oh so you mean
- March 26th, 2012
- Posted in songs
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Sometimes I take old folk songs and rewrite them into the Republic of Cascadia universe. That’s where “Columbia” came from, for example – the first song I wrote what got covered by another artist. Sometimes I write new music, sometimes I don’t. The latest one is “High Barbaree,” which is an old song about a pirate encounter, and of course, in all traditional versions, the pirates lose, but that’s not the way we roll here, now, is it?
But while I came up with a chord set I really like – yeah, this is one I’m substantially rewriting – I’d been stuck for a while on lyrics. Then last Thursday, I realised that in my version, High Barbaree is the name of the ship, not the locale, and a nice chunk of verses all came tumbling out of my brain. Yay!
It’s now about blockade-running privateers for the Republic, and atypically cheery for me. It’s not finished, but now I see how to get there; I should have a first draft ready for nwcMUSIC 2012/Norwescon 35. T-10 days and counting!
Mildly unrelated thing that your talk of changing songs where pirates lose reminded me of; in my version of Captain Kidd (which I should have recorded and online soon), I skip the “sick and nigh to death” verse and do the last verse like so:
“To the execution dock, with my head upon the block
Laws no more I’ll mock as I sail
But listen, hear, and heed, you’ll find no regrets from me
I’d do it all again, you see, as I sailed
@Gifted Gear: “You’ll wind up just like me as I saaaaaailed…” [repeat chords] “Yeah… RICH!”
Everybody and everything dies. Dying’s easy. Being sung about 300 years later? That’s hard.
w00t. Not doing NWC this year.. hopefully there will be video?
@GlennS: That’s something I hope to do next year. (I have a Five Year Plan!) Streaming off the hotel’s network infrastructure is… difficult. Very difficult.