Category: Song-a-Day 2021

New song “I had to leave the house today”

I had to leave the house today x2
Why does it have to be this way
I had to leave the house today
oh how it grieves me 
when no one believes me
when I am trying my best
I was in a muddle
in bed in a puddle
but I found clean clothes and I got dressed!

My list is seven metres long x2
Life affords no quarter
it never gets shorter
My task list's seven metres long

bridge
I sing a song the substance of which
everybody knows
there's too much of it - 
and adulting BLOWS

One day I will get sick and die x2
Sounds kinda peaceful I won't lie
One day I will get sick and die x2
I sometimes worry
I'll leave in a hurry
And you won't have seen me at my best
But all that I ask
is you divide up my tasks
if you want to volunteer please be my guest!

I had to leave the house today x2
Why does it have to be this way
I had to leave the house today
oh how it grieves me 
when no one believes me
That I was trying my best
I got out of bed
and did what I said
Now please act like you are impressed.
Alternate final three lines:
But no one supposes
my face when the door closes
behind me and I finally get a rest

last updated 12 jan

ermagerdke

Just blocked another GD bot on bluesky they are all

The muse walked up and punted me hard musta been Terpsichore doing a kick-turn of some vigour and this fell out I can hear a banjo a hi hat and bass drum and a stand up bass

I am not Dean Winchester

I don’t have a thing for brunettes

but then you’re not a person really

You are a bot-pretending to be——a brunette

Dean would kill you if he knew you were a bot

Dean Winchester kills monsters and a human you are not

kill the bot – kill the bot – kill the bot – kill the bot –

it’s a monster it’s a monster it’s a monster kill the bot

 

I am not Dean Winchester

I don’t get to die and come back

I put you down a dozen times a day and motherfucker

bot you come back

Season 10 Dean would just gank you like a djinn

but Dean is up in heaven where you bots just can’t get in

 

kill the bot – kill the bot – kill the bot – kill the bot –

it’s a monster it’s a monster it’s a monster kill the bot

set of steps – new poem / song

YES I WROTE A SONG IN G#/Ab and I’m working on Uke chords…. I tightened the bottom string half a tone:::: and VOILA no more stretching my pinky like Elastoman’s dick stuck in a door.

An algorithm is a series set of steps
A set series of steps
Designed to get you to a certain place
what do I call how I got this way
I point and mimic and then I say
I’m
a set of steps in process
I
have not reached my the objective
It’s just as near and far
As the products of a star
I’m just a set of processes in tandem
Reaching for something
That looks like an objective.

And I said hold up, wait, wait a minute, stop
hold up, wait, wait a minute, stop
I said, hold up, wait, wait a minute
stop

Just getting here? my line
Went from being mats of slime!
To sitting on cardboard with a dog
begging for a dime!
The weight of my brain
On my neck
Is driving me insane
But I’m a set of steps
Flying in close formation
All my trials and tribulations
Are a set of steps

The algorithm looks a bit like plot
But it’s really not
And everything you grab on the way by
Is fleeting as the mood of the sky
I didn’t make the rules that I’m I am forced to live by
But something happened a long way back
You don’t always defend Don’t always play defence
Sometimes you can roll attack
Attack all the things that are holding you back
And
get a new (x3)
set of steps

You can’t erase
Or sponge off wipe out the old ones
They remain, they make themselves plain
They go through the same shit (steps, if you can’t swear) again and again
(They bleed through our whole lives again and again alternate line)
You don’t have free will and you can’t abstain
From the old set of steps

You don’t have free will
but something cunning and false
You can’t be mistaken for anyone else
The gametes roll/ed like invisible dice
And this part (snare slap) is almost automatic

(here follows a 2 minute percussive guitar solo, often omitted

to represent

ahem

the mating dance)

You can’t escape the way you were made
Nor will folks in the future I’m very much afraid
If we fuck with the steps they will fuck right back
(If we mess with the steps they will mess right back)
And we aren’t prepared to take steps like that

New song – Vancouver mods

Vancouver mods I hate ‘em with a passion
they’re one and all irration
al
Vancouver mods, they do bad things to ferrets
their brains are mushy carrots
I hate them, I hate them
I hope their dearest loved ones all catch hollow heels and die
I hope they get diseases where their torsos meet their thighs!
Spontanyusly combust and thus completely carboNIZE
May all the just and mighty gods
decorticate Vancouver mods
and in conclusion fuck Vancouver mods

vancouver mods

The TwoX mods, those jerks are even worse

The AITA mods please don’t get me started

=====================================

Mike warned me about them but I just cannot believe the rationale for removing my post. My response is childish and quite enjoyable at least to me, and nobody is getting hurt.

Leo and Linda very kindly took us to the Foreshore. Jeff’s got a bug of some description. He crashed hard yesterday afternoon and retired to his room.

RIP Creede this one’s for you

It’s two in the morning, I just wrote and orchestrated an entire song in my head, and I’m crying so hard my snerking can be heard in the next county.

