From my archives

This is one of my script development files. I have dozens of these for Shipwrecked 2030. THINKING OUT LOUD 6.10.2021

Looked at some clips, and indeed Jennifer Ward-Leland's voice does have that flinty quality these days - it's gotten a wee bit lower with age as well, which suits the 'earthy, but authoritative' vibe I was pitching for Joanne's mum.

Will use her a bit for the character creation process, at least. And also a bit of Jacinda, I think.

Working out Shandra's whānau will be probably the next step in fleshing out the story world once I have the two warring mum's in character sheet form. [Shandra became Pandora].

Oh, and the mum from sense8: the Jewish feminist one - forget her name off the top of my head...

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Re-watched the Front Lawn short films (except for Walkshort) and did a bit of a compare-and-contrast with my new songs:

I think it definitely paid off to pursue my obsession with the Don McGlashan sound; some of the similarities melodically were already unconscious from hearing his tunes as a kid, but the lyrics basically went over my head back then.

Even Portrait of a Knight has a bit of similarity, particularly in Rachel's songs.

It really improved my lyrics, I think, to study his fairly closely - I did a breakdown of how he uses false rhymes for effect in my phone journal, and the slightly looser vibe inspired me to push for the idea instead of the rhyme a little bit harder in the new songs.

Eg - in Machine Fatigue: 'Tik-Tok' would actually need 'ick-Tok' rhymes to be perfect, but that would sound forced. Same with 'headlines' and 'signs' ... breadlines, deadlines etc. are the perfect rhymes.

Or 'locks' and 'Springboks' in Glad They Were Playing - 'ingboks' rhymes aren't readily available. American lyricists trained by BMI or NYU or other notable musical theatre institutions sweat over the perfect stresses, and it's the reason most of them suck. For real: Lin-Manuel Miranda doesn't bother, and his are the best of people writing in this century. 👋🏻 - For the old pros:

Thanks to Jazz and Pop influences in Rap, we sing and speak in syncopation nowadays, so can use accent to change the stress of words for rhyming purposes without it feeling weird the way it would have in the mid-20th Century. No excuse for false rhymes [consonant/plural] or slant rhymes outside of Rap, though - that does make the ear lazy, and affects the ability of the lyrics to properly do their job of telling the story through song. A few too many of those, and their ears will tune out over the course of the evening.

Editor's note 2024: If you're curious about what I mean, listen to the prosody of politicians. There's lots of words that are pronounced differently in NZ, including literally, finance, and a raft of others. Also, their prosody isn't "pure" like broadcasters, so you hear the shifting rhythmic emphases that I've made a feature of my songs. People speak in a different way now. That's what I hope that my songs are capturing, despite doing the old-school thing flawlessly for Portrait of a Knight to impress people. I deliberately chose a false rhyme for The Sands of Time. That's something that Sondheim would have never done. I hate it when people think I'm a clone!😎 -

Don's was definitely the voice to copy in terms of singing in a Kiwi accent: other pop singers like Andrew Fagan, Jordan Luck and the Sneaky Feelings guys have Kiwi accents when they sing, but they aren't quite as 'in-tune'.

Still don't know how Hannah did such a good job in POAK, actually. I told her to do it, but she was the one who committed to the 'flat', 'far-back' vowels and actually sang them. Of course, we autotuned her, though...

Hardly a clone in terms of my 'Don McGlashan sound', though; just like I didn't copy Sondheim's sound outright either. Got my own ideas, but studied them closely the way classical composers study all their models, so the influence shows up for sure.

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That was fun: only talking to myself do I get to show off my erudition - people think I improvise everything, so assume there's no 'process' behind my compositions or my writing [despite having a Composition degree].

So sick of that - from Vanya's Lament onwards, all the classical musos just assumed I improvised it (and some didn't even think I could notate music 😡). Working in film scores and musicals and guitar gave them easy reasons to write me off, so they did.

And improvisation is a process in and of itself. Most pure classical players can't even do it anymore, so a bit rich to be looking down on me because I improvise as part of my formal process as well. John Psathas does!