Jeremy Pierson’s Song of the Week

Welcome back to week #2 of Jeremy Pierson’s Song of the Week with Song #2, “Lord, Save Me From New Orleans”.

 

 SOTW 002 - Lord, Save Me From New Orleans: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

An Introduction to this Podcast/Blog:

So this begins something new in several different ways for me.  For one, it begins my commitment to writing, recording, and publishing a new song every week.  I hope to do this for at least one year, giving me 52 songs that I can then go back and pull a dozen or so of the best out of and hit the studio for some serious work on them.

Second, this marks my first venture into Podcasting and Video Podcasting.  I have absolutely NO IDEA what I’m doing or how this is to be done, on the technical side, but I’m pretty good at figuring these things out, so I’m giving it a shot.  We’ll find out shortly when I publish this first episode and then try to find it in iTunes.

For more info on this project, please read the About page.

Episode 001: Shadows on the Moon

This first song was not actually written this week, but it is a new song in its earliest stages.  The song was written for the Quickstop Entertainment Song Fu #2 song writing competition. I did not make it past the first round, unfortunately, but the contest has many flaws and is anything but fair competition and I received many compliments on this song anyway, so I’m happy with what I submitted.

As far as this song goes, I’m not sure where the inspiration came from.  The songwriting requirements of the competition were only that I had to “write a song about the moon”.  So why I chose to make it a funky song about a psycho stalker, I can’t really say.  I think the chords came first and the words just sort of fell out of my mouth.

The song was originally written and recorded in the key of A minor, but I perform it this week a bit higher, in the key of C minor, using a Capo on the third fret.  This song has great potential to be a funky jam in a live setting with some great musicians.  I’ve even caught my daughter humming along and bopping to the rhythms, so I know it’s got the feel I want.

So here’s Shadows on the Moon:

 

 SOTW 001 - Shadows on the Moon [03:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download