Note: You may need to go into full-screen or at least enlarged screen mode to see some parts of the video.

Well, I lied last week, about the video and the haiku anyway.  So I’m going to stop making predictions and pronouncements and just go week-by-week, until something or nothing happens.

The Song.  This is a sad little Bigfoot melodrama I wrote for a friend who’s having a rough time and who told me she feels “feral.”  Beyond that I don’t know what it’s about.  There’s something Wiccan about it, I think.  Maybe I’m a Wiccan.  That would explain some stuff, I guess.  Plus, I hear they give you an interesting hat.

The song is a first for me in that it’s the first time I’ve written the lyrics to an already existing melody.  Well, the song doesn’t really have a melody, so I should say “chord progression.”  Over thirty years of guitar-playing I’ve stumbled across a fair number of intriguing chord progressions and various coolish guitary things, but until recently I’d never tried to do anything with them.  I didn’t start this songwriting thing in earnest until about six months ago, and the songs posted so far have been mostly joke songs; there’s been no real “which came first” aspect to those.  The joke came first, and the lyrics and music kind of came out of that at the same time.  In most of those songs, the music is part of the joke-the particular song/joke wouldn’t work unless it were in honky-tonk mode or gospel mode or lounge-bar-jazz mode, etc.  A big part of the joke is the parody of the form itself. 

For more serious songs, or at least songs that aren’t intentionally funny, it doesn’t necessarily work that way, of course.  The goal is that there be some ineffable relationship between the words and the music, and that’s where I’ve always gotten off the bus.  I’m still not really on the bus in any permanent way, but overall I think “Bigfoot Song” works, by which I mean not necessarily that it’s a good song but only that it is in fact a song; the music and lyrics succeed or fail together.  I don’t think you’d say “I like the lyrics but I don’t like the music” or vice versa.  You’d just say “I like that song” or “I don’t like that song.” 

This chord progression is nothing revolutionary, and if you vary the rhythms slightly you’ll find that you can sing the verses of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” to the verses of this song (which is how I came up with the chord progression, in fact, years ago. I am not inviting comparisons, by the way.  I am expressly dis-inviting them.)  But I’ve always liked it and am glad to have found a use for it.  This friend of mine is thinking of moving to Antarctica.  I put that here because it fits as logically in this paragraph as in any other.  I don’t think there’s any paragraph about anything that you could sensibly work in the topic of somebody moving to Antarctica, unless you’re a Shackleton.  She’s not a Shackleton. 

I wrote the lyrics on April 15, all but the next-to-last verse (Bigfoot looking down at the village in the valley), which I added “in the studio” because I thought the song needed something else, and now I think that’s the best verse of the song.

The Video.  The live footage of the woods is from a walk I took up the Southern Upland Way behind my mother-in-law’s house in Traquair, Scotland, last Christmas (not the armadillo.  That’s from Lake Somerville.  They don’t have armadillos in Scotland.  I looked.  It took nearly all day.)  In that last shot I really did think I was seeing Bigfoot.  I robbed the still photos from the internet and feel bad about not giving credit, at least for the stuff that somebody obviously took some pride in, but I think they were already stolen by the time I found them where I found them.  In the footage of Thomas and Rona, I missed the really good shot:  I stepped out of the office one evening and saw a tiny face under a purple wizard hat standing looking out the door into the dark.  By the time I got the camera, the owner of the face had moved further back into the den and was undergoing her 25^th wardrobe change of the day. 

There is also footage of the granddaughters of our neighbors across the street, followed by the staged action-footage of our kids and three of the four Reilly girls on an afternoon they were over at our house for a fish-fry (Trinity, Emory and, briefly, Presley; not pictured is 18-month old Avery.  It is a condition of coming to my house, or living across the street from me, that you consent to your image being used in a nutcracker video.)  We waited until too late in the afternoon, so the green tarp wasn’t bright enough to work for the chroma-keying.  I wanted to have the kids running across the ocean, but instead they’re kind of ghost kids in the ocean and in the woods.  Seems to work.

The Recording.  The recording, yes, alas.  The good news is I figured out how to make the acoustic guitar sound like an acoustic guitar:  Don’t plug it in.  So on this one I’m just playing into the microphone.  The problem is it’s hard for me to stand still-I’m a regular Bruce Springsteen when I strap that guitar on-so the volume going into the microphone is uneven.  I added the harmonica just to help give some kind of texture to the choruses or bridges or refrains or whatever those are (my rule is it’s a chorus if it starts on the IV chord and it’s a bridge if it starts on anything else or changes keys entirely.  I don’t know what a refrain is.  It makes me think of homesick drunk Irishmen in brown clothes linking arms around each other’s waists and singing sad songs in bars at the turn of the century.)  The choice was either a harmonica or me singing harmonies.  I tried the latter and . . . be grateful I opted for the harmonica.

The second guitar is coming out somewhere on the far left end of your far left speaker because of my continuing confusion about the recording device I use.  You know what most people use to record music at home?  The computer!  Me, I bought a boxy stand-alone unit from a guy on Craigslist that’s complicated as hell and doesn’t do anything the same way twice.  When I get a song sounding anywhere near what I want it to sound like, I burn it to CD and then import the CD onto the computer and into my iTunes catalog.  All the other kids have a Wii, and I’m the neighborhood loser in the basement playing solo Pong on the mahogany Magnavox.

Future Installments.  No guarantees on anything in particular from week to week, but I do want to announce that sometime in the coming weeks I’ll have a guest-songwriter, ten-year-old Lizzy T, who will contribute her “angry cheese-loving girl song” once we make a plan for getting it recorded.