Bill Roper's Journal

Song Thirteen

2025-12-20T22:00:41Z

This is Chris Conway's fault. Sort of.

Chris has been working on his new album and has been posting about the various things that he has been doing to "Song 13". I finally asked him if that was the title of the song, or its position in the track list, or what. It turns out that it's "what", in that it's the thirteenth track that he's been working on in succession for the project.

I had an ulterior motive when asking: it seemed like "Song 13" was sort of a good title for a song. I wasn't sure exactly what the song would end up being, but it was a good title for a song. :)

And now I have a song to attach to the title, which you will find just below. Some things just get numbers, I guess. For Love Potions, it's Number Nine. Or maybe Ten...
( Lyrics inside... )

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Touch Me Tonight

2025-12-04T00:54:46Z

This song started, like so many songs do, with the chorus arriving and demanding to be attached to the rest of the song. It just took a while to figure out exactly what the rest of the song was, along with getting the tune into some stable state. But once you get the first verse down, everything starts to make sense...

And it's in the key of G! The nice normal key of G. Pay no attention to that Em7 and Cadd9...

Anyway, I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside )

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Insomniac Mood

2025-11-21T23:05:30Z

This song has been rolling around my head since before Windycon with various bits and pieces scrawled on a sheet of paper and bits of tune coming out of the guitar. The problem was getting the bits to fit together, which they were stubbornly refusing to do. I finally bashed the tune over the head and figured out how to shift the melody and tempo back to what I'd originally been thinking of. After that, things started coming together and I finally finished it up today.

The protagonist is having a distinctly unpleasant night.

But not you. Sleep well. :)
( Lyrics inside... )

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Lonesome Star

2025-10-28T22:01:15Z

I was on the way back from dropping K off at Ball State and was looking for ways to stay awake while driving. Although I had already written a song for this year's OVFF songwriting contest (Theme: Steer by the stars), I thought about what I might have written if I didn't already have a useful pair of songs to add a third part to with "Four Stars", which I posted several weeks ago. And I got the chorus for this together and sang it over and over again until I got to a gas station where I could write it down. :)

When I was done, I decided I liked this song better, so I entered it in the songwriting contest. And although it didn't place, it was fun to get up there and sing it and see people tapping along to it and singing along with the choruses.

And if nothing else, it is another exemplar for Brenda to use as she looks at *her* Bill, who seems to have more of a problem coming up with romantic songs. :)

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Four Stars

2025-08-22T18:59:20Z

A while ago, I mentioned that I had managed to write two songs for the OVFF Songwriting Contest (Theme: "Steer by the Stars"), which is one more than I can enter in the contest, so I needed to decide which one to enter. And now I have.

This is the other song. It is the third song in the set that was started by "It's All Right", followed up with "End of the Line", and now, I assume, finished up with "Four Stars" -- unless some *other* participant in this story needs to pipe up and say something.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Real You

2025-06-12T02:56:08Z

Sometimes you get an idea for a song and it just doesn't work out the way you planned.

In this case, I was contemplating the fellow who was trying to use modern AI technology to create an on-line replica of his parents simply because he wanted to talk to them so badly. I had a verse. I didn't like it. At all, the longer I considered it.

Yesterday morning while lying in bed at oh-dark-thirty or thereabouts, I got the chorus. And a couple of verses. And random bits to build the rest of the song out of.

Today, I have the whole song. It is not *anything* like the song that I set out to write.

Overall, I think that's a good thing.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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The Time Travel Cafe

2025-05-26T00:06:12Z

Yesterday, my good friend Amy McNally posted an image of a breakfast sandwich that she can, sadly, no longer acquire, because the restaurant that served it has long since closed. I sympathize with this.

On the late, lamented series "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist", two of the principals ran a restaurant named Maximo's, where you could order from any of a variety of other restaurants in town and they would retrieve the food from all those different restaurants and serve it to you. This was an interesting concept, but not what I'm looking for. What *I* want is to be able to get food from all of the restaurants that I used to love that no longer exist. I mentioned this in response to Amy's post and Callie Hills said that I should write that song.

