Futile Horn

09.12.2003 - 6:42 am (a chemical compound or nothing to lose)

I guess I am too excited to sleep. I just made the dry run for my newest song. This will be the third song I’ve written based on a single sentence from a novel I read on the 5 train: one from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, one from Foucault’s Pendulum, and now from The Leopard. The first two had really nothing to do with the book other than they contained a short string of words I thought might sound good to music. This time around, the song is a slight distortion of a large theme of the book (although obviously it has nothing to do with Sicilians). When I left the station I wandered around town for an hour or so thinking about what the song would be about if it were about something other than what the sentence originally meant. In archaeology they teach you that once you strip an artifact of its context is almost meaningless. Artistically I’ve come to realize that it is just an empty vessel, and if you find it, you can fill it with whatever you fancy. Then it’s yours, no matter what it was originally intended for. You’ll often hear musicians talking about “influences” but I am quite comfortable with the term “theft.”

Yeah, I think they usually mean sound, but it’s all the same. I’d steal that too.

Part of me is sort of embarrassed by this pastime though. Not the stealing, of course. I am somewhat bothered that I’ve chosen to express myself in songs primarily because I am just lazy to write something longer. Or to put it in another way, the effort required by so much as a 20 page piece of fiction can be physically and emotionally exhausting. Now I only write three or four verses, mostly putting things I see or overhear into rhymes.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn