Dr. Frank's What's-it

Decomposing

Back when I started posting and pre-releasing demo versions of songs in progress, Dave Bug of Geek Life had an interesting suggestion: post lyrics without music, discuss, then post the actual song and examine how it compares with the "head version" constructed by readers. So I posted the lyrics to my most recent song to date at the time,"She Runs out when the Money Does," intending to cyberbusk the actual song at some point. But with one thing and another, I never quite got around to it. I'm still intending to do it, even though, as it turns out, the song didn't end up being recorded for the album as planned. (I'm sure it will be on the next thing I put out, whether that's a band or solo thing.)

Anyway, in the meantime, various people have mentioned that they've come up with music to these disembodied lyrics. I think that's a pretty cool idea-- the lyrics alone suggest how they might be sung and how the accompaniment might be played, but you never know how the inherent "musicality" of ordered, rhyming, scanning, conceptually coherent lyrical content will take shape in the hands of people with different reference points.

Kudos to the British band 100% Cotton for being the first to participate publicly in this weird experiment: you can download their version here. It doesn't sound anything like mine, by the way, though certain cadences are similar even if they don't sound that way because of the different harmonic context. Anyway, check it out.