Well, yes. I have been contemplating writing that song for a few years now. It just wasn't coming together.

Until this morning when I realized that:

1) I had the chorus.
2) This should really be a duet with me and Gretchen and banter between the verses.

I broached this to Gretchen this morning and now we have a song. Gretchen is not convinced that the song is improved by the banter, but we'll see how that develops. In any case, it can be sung with or without banter, so here is the banter-free version for your perusal.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Blow It Up

2025-05-23T22:22:29Z

I have been suffering from what I will describe as a mild case of musical constipation. This is a condition in which various ideas and lines drift through your consciousness, but none of them actually manage to escape and become songs. I hate this.

Today, however, is my birthday (about which more later) and my subconscious decided to solve my problem as I drifted out of sleep around 6 AM this morning, apparently as a birthday gift from it to me. I started scrawling lines into my phone, putting it down, then picking it up and scrawling more lines. Before I went back to sleep, I had pretty much the whole song, save for one missing line, a couple of places that clearly needed some editing, and the missing bridge which -- while theoretically optional -- felt like it needed to be there to connect the second and third verses so that none of the listeners fell into the bottomless chasm.

I am a big fan of Jim Croce. He wrote incredibly beautiful love songs. He also wrote some of the most amazing piss off and die songs which *also* managed to be beautiful.

All this song owes to Croce is the sentiment. The bits and pieces of music that were flowing through my head as I was constructing this while not sleeping were clearly much more inspired by classic rock. I realized that when I got ready to put a tune to this beastie and lock it down, I was going to need to channel my inner McCartney. Or maybe Steve Martin. (There were a lot of very strange things going through my head this morning.) And there was still the matter of the bridge which was going to need its very own tune, different from everything that surrounded it.

So, liner notes:

Key of E, everyone, with no chord odder than B7 anywhere to be found. There is a thumping bass somewhere in the accompaniment and probably some aggressive drums. There is also a big old break after the bridge which I hope someday to hear my favorite fiddler, Amy, fill in. :)

This is not a political song, despite some of the references that will seem very obvious. It is a relationship song.

Happily, it is not any of *my* relationships...

( Lyrics inside... )

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Lost on Mystic Road

2025-01-28T00:07:30Z

I was driving from Ball State over to the Midkiff's after K's visit at the university. The GPS route involves a lot of local roads and as we crossed Mystic Road, I commented to K that "Lost on Mystic Road" is a good title for a song. She replied, "Right. Lost on the Mystic Road" and I corrected her to remove the vagrant "the".

A few days later, I was lying in bed not quite awake when the chorus started popping into my head, complete with the horn section hitting on "Down". (Thanks, Moxie!) I scrawled this down in my phone and kept adding bits over the next several days before finishing it up this weekend.

I hope that you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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The Stars Do Not Care

2025-01-05T23:40:01Z

I had thought that I would post our current OptumRX saga (which *may* be resolved) today. But instead, I have finished a song -- more or less, as the tune is still settling down. And I would *much* rather post that.

So here is the cheery little ditty that I started last night and finished up today. There is *nothing* like having a con coming up to engage the songwriting gears...

Anyway, I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Wind and Water

2024-10-10T15:48:26Z

My dad was a meteorologist who spent a lot of time forecasting typhoons in the Western Pacific, which is how we ended up spending two tours of duty on Guam. We rode out a couple of typhoons there, the worst being Typhoon Karen, which passed directly over the island. We were lucky. We lived in concrete block housing on top of Nimitz Hill which was built to withstand terrible storms, as long as you boarded up your windows. And when the storms approached, the seamen would drive around with their cache of plywood and make sure that happened, because the Navy was terribly well organized in that regard.