 

Herewith ‘The Parting Gift’ a bluegrass song for Creede Lambard

Opens with banjo and the bass sneaks in, other instruments following, everyone’s playing and singing together on ‘and now the train is boarding’ to maximize harmonies and audio density

Your voice gone from the room
Your song is a recording
Not much to lift the gloom
And now the train is boarding

bass really booms, all the other instruments wire weave; the voices on top are angry and desperate

I’m glad, I’m glad
that the batteries are dead
the times we had
always better in always better in my head

Instrumental break, starting with the bass, then to mandolin, then to octave mandolin, then to banjo, then a polyphonic explosion as they all try to outshout each other.

Much sparser accompaniment and vocal arrangement, with the voices taking turns.

I lost my final home
Soon after you had left us
And now I’m doomed to roam
With the dark songs that you gave us
Only my voice I lift
My mandolin is gone
It is your parting gift
I remember you in song

Much longer and more subdued instrumental break, everybody calming down and being sad and politely taking turns.

I’m glad, I’m glad
that the batteries are dead
the times we had
always better in always better in my head

 

 

for banjo, mandolin, octave mandolin, upright bass and at least four voices, all tenors and altos but if there’s a true ‘black hole’ bass voice I’ll allow it.

Suzanne plus Alex plus Katie

& I spoke with Mike today. The cup is full, the house is much cleaner. I love the world right now and need to sleep.

New Kaos: b.38/g10/bpm20/C_/gyp (music for a video game, a slow heartbeat sound quite ominous) … can you tell Alex was playing with it today and got me all inspired. Absolutely shredded Gelis and Niccolo today, I got sounds a guitar doesn’t readily make.  And I wrote a hundred words today, and washed the rugs, and made Alex lunch, and watched Elementary with Jeff. This is what a successful day looks like.

Weather quite variable today but mostly not windy, and warm.

COVID is still kicking the world’s ass. Monkeypox is established in at least twenty countries with a thousand known cases and an obscured iceberg of infections not currently recorded or understood; plus the presentation is different than the textbooks which is really not helping.

I grieve with Ukraine, what an unholy mess.

Didn’t he die?

Trust me to sing something cheerful about my grandad dying. Katie sings this every once in a while, at least I’ve heard her once. I don’t see why I can’t sing something cheerful about a dead relative; thinking about Denny, who left us on this day in 1995, always cheers me up, because he himself was a cheerful individual, and he’s a part of a lot of people I love.

The lyrics should be pretty self-explanatory. Didn’t he sounds like didden tee in a lot of Canadian dialects.

It’s International Polyamory Day!

The tune. When I wrote it in 2012 I whined about how I can’t stop writing songs in 3/4 time, but now I understand it’s a very white time signature (percussionists loathe it, so says the filk circle LOL), so it’s okay. Is it not hilarious how out of date this song is already?

Here are the lyrics:

Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
I won’t force you into a pair
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
Your talent’s exceedingly rare
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
I tell you, for I truly care
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
A skillset like yours should be shared

In this life there’s a bias for binary thoughtless
It starts with your left hand and right
Couple Up and De-Couple!
sells novels, moves clickbait with
Tropes that are tragic and trite.
Whatever your naughty bits com-mu-ni-ca-tion
is key to affairs of the heart
so when delineating polyamory
that is the place that I start

Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
I won’t force you into a pair
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
Your talent’s exceedingly rare
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
I tell you, for I truly care
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
A skillset like yours should be shared

You don’t make assumptions or fail to do check-ins
When you’re angry you use your words
You try not to judge, but when something goes ‘squick’
you are quick to say that’s for the birds
You rarely make promises, but you will keep them
on that your friends may be assured
and you’re made out of action, instead of excuses
a life style choice I much prefer

Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
I won’t force you into a pair
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
Your talent’s exceedingly rare
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
I tell you for I truly care
Be mine, be mine, and be somebody else’s
A skillset like yours should be shared

But only if you you really want to….

Two free birthday songs

Jeff asked me to write a copyright free b-day song, so have TWO. One’s the chorus of the Tapioca song (which see) and the other was purpose built.

PS happy birthday to me. My apologies if I’m not actually alive, and gosh I guess I died young.

(I posted this in March and it finally went ‘live’ today, as did I when I awoke at 2 am.)

ow

Poor Keith has had his first migraine. His migraines are pure pain that drugs don’t touch and light sensitivity – the classic. Not like me and my personality changes and auditory hallucinations!!!

Katie is very tired of being pregnant, but very much enjoying only having one child… so that’s fun.

Paul is about the same as always, but he’s seeing a therapist, which is great, because couples therapy was always super gross.

I still feel massively stuck and unreplenished, which is stupid, because I had a very good time last night in a painful way (we were talking about therapy, anger, parental and childhood experiences, and it got…. well how do you think discussions like this go? except we all stayed civil.) I cried of course but it wasn’t in response to anything the kids said, I just burst into tears describing the worst moment of my childhood. And I kept trying to stifle the tears and finally I grunted I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M STILL MAD ABOUT THIS.

