Music

The Story

Disappointingly, this one is actually still unfinished. I was taking a really great songwriting class my second semester at Berklee and we were given a sort of build-your-own assignment thing. The teacher's instructions were "write something that's not like what you normally write; something that challenges you". Having just written "Goodbye", and really having felt generally in a rut of sad songs, I decided that my challenge would be to write a happy song.

So there I was, racing my sunshine yellow Cannondale touring bike back from campus in the full splendor of a gorgeous early spring day, and I thought to myself, "wow, it's a beautiful day for a bikeride!" And it stuck! It's a beautiful daaaaaaaaaaaay, for a bikeriiiiiiiiide; it's a beautiful daaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy, to be outsiiiiiiiide. I had so much fun with this.

Like so many other good starts, though, I was unable to follow it through. It made me realize that I have a lot of trouble getting outside of my direct experience (which is a totally crucial skill of any good storyteller). I was able to talk about having fun on my bike, but when faced with building a fictional story around that, I flopped. I ended up — as I so often do — floundering around in the fluff of the love motif to fill in for my lack of good ideas.

After days of agony, I wrenched out two wholly disappointing verses and a hollow prechorus to go with what had been my really encouraging start and decided to leave it at that until "later". I'd still love to go back and revamp this, but time, time, time is not on my side.....