Some of the higher ranking officers lived in much prettier houses made of wood. They had to head for shelter, because their houses wouldn't stand through the wind.

But we were high on the hill, far away from the storm surge, and where water would run down and away from us.

Some people are not so lucky.

And today I have a song, which is not so much a filk song, but definitely a song that I needed to write today.
( Lyrics inside... )

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It's Propaganda

2024-08-19T22:25:59Z

I've had the chorus of this song rattling around in my brain for well over a month now. It has become clear that nothing else is going to get written here until this song is done.

This song is now done. :)

And I hope you enjoy it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Write It Yourself

2024-08-06T19:04:17Z

While pondering the question of an optimized topological sort (which appears to be what is called an NP-hard problem; I believe that, because it is certainly hard), I poked at a directory on my hard drive to see if there were any old Wordstar files lurking there. (So far, no.)

I did, however, find the lyrics to a song that Gretchen and I wrote in 2001 and which I had completely forgotten. So here is a blast from the past for you. :)
( Lyrics inside... )

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Zeta

2024-03-20T20:39:24Z

Did I mention that I'm a fan of Adam Strange?

Not the vast majority of the deconstructionist Adam Strange stories that have been written since Alan Moore passed by the character, to be sure. I want Adam to be a hero. And I have come up with a framework that allows him to be one, which I was sharing with my friend, Sam, over the weekend.

My theory is that the civilization on Rann (which is the planet of Alpha Centauri that Adam Strange travels to in best ERB-like fashion) is old. And static. And virtually everyone on the planet is completely lacking in problem solving skills, because the great machines that their ancestors built supply their every need and are self-repairing.

Except after some untold number of generations, the machines are breaking down. Oops. The things that the machines defended the planet from, whether natural disaster or critter from outer space, are breaking through. This is a bad thing for the people of Rann.

The last scientist on the planet (because, really, why would you need scientists in this utopia?) invented the Zeta beam and aimed it at Earth, hoping to establish communications with the more primitive people just one star system away. But he didn't account for the effects of cosmic radiation on the beam, which converted it from a communication beam to a teleportation beam. Surprise!

Enter Adam Strange, archeologist, who is picked up by the beam and taken to Rann. There he meets the lovely daughter of the last scientist. And unlike everyone else on the planet, Adam Strange has actual problem solving skills. (The scientist and the daughter are trainable. Everyone else is hopeless.)

You may not think of problem-solving skills as a super-power. I invite you to think of some of your co-workers and reconsider that.

And this is why Adam Strange becomes the champion of Rann.

At least, that's *my* take on it.

And I am now visualizing this as a movie starring Paul Rudd. Because it would be a *good* movie.

Anyway, given all that, I wrote a song about it.

And I now have an entry in my personal songbook with a title starting with the letter Z.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Roulette

2024-02-16T00:01:26Z

I mentioned another song that I was working on the other day, a song which had gotten cruelly shoved out of the way by another song that was good and ready to be written right now. Well, that song made its way back to the top of my desk and got me to finish it, so here it is now.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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You Should Know

2024-02-11T19:34:56Z

It is possible that my subconscious will do anything to help me avoid working on taxes. Or maybe I've just been listening to Mac McAnally a bit more than usual lately.

But this song came pushing its way up the queue past the song on my desk that I've been working on for several days at about five in the morning. I grabbed my phone and wrote down a verse and a half, then wrote the chorus and the remaining bits this morning after I woke up.

After we got back from lunch, Gretchen took Julie out for a drive. I went upstairs and (instead of working on taxes) set chords to the song and beat the tune into shape. And added the coda when I realized that the song would never resolve without it.

So Gretchen hasn't heard this yet.