Since mOm and pOp will be reading this with horror, it’s about the move to London, which (for an autie kid with trouble making friends meant that the entire cohort of public school kids I was supposed to go to high school with VANISHED and I walked alone at the age of 11 into a 2000 student high school although I never was schooled in a portable thank the living Christ) seriously messed me up for years. I am over it, but we were talking about childhood, and with Tom being so recently passed away I’m four seconds from tears at the best of times. I mean, normally I look at it from the parents’ perspective “EH wot can you DO ?” but this time I reexperienced it from my childish perspective and WHOOPPPPSy

Alex was playing in his room the whole time.

Jeff is SO GLAD he didn’t go for supper, although let me tell you brO Keith put on a helluva feast and there was PIE not PUMPKIN afterward.

Then I came home and practised for a while and started hacking around on a song.

Didn’t mean well
when I said those things
I’ve got a talent
for making sure it stings
It’s no cause for pride
I say sorry a lot
sometimes it seems
Spite is all that I’ve got

 

Feed the bears

Early each day to her Whistler back yard
The little old bear woman comes
In her own special way to the people
She calls, “Come, feed the bears, all you bums!”

“Come feed the local bears, show them you care
And you’ll be glad if you do
Their young ones are hungry, their dens are so spare
All it takes is two grand from you.”

“Feed the bears, two grand a pop
Two grand, two grand, two grand a pop!
Feed the bears!”, that’s what she cries
While drones from BCCOS fill the skies.

 

 

Based on the news item which stated that Zuzana spent a bomb on feeding bears human food in Whistler and got fined 60K. Her male co-conspirator skated.

 

As I was compos(t)ing this parody, some witless asshole drove up and down Kingsway on a motorcycle wound up to about 9K. This town needs an enema.

Half an hour after that (it’s one in the MORning people) a chopper buzzed the house.

 

stone sighting

There is a dive bar in Charlotte
North Carolina
and to that bar a man went to drink
and the photo of him that hit
next morning on the internet
made the owner yell
and the patrons cuss
it was fun for the rest of us
Cause that man was Mick Jagger (aetat 78)
and he drank a beer and left.

The owner a man whose name is
(of course) Brian Wilson
was putting his five year old
daughter to bed
Now I may be a hapless simp
for men who do their duty
by their children when they’re missing
a chance to meet Mick Jagger
….But I have to say he
comes off pretty good.

I once drank a brand of beer
called Thirsty Beaver
which is also the name
of the dive bar of this song
and everything about this story
makes me happy
It’s unlikely that I’ll ever go
to Charlotte but you never know
and after I will say like Mick
I drank a beer and left

Based on a photo Mick posted on his twitter which since I’m not on twitter any more I can’t see to verify and this.

solstice sound poem with Alex

This is not a song. I am only peripherally in it – at one point you can hear my phlegmy cough, sorry about that lol. This is so my mOm can hear her grandson’s voice babbling and laughing any time she wants. It’s two and a half minutes of sonic mayhem. it was the winter solstice….

 

Thorfinn’s Song – Dunnett filk from King Hereafter

CW SPOILERS FOR KING HEREAFTER

This is also called ‘The Standard of a Crow’ but GOSH it really should be a raven. The novel this comes from is King Hereafter, and it’s her take on Macbeth. It is a f)cking amazing novel; Viking and Christian life is shown in detail, and there are so many amazing battle sequences… it’s a lively book, with a love story at its heart and a really interesting and quiet depiction of the friendship between men as one of its many pleasures.

You don’t want to have find rhymes for raven. that’s why it’s a crow. AND FILK.

Please note that the previously published lyrics for this have been superseded by the lyrics shown below. OBVIOUSLY THESE ARE SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOK

The MP3 file is for the first two verses and choruses.

When you’re deep down in it       (Note: battle rage)
As deep as you know how to go
There’s no end, once you begin it
Your foster father taught you so
It’s a dream, it’s a trap
For no matter how far down you go
You must rise up for the next battle
And stand under the standard of a crow

Pull the axe from my battered hands (forty miles a day, o!)
There was a lot of blood, not all of it mine (ridin’ in the rain, o!)
I am good at killing men (make a joke, run him through, o!)
If you would follow me, now you must ride (ride, ride, ride)

It isn’t wise to ask them  (note: seers and fortune tellers)
Folks seeking comfort are rarely wise
The seer said I’d take half the battle
And mocked me for the doubt in my eyes
It’s a dream, my heart rattled
I saw her eyes, like oxblood on snow
Hers the first face that I am seeking
Standing on my stirrups, underneath the standard of a crow

Pull the axe from my battered hands (forty miles a day, o!)
There was a lot of blood, not all of it mine (ridin’ in the rain, o!)
I am good at killing men (make a joke, run him through, o!)
If you would follow me, now you must ride (ride, ride, ride)

She has an errand, seaward (note, he asks her to say goodbye to the sea for him, because he was a frickin’ Viking after all)
I die on land an aged fool
She’ll make my goodbye for me
make herself a young king’s school
It’s a dream, it’s a trap
Knowing that life goes on, just so
But she made it through one last battle
Still stands under the standard of the crow

Still stands under the standard of the crow