things. Songs are maybe not the best way to say.

We can’t feed a village by going from C to E7. We couldn’t. We didn’t. We won’t.

(Whole rest)

We loved the bones. We still do. We worshiped the bones so hard we forgot the body. But now the body’s starving. And the bones still hum but no one’s listening except us. Me, and maybe you.

🎵