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.
Posts
