songwriting 101 (part 5)

this post is about 3 new songs:
10. dinosaurs in my tree
11. y
12. ICTHRUU

back in the days before jurassic park the movie
there were rumors of exciting new developments
in the world of dinosaurs, one of my passions.
I began reading every book I could find on the subject.
paleontolgists had proven the skeletal structure
of t. rex is exactly the same as that of a chicken,
if fact it's the same as that of all birds.
the shocker was: this means birds
are the direct descendants of dinosaurs. ergo,
birds are dinosaurs!

to this day it fascinates me to think
when I'm feeding wild birds on my deck each day
or watching them fly across my backyard,
I'm actually seeing dinosaurs!
(it follows then that if I'm eating a chicken sandwich...)
hmmm.

dinosaurs in my tree expresses this fascination
over top of an african-esque rolling tom tom beat
and an acoustic guitar tuned DADEBE but
with a capo far enough up the neck (on the 7th fret)
to sound somewhat ukelele-ish.
the singer expressing his amazement is surrounded
by bird chirps and dinosaur roars
(made on guitar, of course. the nice thing about
making dinosaur sounds on electric guitar
is that no one can say they didn't sound that way).
dinosaurs in my tree is under 2 minutes long.

for song #11 in our recording marathon feast
I was up to my usual manipulations of another passion:
wordplay. it comes naturally to me.

I was thinking about the letters of the alphabet,
wondering what it would be like if they had feelings.
the letter a for example might think of itself
as a trendsetter, the very first, numero uno.
the letter a might therefore possess a maladjusted ego.

given that so many names in cyberspace
now begin with a lower case i, (ieat, isnore, ipoop).
the lower case letter i would certainly
see itself as the current favorite of the main stream.
a very popular letter.

but the letter that I would envy the least is the letter y.
why?
there you go, the letter y will always be a question.
and always next to last.
poor y.

so I wrote:

"y
r u beside z
& stuck next 2 x
where no 1 wants 2 b

y
4 ever the ?
but never the answer
when u could b a c
who doesn’t like the sea?

o y
the trouble u r n
o g i feel bad 4 u
but then look @ q

y
o 2 b an a
or lower case i
instead of @ the end
n the alphabet line..."

y was written in standard tuning
and lasts just over 1 minute.

keeping with the same tactic of wordplay,
I saw a vanity plate that said ICTHRUU.
"clever enough," I thought, "y not use it?"

so in song #12 the singer repeatedly sings:
"I see through you".
I liked ICTHRUU so much I made a second
version called ICTHRUU2.
both songs are based on a very krim-esque
loop of two guitars and bass with some
trash can-style drumming on the same ludwig
drum kit I played on my first record, lone rhino.

ICTHRUU and ICTHRUU2 both were written
on the silver adrian belew signature model parker fly
in standard tuning, each lasting a minute or so.