Unexpected summer digression from lyric writing, August show.

Scrambling to finish the lyrics to this record we are apparently recording soon, I've been thinking often of the relationship between poetry and music. The more I read verse, the more pleasure I find in noting a poem's metre, rhythm, and, I suppose, music. I have wondered about relating traditional poetic form to song composition: maybe phrasing a song with iambic pentameter or something... ha, perhaps that's foolish. Nevertheless! with this subject floating around my head one morning while eating breakfast and reading my book of Graves poetry, I was struck by the muse (or "The White Goddess" as Graves would have it...), and composed a brief song taking one of that author's poems for the lyrics and trying, as best I could, to use his pattern of stress as a guide for my composition. Here's the result:

She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep by slowdancers

and, in case ya'll wanna read it, here's the poem:

   She tells her love while half asleep


She tells her love while half asleep
    In the dark hours
         With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
    And puts out grass and flowers
          Despite the snow
          Despite the falling snow

Honestly,  I'm not too sure how successful my attempt at translating his metre has been. In singing this, the accentual-syllabic metrics almost became quantitative, that is I mostly rendered unstressed syllables briefly held notes (as in the "She" of line 1) and stressed syllables sustained notes (as in the "tells" of line 1). Maybe this is a pointless observation, however, for sung poetry is music and poetic terms perhaps have little/no meaning applied to music. At the time I felt like line 2 ought to be a trochee followed by an iamb, but now I'm not so sure that was the right choice; perhaps that whole line is poorly sung.

In other news, we're playing a big old end of summer show on Sunday, August 28th. Here's the FACEBOOK EVENT. A stand-up man named Dan Holbrow from Regina, who performs under the name B-Side Champions, is also playing the night. He once featured Cole and my's rock and roll band, Right Through, on his podcast. Till next time,

VALETE