名作記

I think I may have managed to write music for "What I Deserve", officially making it the first new song I've written in 2006.

This small but significant development makes me think I could pull off this notion of writing lyrics first before music. I must, however, confess to "borrowing" a melodic lick from Damien Jurado and Gathered in Song for this track.

And just because I have this thing for titles starting with "Re-", I'm fishing out the pop music requiem mass I wrote back in high school and updating it. Oh, please -- don't make me talk about it. It's embarrassing. Let's just say I did it in the throes of my Enya and Andrew Lloyd Webber fascination.

So Requiem is going to be a future Eponymous 4 project. The original Introit and Kyrie was modeled too closely to Enya's "Portrait", so I bashed something out last night. My post-college writing is vastly different from my pre-college writing. I wouldn't have had the sense to pluck out a chord progression on a chromatically descending bass line in my junior year of high school. For the revised Introit, that was my first instinct.

I will have to trash the Offertorium. I fit the syllables of the Latin text to the melody pf a rock tune without any concern for the actual cadence of the phrases, so it all sounds really awkward. What the hell did I know at the time? I didn't even perform a Requiem till college.

I'm thinking the music for the Offertorium that's already written could use some nice Japanese lyrics.

I originally modeled the high school-era requiem after the Andrew Lloyd Webber text, which includes a Dies Irae. The updated requiem will be modeled after the ones written by Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Duruflé. No Dies Irae. But I wonder if the Dies Irae could make a feasible separate piece?

It'll be interesting to see how I can resolve writing from 20 years ago with writing today.