Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Mammon, You Been on My Mind

Here you go, an unfinished product, but a product nonetheless. Forgive the eye rhymes and whatnot; it's just a goofy little song that resulted from posts/comments. Also, I'm not sure if "My" should be capitalized or not:

Never met a man named

Nebuchadnezzar

I guess he was

One of a kind

I ain’t sayin’

It can’t happen never

That Mammon, you

Been on my mind


Maybe Judas’s little sister

Or a long lost cousin

Needed a new heart

And a little more time

Thirty pieces of silver

For a simple operation

Or maybe, Mammon, you

Been on my mind


I can’t be the only one

To think the golden calf,

And I ain’t sayin

It’s a sign

Looks like a chargin’ bull

By little more than half

But Mammon, you

Been on my mind


The joke is really just a reference to a Bob Dylan song, "Mama You Been On My Mind." I figured it was obscure enough that nobody would get it. I was busy writing better songs, so this one is kind of a throwaway. It's good to write throwaway stuff sometimes, I figure, especially if it gives me practice in different keys. This one's written in F, which is not so difficult to play in, but sort of hard to sing in. I recently wrote a (better, in my opinion) song in D (!!!), which means two sharps for anyone who doesn't know. More sharps is generally more difficult, but D is a sort of particularly strange key for me because I don't have a D harmonica, and playing the blues in D, besides maybe being kind of weird historically, would require a more functional G harmonica than the one I have, which is held together only partially by a liquefied rubber band.

In terms of lyrics, choosing a structure where the last line is always the same or just a slight variant on the same line is a convenient way of churning out a song but makes it difficult to fit in what you want to fit in. The third verse demonstrates that, I think, since there's no natural way to phrase it that doesn't require the other lines to end in something like "calf" or "bull" and almost nothing rhymes with the former, while the latter seems only to rhyme with three+ syllable words, like "syllable," which make for awkward lines. Anyway, I challenge you to do better, since I think it's pretty clear how to structure a verse.

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