The brain trust met again and got on the subject of poetry. Poetry wasn’t the beginning of this meeting. It seems that one of the members of the brain trust has decided to take up song writing. Songwriting could be a rewarding and profitable vocation. This particular brain trust member just had his 53rd birthday and decided he is going to start writing songs.
With a start like that, there is no telling where this brain trust meeting could end up. Immediately, the talk led to the wonderful financial benefits that could come from writing a good song. Supposedly, Quincy Jones made a million dollars just writing “Pretty Young Thing” the Michael Jackson hit song. Writing a few songs could be a profitable endeavor.
The brain trust doesn’t let you get away with a good idea though. Potential problems with songwriting had to be explored. Our songwriting friend was finding out that writing a song could be a lot harder than he thought. He was trying to learn to play the piano. At 53 this was harder than he thought. His parents had wanted him to learn to play piano when he was a child. He told us that once he found out where middle c was one the piano, he lost interest in taking piano lessons. He did find a book that said he could learn to play guitar and meet girls in six weeks. He ordered the book from the ad on the back of a comic book. He found out that learning to play the guitar would take a year of locking himself in his room and practicing for about two hours. At the end of the 700 hours of practice he could play the guitar. All that time locked in his room didn’t help him meet girls though. Now he is trying to play piano and write songs. It turns out that the lyrics to songs are just little poems. He said he didn’t pay attention to literature and poems in the ninth grade. Had he done that it might have helped out on figuring how to be a world famous songwriter.
Some of the brain trust suggested he just change some of the words to songs he already knew. He could read poetry and try to figure out how it is done. One suggested he read romance novels to get ideas for love songs like Hank Williams did. Poor guy is now trying to read novels, poetry, reword songs he knows, and plunk around on the piano.
What about redoing church hymns for new songs? He had thought of that. There is a wide range of hymns and songs to choose from. That creates other problems as well. A modern day praise song could be ten stanzas of “praise the lord”. Compare that to Charles Wesley’s “O for a thousand tongues to sing” which was written in 1739. Great church songs written during the time of J.S. Bach in the 1700’s are certainly different than smoke machine and light show songs of a modern day praise church.
At least he is finding lots of inspiration for getting short snippets of poems from the Internet and social media. There are all sorts of advice, poems, and sayings that could be made into poems or song lyrics. This songwriting project is going to be a great topic for the brain trust. Now people are coming to the meetings reciting old poems that they remember when they were paying attention back in the ninth grade. We haven’t quite come up with anything that has been converted to a song yet. It is fun though and it is a great dream.
“If you can dream and not make dreams your master,
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with triumph and disaster,
And treat those two impostors just the same.”
All the brain trust thought that was a good little verse. I said it should be. Rudyard Kipling wrote it.
