Bill Roper's Journal

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... )

I have a ludicrous number of musical influences. Of course, I have been listening to music for a very long time. :) And I learned by listening to the Beatles (especially McCartney), and Paul Simon (with and without Garfunkel), and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and America, and Jimmy Buffett, and many, many others. And for someone who is almost completely unable to sing a harmony, I find my melodies weaving all sorts of harmonies inside of the chords that I play. That makes me happy.

One of the lesser-known bands that was an influence in my music was Mason Proffit. I would never have heard of them, but one of my college roommates owned one of their albums. Through the miracle of cassette tape, I shortly had my own bootleg. Many years later (and much like Jimmy Buffett paying the mini-mart back), I bought their CD, so I am now an honest man.

And one of my favorite songs of theirs was "Two Hangmen", which might have gotten more airplay if not for the extraordinary length of repetition of the last lines of the song, over and over for more than two minutes. Maybe there was a radio version. I hope so, because really, that was excessive.

But somewhere down at the core of it, "Two Hangmen" is a song about disinformation, about spreading messages that the government doesn't approve of, and consequences. And that makes it a song that still feels true to me today.

Maybe I will sing it at a filk some time.

But without the two minutes of repetition. :)

And here's the song.

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... )

In and around the three loads of laundry I did today, I was able to duck into the studio and use Cubase's pitch shift function to capo 2 the scratch vocals and guitar. The vocals did not at all appreciate this treatment, but they and the guitar are going to be replaced shortly and only need to be there now to assist me in timing everything correctly to Sally's drum track. They will do for this purpose.

K is off on the high school's "all night" sojourn to Six Flags. It is not actually "all night", but they'll be getting back around 3:30 AM and I'll need to go rescue her and one of her friends. I offered K my car, but she cleverly declined, as she expects to be in no shape to drive at that time.

I will be snoring away waiting for my wake up call...

After two weekends of good intentions, I have actually gotten started pulling together the Dodeka taxes for 2024. This is not going to be pretty...

I have been working on getting my older albums up on streaming since discovering that "The Grim Roper" had found its way there and was actually generating a noticeable number of streams. Not as many as some folks, but enough to produce a few hundred dollars in income a year, which was quite a surprise. So "Liftoff to Landing" should now be up on the streaming services as well.

Since I already had "Seven Miles a Second" and "Falling Toward Orion" up on CD Baby, it looked like it would be easy to get them set up for streaming. This turned out not to be as true as I had hoped, but I am finally in contact with the support folks and something should happen there soon.

That will leave "Live In Germany (mostly...)" to get up on streaming and then all of the stuff that is currently available on physical media will also be available on streaming.

And all of this is a good thing to be working on while I still don't have a singing voice. :)

I'm back from GAFilk, where I had an excellent time, even with so many folks who couldn't make it there because of the weather or other factors. Traveling companion My Good Buddy Clif and I had good fortune with clear and dry weather on Thursday for the trip down and Monday for the trip back. But it is a *very* long drive. :)

Thanks to the Midkiffs (mostly Phil, who had to deal with it :) ) for keeping Clif's car so that we could meet up in Indianapolis on the drive down. And to Sutton and the concom who had found a speaker system that *worked* well this year, so that I could hear the concerts and such in the Dealers' Room -- which was very nearly the singular Dealer Room, as Sally Kobee couldn't make it for a variety of reasons, I'm told. And neither could the Blibbering Humdingers or Marc Gunn. But Leslie Hudson ended up with a table and we had a nice conversation or two.

I had nice conversations with a lot of people, which is mostly why I go to conventions. That and the singing, which was also fun. And I got to perform in the 2x10s with Amy, which I always enjoy. And the dinner dance with Play It With Moxie where I tended the board for a few songs so that James Mahaffey could get on stage and play. And the Interfilk Auction, which was quite brief, and where Gretchen won the Interfilk Quilt raffle in absentia, Brenda having been good enough to write her name on the tickets I'd bought for her while I was auctioning things. At one point, I was auctioning an OVFF thumb drive that claimed to have the Pegasus Nominees for 2024 and 2025 (!) on it. I would have been greatly interested to hear the latter... :)

And I got Sutton to sing "Stray Dog Man" before heading off to bed on Sunday, because I had been requested to sing it on Friday in his absence and it seemed like he should sing it at least as many times as I did, he being the author and all that. I suspect that was the only time he led a song all weekend, because he stays very, very busy at GAFilk.

Oh, and we released "Liftoff to Landing" (which I should now go turn loose on Bandcamp) and sold a few copies of that as well, which is good, because I have a *lot* of copies of that album. :)

I have tables for next year, so I should be back, weather permitting. :)

It was back to work today for what is going to be an short week, as I'm scheduled to head off for GAFilk on Thursday, assuming that the weather doesn't go completely to crap. So far, the forecast is good. I have way too many things to do and the month of January is going to be a complete mess. But I'm making progress.

In the meantime, I have too many things to finish up at home. This includes tomorrow's ultrasound to check on how things are after last summer's lithotripsy.

And packing. And updating software. And inventory. And...

Whee!

I got a push from a friend of mine and I am now trying to sort out streaming for my music. This is being a learning experience.

Apparently, I managed to set up the remix of "The Grim Roper" for streaming as part of the duplication process. It is now bringing in about $20 a month in streaming royalties, which is not a huge amount of money, but which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Today, I have succeeded in reclaiming my BMI account. It has 21 or so of my songs registered and they apparently owe me about $20 that should arrive some time next month.

I started setting up "Seven Miles a Second" for streaming, but didn't finish it. I have since finished setting it up and have done the same for "Falling Toward Orion". Next up is "Liftoff to Landing" and then "Live In Germany (mostly...)" which means that I should get the BMI registrations complete for all of the songs of mine on all of those albums.

This is a fascinating little bunch of stuff to sort out...

I've updated the Filker website to add the last two songs I wrote this year (unless something happens in the next couple of days...), "It's Propaganda" and "Wind and Water", along with the MP3 for the latter, plus lyrics and chords for the misplaced "Write It Yourself" that Gretchen and I wrote to the tune of Bill Sutton's "Do It Yourself" back in 2001.

The nice thing about being off of work for a few days is that you can try to clean things up that need to be cleaned up.

(He looked to the right on his desk and shuddered...)

ETA: And after I originally posted this, I realized that I needed to add a page for "Liftoff to Landing", so that's done now. And then I realized that the chords for "Promises" have been wrong since I originally posted the song, so that's fixed too.

And *then* I picked up the new baritone guitar and played "Promises" on it. And that was very, very pretty. :)