monday song #35: beautiful girl
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with number 35 i’m taking a break from my manic suite and breaking many of the rules of monday songs, perhaps retiring them permanently. the song has overdubbed instruments, vocal harmonies, and has nothing sad about it. it’s the most fun i’ve had doing a song in a few months.
friday was my daughter maude’s birthday, and she asked me to write a song for her. she actually asked back in august. she’s quite a planner. so last week i put together a song for her. from the first thought it was clear there would be a more complex arrangement; more room for enthusiasm. it wasn’t meant as a monday song at all. but when i completed it, it seemed like something i wanted to share. she didn’t have a problem with it being a monday song.
the song is a celebration of my multi-faced and mercurial daughter. she’s a great kid, and pouring my feelings about her into a song was a real treat. the verse is a fairly straightforward children’s song, with a more rock chorus where i banged on the piano and wurly. the bridge was particularly fun to do with the wurly and background vocals being improvised. reminded me how much fun it is to do overdubs and experiment a bit.
most of the lyrics are pretty straightforward. with the exception of the reference to pumpkin seeds. on halloween a couple years back, we were carving pumpkins and maude volunteered to pull out the seeds for roasting. she started into work while we carved and cleaned up and moved on to other things. about an hour later we returned to find maude still pulling out pumpkin seeds, having meticulously removed every seed from three pumpkins worth of insides. we asked her if she wanted to stop, since we had more than enough seeds. she said she wasn’t finished. with concentration skills like that, grad school is gonna be a snap…
i’m not going to shift into 100% multi-tracking, but i’m not going to resist it either. whatever seems like the most fun. even in pursuit of the downbeat.
not sure
December 21st, 2009 at 11:25 am
Beautiful dad.