OK, let's see if I can explain the very strange genesis of this very strange song. I sat down to work with no ideas at all. Casting around for any sort of inspiration, a song from the White Album, "Mother Nature's Son", popped into my head, as it is wont to do; I really like that tune.
I have that big white Beatles manuscript book - every song they ever did, every part written out. I call it The Bible. I got it off the shelf and flipped to "Mother Nature's Son", and started to learn the guitar parts.
After a while, I got out the CD of the album, and imported the song into Pro Tools. Pro Tools has a function where it can figure out the tempo from a piece of audio, and so I did that; painstakingly creating a tempo map of this old Beatles song. The original performance obviously didn't use a click track - probably the basic track was just Paul McCartney playing acoustic and singing. So let's just say that Paul's time on "Mother Nature's Son" wasn't exactly rock solid (not that we care, right?).
So, once I had a tempo map in Pro Tools, I decided to write some music that fit it - and I decided also to follow Paul's arrangement of his song; when he was singing words, I would sing words. When he was singing "doo doo doo" melodies, I would do that, too. Etcetera, etcetera.
Believe it or not, that's where this song came from, me hanging new music on the skeleton of a 40-year-old Paul McCartney tune.
lyrics
Inappropriate
I know it's
Inappropriate
I shouldn't feel the way I do
About you
'Cause it's not allowed
I must be a really bad person
All these barriers
Are keeping us apart
Legal, social, and expealidocial, yeah
I guess we gotta play our parts
We don't wanna be really bad people
Inappropriate
They'd say it's
Inappropriate
If there was anything 'tween us two
I s'pose they'll never know
Which one of us is a really bad person
credits
from 5240 Volume II: Spring,
track released June 1, 2009
Written and performed by Shawn Farley.
Recorded in my apartment in Ballard on my Macbook Pro.
Song 22 of 52 songs in the "5240" project.
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