As part of the Third Songwriting Cycle, I was challenged to either (1) use a movie, TV show, online program, or book that I had recently watched or read as inspiration for a song, or (2) select a rhetorical device and translate it into music.  I ended up using the first challenge, and the result was Election Night 2012.

But for much of the three weeks we had to finish our songs, it was actually that second challenge that I thought was going to lead to a song.  Using epizeuxis and possibly aposiopesis, I thought I’d write a point-of-view song about someone facing the extremes of bullying.  With Amanda Todd fresh in everyone’s mind, and with other such videos appearing on YouTube (such as this, this, and this), I thought it would make for a powerful, thought-provoking song.

However -- the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the song that I wanted to write was not the song that the “main character” would actually be singing.  I was thinking of a song with crashing, driving, repeated musical punctuation marks and howling expressions of anger and frustration and indignation.  Musically, it would have been very cool to write and perform and record.

But I didn’t think that’s what someone would be feeling if they were at the end of all things.

Here’s what I wrote back in November of 2012.

1. “I suspect that if that despair and resignation took the form of a song, it would be quiet.  And despondent.  And still.  And characterized by tragic acceptance, rather than active defiance.
   

2. 
   

3. “It’s entirely possible that -- later -- I might write that song.  But I realized that I did not want to write that kind of a song now -- here in the middle of November of 2012.  I did not want to plumb the emotional depths necessary to try to get into the head of someone so shattered and depressed, so that I could try to do them justice with a meaningful song.  And I did not have the time to invest in writing something stripped-down and achingly simple.
   

4. 
   

5. “‘Simple’ is exquisitely difficult to create well.  It’s far easier to write something big and noisy, where everyone’s focused on the broad strokes and just about any note that you care to sound can sound good within the context of a big cloud of roiling notes.  But when everything but the absolute essentials are stripped away, every single facet of every single thing must be chosen with tremendous care.  And that takes a tremendous amount of time and attention.  It’s not that I can’t do it.  I have before.  And it’s not necessarily that I won’t do it.  But I chose not to do it for this songwriting challenge.”
   

Well -- in March of 2013, on the heels of writing a protest song about bullying for Round Three of SpinTunes, the Round Four challenge was to “write a protest song about the same topic you picked in Round Three!”

So -- my Round Three song went from having the title of “On The Matter Of Bullying” to having the slightly longer title of “On The Matter Of Bullying (Part 1),” and my Round Four song became the song I didn’t write four months earlier . . .

(You can follow this link to hear

Part 3 of my bullying trilogy . . .)