The Longest Way

So I opted to spend my New Year's weekend in Williamstown, soaking in the rarefied mountain air and steeping, like some sort of pale and anaerobically inclined teabag, in the musical atmosphere. Both Sarah and her mother are music people, so it's almost too much joy to handle - it's none too common, outside of my conversations with Sarah, that I get to talk about all the crazy ideas I have for music and all the little things that I love about it. It makes me really grateful that we are able to understand each other about it!

And we talked quite a bit about it - I ended up passing some of the things I talked about with her along to Gums during our band meeting thing. Musicals are a little different than the direction I'm aimed at, but having gone through the whole English degree rigmarole - and paying attention to narrative form in video games and books - I do have a thing or two to say about it. In a lot of ways, the how of the telling of the story is equally as important as the what - demonstrated easily by the many times that personally hilarious stories fall flat when I can't phrase them quite right.

One thing that we talked about was how to work into musicals things that haven't been really done before - experimental ways of telling stories through music, whether the experiment is the narrative form or the music itself. She's an outright amazing composer, so I feel like some weird styles of music in her hands - dub, metal, house or dance, motown, etc - would be awesome to hear, especially mashed into a big lump with her own influences. The idea, in general, is to be as wildly experimental as possible while telling something coherent and powerful - to come up with unique ways of conveying emotion and the musical styles that will carry them. Especially in musicals, it seems like there's a somewhat rigid structure of what's expected, what 'works' - and I don't think that has to be so.

For example, in the 48 hour videogame contest I've participated in a few times (www.ludumdare.com - 48 hours to design a game from scratch around a concept) people use some of the most insane ways of framing concepts and games that I've ever seen. During one of the contests (the theme being "Exploration"), you wander through what is essentially a 2D platformer a la Mario - except the platformer is set inside your character's own head, and you are exploring his past. You kind of fumble through various transformations and trippy text and obstacles without a clear objective or meaning..and yet it's really good because of that. Definitely not something that a major studio would produce, but merely because it is risky - not because it isn't good. I feel the same way about music - and by extension, musical theater - that to make the best stuff you really have to go out on a limb.

In a similar way, that's what Gums and I are trying to do - throw together a ton of different ideas and see what sticks. We both feel that metal in the 2000's has stagnated, kind of grown...dull, fat, and complacent. Sure, you can turn down the distortion or turn up the distortion, add female vocals, add male vocals, do screaming and singing, turn up the tempo or down the tempo...but it still seems like a lot of it is pushing around the same ideas. Maybe it's a little naive of us to assume that we have something new to bring to the table, but I don't know - something just feels really good about collaborating with him. We've gotten a ton done in a really short time, whereas other people I've played with...well, they just flaked out almost immediately.

I have, for once, one of my own songs stuck in my head - and I just finished a small chunk of lyrics for it, so I am off to bed - with my words dancing in my head.

Mine is the longest way
Though my eyes no longer see
Through the path that does not stray
On the road defined by me