Episode 002: Lord Save Me From New Orleans
Welcome back to week #2 of Jeremy Pierson’s Song of the Week with Song #2, “Lord, Save Me From New Orleans”.
About this song:
With what appears to be a common mode of function for me, this song began with a simple chord progression, something not new but new to me, using an E major and then going into a G minor. It had an immediate blues sort of feel, to me anyway, so I was already in that mindset. After that I just opened my mouth and let whatever wanted to come out, come out. And the first part of the song, up to and including the chorus, just rolled out of my mouth in fairly short order, about 5 minutes, with little or no revision. I had no idea what I was writing about, but I liked the mood and the sound of the song.
Well, that initial burst of inspiration was last week immediately following my first posting for SOTW, and I didn’t get to come back and finish the song until this morning. I spent all week with the song in the back of my head, wondering where in the hell it was going. Why so ominous?
What came out today didn’t take too long, maybe an hour, and I still didn’t really know what the song was going to be about, until each line appeared - again, with very little revision.
I don’t point out this “little or no revision” thing because I want to give anyone the impression that I’m something like Mozart, and that my work flows out of my head already perfectly written. I just want to underline the fact that these songs, as they appear on this site in this series, are pretty much first drafts. All very rough. If I could play the guitar any better, that would certainly help as well. It is evidenced in these video recordings how difficult it is for me to sing and play even a simple chord progression with any sort of rhythm. And I have to read the lyrics off the computer screen in front of me.
So that’s how the song came out. Now, what it’s about? Well, clearly (I hope) this isn’t a song from a real-life experience. It’s just a story. Why it got set in New Orleans, I have no idea, but it did, and that sort of pushed the song in the direction that it went. The ‘voodoo child’, in my mind’s eye is more of a creole girl, than a real dark southern Louisiana, or even ‘Cleo‘-type thing. And very sexy, rather like Lisa Bonet.
The protagonist of this song is anything but heroic. He cries, gets manhandled by a pretty girl, and is left stranded in some backwoods shanty in Louisiana in the middle of the night. At the end he is lamenting why things like this “always” happen to him. There’s a sort of dark humor to the lyrics of this song, bordering on “silly”, but fun nevertheless. I enjoyed writing it and was curious the whole way where the story was going.
Let me know what you think of it.