But she will soon.
( Lyrics inside... )

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Flying on a Rainbow

2024-01-22T22:04:48Z

There are days that I want a warp drive so *badly*. :)

And today, it got me a new song. I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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It's Very Dark

2023-12-21T16:48:47Z

So maybe it's fair to call this my last Chambanacon song -- not because the song is about Chambanacon in any sense, but because it has rolled out of Jen's songwriting panel at the last Chambanacon. I will say more about that in a subsequent post (a *lot* more about that!), but for now, here are the lyrics to the new song.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Everything Ends

2023-11-27T23:18:06Z

Here's the song that I wrote for Brenda -- and anyone else who needed it! -- for my concert at the last Chambanacon. I'm glad that Brenda (and Bill and others!) liked it. And it was a lot of fun to perform it (and the rest of the concert as well) with Amy McNally, who is always a delight to work with. Actually, "work" is the wrong word, but it sounds wrong to say that Amy is always a delight to *fun* with. :)

Anyway, lyrics! I should post lyrics. And for those of you who haven't heard this yet, by virtue of not being at the con, it's upbeat and starts off with an Amaj7 chord...
( Lyrics inside... )

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Postcards From the Stars

2023-10-18T19:44:58Z

I think this is done now. :)

For those of you keeping score, this is the song that ended up with the chord that I *think* is nicked from The Who, except that they go from Emadd9 back to A7, while I head off to Dm6.

Anyway, I hope you like it.
( Lyrics inside... )

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Counting Up

2023-07-30T03:12:01Z

Gretchen got out of bed first this morning. This left me lying there, drifting in and out of sleep, and as I drifted out of sleep, I constructed the chorus for a song. Having decided not to be stupid, I grabbed my phone and typed it in.

This afternoon, the kids were off at a birthday party and when Gretchen went to pick them up, I was able to finish it.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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Road Trip

2023-07-24T03:13:49Z

So Gretchen and I set out to write a song that can be performed either as a duet or as a solo piece if she's not around. We're still finishing up the patter (so you'll have to wait to hear that!), but here are the lyrics, because it's a long time until the next convention.
( Lyrics inside... )

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Third Planet From the Sun

2023-05-02T23:40:04Z

And here we are back to the astronomical song themes again. I woke up a while back with bits and pieces of the chorus rattling around in my brain and with everything that goes on around here, it's taken a bit to assemble the rest of the song. (I also had to convince myself that I wasn't inadvertently copying some other song, but so far I've come up empty. I hope I *continue* to come up empty, having read about the latest Ed Sheeran trial this morning. There are some extremely Melancholy Elephants lumbering around that courtroom. I am amused to note that the chords at the beginning of the verse are yet another variation on the classic G/Em/C/D that are part of that particular dispute -- in this case, G/Em7/CaddD/D. But I digress...)

Anyway, I hope you like it.
( Lyrics inside... )

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Voodoo Love

2023-04-16T19:53:28Z

My brain seems to be determined to produce some songs lately.

I woke up with the idea for this song in my head one day last week. It wasn't hard to pull together the chorus and the tune for the verse. Then I later produced words for the first verse. So far, so good.

Except that I woke up around four or five in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep, as my brain was stubbornly determined to produce another verse. And it did, but since I wasn't clever enough to write it down, it vanished into the ether the next day.

I didn't have time to get back to the song-in-progress and two mornings later, I woke up between four and five in the morning and couldn't get back to sleep, as my brain was stubbornly determined to produce another verse. And it did, but being a slow learner, I didn't write it down and it vanished into the ether again.

I had, by this point, lost way too much sleep to this particular song. So yesterday, I pulled together a bridge and the remaining two verses and declared victory, taking it to Gretchen to try it out. Done.

Except that I decided I wasn't quite happy with the two new verses, so I rebuilt them today after typing them into the computer.

I think I'm done now.

I had *better* be done now.

Because this is getting silly for a fairly lightweight, retro song.

I hope you like it. :)

( Lyrics inside... )

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Wise Guys

2023-02-15T00:53:32Z

I'm not playing in FAWM, because work is going to win that game. But I did get mugged by a chorus a few days ago and the rest of the song followed along.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

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