My Song Writing & Song Lyrics

Both ancestrally and currently, I belong to a musical extended family, but I'm not talented with music myself. When my mother eventually managed to afford some music lessons for me, in piano, it was late in my childhood and I felt like a failure in comparison with how extremely well my similar aged cousins were doing in piano and other musical instruments, even though they had been learning them for many years, were allowed to focus on music, and in some cases actually attended a full-time school dedicated to music. I worried I'd never catch up with them, that it was all too late. My parents weren't reassuring about that because I could never really confide in them, for various reasons - if I confided in my parents, their responses, it seemed, always totally weren't helpful - they "hadn't a clue" what to say or do, they couldn't emotionally cope with me not being happy, they didn't believe what I was saying, it was a case of rules were rules and put up and shut up, or whatever - take your pick - so I just slid out of working at my lessons and so they stopped. I wish I had persisted in learning music as despite my lack of specific talent, it would have been fun for me as an adult and I haven't then had the time to  learn an instrument, the keyboard, whatever, without which a person is quite limited in what they can musically express. When they're doing other things instead of hanging out with those who work in music.  Nevertheless, within the last couple of decades I have sometimes composed my own songs, while hearing the melodies within my head. Writing the lyrics to some of these has been cathartic.

My favourite song in those I've written, I named Red Rose On A Tomb. I like it because it's so romantic. And sadly so. Sometimes it makes people feel better to have a cry, I think - that's why so many traditional Irish songs are sad? And it's affirming, "seeing" to write about people not getting what they want, not being fulfilled romantically, which applies to me. The white-dressed belle in it has to marry someone else.

I wrote that maybe fourteen years ago. 

Then, about four years ago I composed "Summer's End". About giving up amidst the beauty of life, but the mortality of life, because, I guess, of failure to become rooted in it - being adrift and ceasing to fight the current.

I hoped to sing those songs on voice recorder to add here, but I lost the time to - my daughter became and is ill. My phone also lacks space so it perhaps wouldn't be possible anyway. I'm taking a break from admin and nursing to write this now. 

Music is such a pleasure.


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