I’m back at the world headquarters of the Meadowlark Artistic Collective, the St. Vital A & W. To finish up on Mercy Mild - it was composed by me some time in the early 2000’s, making it easily the newest song featured in the novel. It originally was played slower than the recent recorded version, more as a slow country blues or even a gospel number. I left plenty of room for solos, at the time mostly by Paul, featuring slide guitar sometimes, or deep overdrive electric guitar. Because it was more an excuse for riffing than a proper song, the lyrics never got beyond one verse and one chorus. The changes were deliberately and militantly cliche: G Bm C D for the verse, and C G C D for the chorus. The influences are almost comically diverse, ranging from the Rolling Stones (See ‘Shine a Light’ from Exile on Main Street) for changes and feel, to Smokey Robinson (see ‘Baby Baby’) for vocal high notes and Bing Crosby (see, well, anything) for crooned deep vocal notes.

At the time I was considering songs for the novel, I tried to write more words. But everything seemed to subtract from, not add to the song. Paul and Tony were convinced that the words already written said everything the song wanted to say. So we left it as is lyrically, and used two guitar solos to make it run longer. There was lots of debate about the tempo. I was reluctant to leave the slow tempo feel behind, but, in the event, we moved it to a more normal 120-ish bpm speed. The alternatives were a three minute, boring, slow version, or a much longer, solo filled version - one which ran a different risk of boring the listener. Most of the tracking is done. All that’s left is tracking the vocals and mixing and mastering. I say ‘all’ casually, because I don’t have to do that tough slog - Paul does!

Oh, I forgot to mention, the song has one feature that distinguishes it from a typical modern pop song. It has an ‘Intro’. That is, there is a preliminary section, with words and music that is markedly different form the main song in tempo and structure. My inspiration for this was very old pop hits from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. These songs often had what they called the ‘Verse’ at the beginning. The Verse was only done once, with the ‘Chorus’ (i. e. what you and I would call the actual song) following. Very often these verses have been lost to time - never preformed, or very infrequently. Sometimes they lasted. The classic example is Stardust, with its verse of, “And now the purple dust of twilight time...”, followed by its famous verse melody behind, “Sometimes I wonder why I spend....” This practice had fallen so far out of favour that I thought it would be a kick to use it on one of my songs. So, a few years after I had written the main part of Mercy MIld, I came up with a separate verse (or ‘Intro’, as I style it). Using an Intro allowed me to set up the song, both melodically and in terms of the ‘story’ of the song. You can be the judge of whether it works when we post the song on this site - on September 11 or thereabouts.

On the performance side, I’m working with Doug Anderson on the set for the September 17 readings/songs gig at the Millenium Library. I hope Doug knows what he’s getting into! I’m just happy he agreed when I asked him to take over for the departed Tony Buchner. Even If you’ve already seen any of the shows, it will be worthwhile to come out and see what spin Doug puts on things. He’s a much different player than Tony, and very talented.

Au revoir for now, mes enfants.

P.S. Check out the blogs for April, May, June, July, and August for the histories of the novel and the songs.