ng_moonmoth: The Moon-Moth (Default)
A number of people on my reading list have done this one. The goal is, starting with a list of topics, to find (ideally without searching for) a song with a title matching the topic. Everyone who's put out a list has mined their listening habits for songs. Most of those are filled with artists and groups that are familiar to many people.

There are some outliers, though. One I enjoyed was completely filled with arias from well-known operas. I'm another outlier. The music I'm most familiar with comes from the filk community, in which I am an active participant. (Read about it here, and here. Be aware, though, that the first article is twenty-five years old, and the second article reflects to some extent the biases of its author and does not, at least to me, properly acknowledge that the apparent diminuition of the styles of the community's roots is more that the genre is alive, thriving, and expanding well beyond its origins.) Sticking to filk, I only had to cheat a bit on the last topic; there don't seem to be that many songs in the community with days of the week in them, so I searched the catalogs of a couple of friends to find one I liked.

My list )

If you like what you heard, the best thing you can do is support the artists who are bringing it to you by buying their music. Nobody makes any money from filk, and many of the artists featured here are doing it for love. But some of them are professional musicians in other genres, and are hurting for bookings in this pandemic era. Links to Bandcamp pages or personal websites offer options to purchase their music.

ng_moonmoth: The Moon-Moth (Default)
This was originated by china_shop, who asked interested readers to look at the 20 most recent fanwork titles on their AO3 accont and answer some questions about them.

I'm not on AO3, but I see no reason this need be limited by platform or by type of creative work. My creative outlet is filk -- very approximately defined as the folk music of science fiction and fantasy fandom, and characterized by an intentional minimization of the boundary between "performer" and "listener". That's close enough for me.

So I went through my catalog, and pulled out the most recent songs I wrote new lyrics for that I'm currently likely to perform. I came up with 22, and the oldest two are ones that I like and perform frequently. I didn't want to toss them, so I decided that was "close enough for filk". Here are the questions and the results:
  1. How many are you happy with?
    Fourteen. Those are marked with "1" in the first column of numbers.
  2. How many are... not great?
    Five. Those are marked with "2" in the first column of numbers. The remaining three are just "meh" -- not particularly good, but not "I wish it was better", either. So not worth changing.
  3. How many did you scramble for at the last minute?
    Seven. Those are marked with "3" in the second column of numbers. "Hey Murphy, Do You Sing?" was an at-convention songwriting contest entry, and it was already the last minute when I got enough of the song done to title it. "Big Tech Diary" and "In Virginia's Mountains" didn't change the words that formed the source song title. Using title word replacement on "Creative Writing Lesson" would have produced a "huh?" title. And title word replacement on the other three would have been spoilery. I don't care to go there.
  4. How many did you know before you started writing/creating, or near the beginning?
    Thirteen. "The Earworm" was another attempt at a songwriting contest entry, but one I was pretty sure I was going to fail at. Creating parody lyrics over the span of a weekend is almost certainly doomed when the source lyric credits include Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and Stephen Sondheim -- never mind getting ready to sing the result to Leonard Bernstein's music passably well. But the idea was enchanting enough to me that I stuck with it, and the contest theme fit well enough as a title once it started taking shape."Librarian, Anonymous" was another doomed songwriting contest entry -- this one, because tragic songs don't do well in the voting. But I got it done in time, and decided it was good enough to keep. Once again, the title came into shape at the same time the song did.
  5. How many are quotes from songs or poems?
    None are direct quotes, but eight are of parodies or transformative works where replacing the words of the title drawn from the source lyrics with the corresponding words in my lyrics produced a suitable title, and one more ("Pointless?"), where the source title suits the song well but does not appear in the source lyrics, had a natural and pleasing equivalent description of my theme.
  6. How many are other quotes?
    None. Trying to hang a quote on something that people are going to refer to by what the song is about, or something in the content, doesn't work for me.
  7. Which best reflects the plot of the story/content of the fanwork?
    "Servicers of the Machine".
  8. Which best reflects the theme of the story/fanwork?
    "Ragnarok".
  9. Which best reflects the character voice of the story/POV of the fanwork?
    "Night on the Town".
  10. Which is your favourite?
    "Pointless?" The question mark is part of the title; it doesn't denote any uncertainty about my choice.
Here's an alphabetical list of the song titles:

23Beneath Sasquan Skies 
 3Big Tech Diary 
23Bob's Sitrep 
23Creative Writing Lesson 
  The Earworm 
 4Fantasy Home 
14The Golem Song5 The Dreidel Song
13Hey Murphy, Do You Sing? 
23In Virginia's Mountains 
14Kitchen [Classified] 
1 Librarian, Anonymous 
14Night on the Town 
14Plush Cthulhu5 Rubber Duckie
14Pointless?5 Boundless?
14Ragnarok5 Camelot
14Servicers of the Machine5 Acolytes of the Machine
14Ship and Stone5 Ship of Stone
23Sunday Morning – Filkers Take Warning 
14Sunken Land of R'lyeh5 Mary Ellen Carter
14Teddy Bears' Ballgame5 Teddy Bears' Picnic
14A True SF Fan5 A Heavy Dragoon
14The Whedonist Retreat 

ng_moonmoth: The Moon-Moth (Default)
By way of working on my composing and arranging skills, I asked [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith in a recent Poetry Fishbowl for something that could be set to music. "Ghost Colors" was the result. The melody and chords, which I offered to publish in trade for the poem being published, appear below.

This post contains a lyric sheet with chords, a studio track of an arrangement I sequenced and a bitmap copy of the sheet music. I will be happy to send PDFs of the sheet music or lyric sheet to anyone who would like them.The song felt like it needed a bridge stanza, so I wrote one. Those words show up at the end of the sheet music.

Lead sheet )

The track )

The sheet music )

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