Filler Lyrics

I went shopping yesterday which means I spent all day having radio 'friendly' pop songs blasted at me. 'Friendly'!! Friendly to whom? Certainly not me!

Throughout the course of the day I was instructed approximately 12 times to 'look to the left, everybody look to the right' by Jessie J. The only reason I was given for being instructed to look left then right was 'because we're paying with love tonight'! Can someone explain to me how looking left, and then right, illustrates in any way whatsoever the anti consumerist message of Jessie J's opus that is 'Price Tag'?

I'm working on a few new tunes at the moment so I thought I'd post up some of the works in progress as I go along. Bits and pieces: a nose here, an arm there that will eventually become songs with their own identities and personalities. They'll grow up and ignore me someday, but for now they're all mine, live under my roof and obey my rules....right that's the end of comparing songs to children, or pets, or golems.

One of the fragments of a song that I'm working on at the moment is called 'Hand Holding' (or at least it is for now).

So here's a rough, home recorded sketch of some of the lyrics:

Hand holding, remolding our fingerprints, histories.
Find me here.

Hips joining, unfolding the romance of alchemy.
Find me here.

Often when I'm working on lyrics I'll read up about a certain subject a bit and even though everything I read about doesn't necessarily end up in the song (not directly anyway) I think it still influence it. So here are some interesting things I've read lately that I've got filed in my brain under 'Hand Holding':


From the Wikipedia entry on Polycephaly:

"A live two headed turtle named Janus can be seen at the Natural History Museum in Geneva Switzerland"

'There is some speculation that the inbreeding of snakes in captivity increases the chances of a two-headed birth...snake heads may attack and even attempt to swallow each other"

"With humans, dicephalic conjoined twins as Abigail and Brittany Hensel are considered "twins", i.e., two individuals....On the other hand, Syafitri, born 2006 in Indonesia, were given one name by their parents because they only had one heart."


And of course I can't do anything these days without tying it in with my current obsession (Frida Kahlo's self portraits) so I file this under Hand Holding too:

Self Portrait as a Tehuana
(Diego on My Mind)

I went for a gander to my local library and came back with three goodies. I've just started reading the first, entitled 'Crap Lyrics', and so far my reaction has been like those videos you see on youtube of babies laughing uncontrollably*.

Anyway in the introduction there's a quote from Noel Gallagher:

" I get the odd night when I'm halfway through 'Don't look back in anger' when I say to myself 'I still don't know what these words mean! I'm thinking what the...'Stand up beside the fireplace! Why?
And all these kids will be singing it at the top of their voices with all their arms around each other and I kind of feel like stopping and going 'Look can someone help me out here? Am I missing something?"


Why did he pick that lyric to single out as nonsense? Of all the Oasis lyrics that make absolutely no sense whatsoever like: "Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball"

'Stand up beside the fireplace' is at least a fully formed sentence. It's even got a sense of gravitas to it, like maybe you'd stand beside the fireplace to give an important speech or if you wanted to be taken seriously but when would you ever be "Caught beneath the landslide in a champagne super nova in the sky".


*except I'm not a baby obviously.