mountain_laurel | stretching long-disused muscles

i worked part of a song up yesterday as follows:

i don't know how i got this old
it's all gone by so fast
just wishing for a moment
that i wished i could make last
when i started on this journey
i had holes in both my shoes
and i'd already earned the right to sing the blues (i'm iffy on that bit)

chorus:

i send signals out like semaphore
just searching for an open door
i don't know what this heart is for
my soul is sore
my soul is sore
i look but i can never find
a feeling i can get behind
ingenuous and unrefined
just something kind

line TBD
line TBD
and now i'm missing all the things
i thought i'd never lose
it seems like only yesterday
my heart was on my sleeve
[i] was always first to fall in love and last to leave

the riff starts on a C plus the 4th finger on the 3rd fret of the B, you pull off 1st and 4th fingers and then hammer on the 1st and pull off again, go to that nice thick G you mock me for with the same added 3rd fret of the B, pull-off/hammer-on the 2nd finger, then back to the C.

for the chorus the first line is all that C progression, then the 2nd line is the G, 3rd line is Am into C, then the next two are both G (although I'm trying to find something that i can use for the first repetition of "my soul is sore" that would resolve neatly into the G, nothing's come to me so far). then you go back to the C, the G, the Am/C, and the G.

verses are a more sedate Am/C/G/D. in the bridge i manage to work in a B7 and an Em as well, absolutely *gorgeous*, i'm thinking it should have sort of a long, rambling, nonstop kind of lyric with an unexpected sort of rhyme scheme, with the meter more or less matching the verses except making sure to hit every syllable, filling in the pauses as well. like, i don't know, as an example (this is NOT a lyric), "i'd stick a rusty nail into my eye if i believed that i could come up with a lyric that did not seem ill-conceived and when this song has come together it had better be a hit because i've spent too damn much time composing it".

only my brain is stuck on the conventional and actually i was hoping for something where the rhymes would land in the right places rhythmically but not necessarily break out into such neat lines. am i making any sense at all? i bet there are actually official terms for this kind of thing and i've never bothered to learn them because i'm so fucking lazy. i think i need to take a music theory class. or a poetry class. or maybe both. what-the-fuck-ever.

kinda hard to explain the vocals, though the chorus starts on a C octave (low to high) and then works its way back down, except on "my soul is sore" it just starts at the high C, and then the final line just repeats the last few notes of the previous line. intentionally repetitive,
thankyouverymuch; it makes for an excellent hook, and i'm particularly pleased with burying the hook mid-chorus and not repeating it, too.

i'll try and get some of my gear hooked up tonight and run a quick demo. i need to find a second desk to put my audio crap on. it may be time for another ikea run, i might just buy another of the one i've got.

i'm rusty as fuck. the pain, the pain! it's got to have been five years since i last wrote a song.

please do resist the urge to complete the lyrics for me. questions of copyright get complicated and i'd rather not deal with such issues.

god, i hope i can keep this energy going. and that i can manage to apply some of it to my FUCKING JOB.