Hi friends,
Back in April I played a gig in the Green Note in London, one of my favourite venues. This video here is taken from that night, kindly hosted by Luce of Stories in Song. Before playing the song you see here, I gave a quick preface: I’d only written this song about seven days ago. And I think for a while I was really focussed on showcasing my best songs at gigs, I hadn’t really shown any works in progress or new songs.
It’s fun to play a new song to an audience. It shows you how the song settles over people, what they respond to — if they respond to it at all! When you play a new song and it ‘lands’ you can normally feel a hush descend (if it’s a quiet song) or a general sense of head-bopping and movement (if it’s an upbeat one). It’s hard for people to hide their opinions when it comes to live music.
I feel like over the last few years I’ve been on a journey to find things to write songs about which aren’t relationships. This song has the working title of ‘One Day I’m Gonna Be A Car,’ and it’s about… uhh… being reincarnated as a car.
The idea came from a prompt for the NaPoWriMo challenge — writing a poem every day in April, as it’s national poetry writing month (according to… someone…). The prompt was something like ‘write an ideal version of yourself.’ I think there were a few different things swirling around my head at that point, but part of me was thinking about illness and people who are at the later stages of their life. Not because anyone I know was going through it at that time, it was just something I was thinking about. I imagined someone longing to have a body which was ‘straightforward,’ like a car. There are parts which you can replace. You can paint it up. You drive it, and it just has that one function. It can take you distant places.
So I wrote this poem:
Of course, I’m still going through a geology phase, so I had the poem be geographically placed in Arches National Park in Utah, where these big, amber rocks tower into the sky, like a forgotten skyline of a distant civilisation.
If you compare the poem and the song you’ll see that the final stanza is basically the refrain of the song, almost unchanged apart from ‘send me out for scrap metal’ becomes ‘send me for parts’ because it’s better to sing. The first stanza becomes verses 1 and 2: verse 1 about the highway, marigolds and the horses, verse 2 about the singing radio.
I knew I should have a final verse which zooms out a bit more and gives more of an emotional underpinning to the song. I also feel like I was influenced by The Magnetic Fields here because Stephin Merritt is great at putting things very plainly within songs that have unlikely subject matter.
‘Keep holding on to the dreams you can’t surrender’ is a beautiful line (if I do say so myself!) and it gives this ‘Rainbow Connection’ feeling to the song: a moral at the end of the story.
🎙 What’s your favourite line from the song?
I don’t know if this song will go anywhere, in terms of being recorded, just yet. But it’s always nice to share works in progress! I keep saying I will do more of this but I am in the middle of album release planning so I feel like I’ve had my attention soaked up by that a lot in recent months. But I will try and share when I can :)
Have a good week!
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Til next time! Be good,
Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶
A New Song: One Day I'm Gonna Be A Car