Tag: songwriting

Bad Song Lyrics – Sneak Preview

~ Jim Flanigan ~ 1 Comment

There are many songs with embarrassingly bad song lyrics. For example, I have always enjoyed the music of the Electric Light Orchestra, but Jeff Lynne’s lyrics sometimes are a bit middling to be kind. For example, one of my guilty pleasures is ELO’s song “All Over The World.” I love the catchiness of the tune, but those lyrics …

“Everybody walkin’ down the street
Everybody movin’ to the beat
They’re gonna get hot down in the U.S.A. (New York, Detroit, L.A.)
We’re gonna take a trip across the sea
Everybody come along with me
We’re gonna hit the night down in gay Paris (c’est la vie, having your cup of tea)”

They’re bad, but this new series of blog posts isn’t about making fun of the lyrics of successful musical artists. It’s about my song lyrics. Many decades ago, I was a teen full of angst (good name for an album or band), writing songs about the cruelty of a life I had barely started living. I had no clue how cruel life could actually be until I had 5 kids, 4 dogs, a mortgage, car payments, and a leaky basement.

Anyway, I was thrilled when I found my notebook of songs I had written starting when I was still a feckless youth. Thankfully, I eventually got some feck. Anyway, they are dated, unlike I was at the time, chronicling my lyrical atrocities beginning at age 16.

Now at age (number obscured to keep Jim from throwing up in his mouth while typing), I consider myself a halfway decent writer. I was in a songwriting mood a few years back, and I wrote some song lyrics I like. But my lyrics from decades ago? Bad. Very bad. For example, from the unrecorded potential hit single “Lady of the Island” comes these lyrics …

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Do It

~ Jim Flanigan ~ 3 Comments

It has been a while since the musical supergroup project I am part of called Sunsets Rising dropped a new song on this unsuspecting world. First, there was my head injury if you remember that blog post that also contained unabashed plugs and links for more music from Sunsets Rising. Three months later, and I still have vision issues and numbness in my face. Go ahead, make a joke about me likely having numbness in my whole head based on the quality of my blog posts the last three months.

The head injury gave way to the holidays and those gave way to one of my collaborators working on some solo music about losing a running race to a guy in a Gumby costume. He calls it Running Gumby.

gumby

Yep, that Gumby, and he did a nice job with the song. Once he was done with that song, he started work on a very vanilla rock song with a semi-catchy hook that I had written called Do It. Finishing Do It should have taken no time at all, except my songwriting collaborator decided that Do It needed to contain …

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Making Music Already Made

~ Jim Flanigan

My wife sang an original song lyric that immediately stuck in my head. It wasn’t anything earth-shaking, but it sure was a catchy melody. I started singing it, over and over, looking for the next line to come to me. I’m always writing songs, most of which I never finish, but I do like to explore new song lyrics to see where they go.

My daughter and I were on the move and we hopped into the car. I continued singing. I don’t sing well, and I was struggling with finding the next line. I thought it would be cool to get my daughter involved. I asked my daughter what she thought the second line should be. She had the perfect answer.

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Sunsets Rising

~ Jim Flanigan

I’m taking a short vacation, so I’ve put my blogging on auto-pilot for a couple days. I know, you can’t tell the difference. In some prior blog post I promised not to foist my recently rediscovered musical career and songwriting onto my blog audience. I lied. I am pleased to present to you our website with our first song. You can stream our first song for free, or you can purchase it for $0.99, or you can invest that $0.99 in something worthwhile like 1/2 of 1% of a share of Apple stock or a crappy plastic whatchamacallit from the Dollar Store. I don’t expect anyone to purchase it, but I also didn’t expect anyone to read this blog nonsense. Anyone who does purchase the song gets automatic consideration for Follower Of The Year. Without further ado, experience the musical magic of Sunsets Rising …

http://www.sunsetsrising.com/

Don’t Seek The Music; Be The Music

~ Jim Flanigan

Let me just start out by saying that the title of this blog makes no sense except that this post is about music and my quest to become one with music. You will only find out at the very end if I reached that lofty goal. I workshopped many alternate blog post titles, and they all sucked as much as this one, so what’s the point of even trying? It’s good enough (maybe too good?) for the likes of us.

Moving on, this is my longest blog post ever, and perhaps the longest ever in the history of blogging. I have no interest in checking, so let’s just take my vague hunch as gospel truth that this is a record-setting post. It is chock full of nonsensical words in a seemingly random order that would rival a Sean Spicer press conference, links to older posts (in a pathetic attempt to increase views), pictures, animated gifs and video links. If you are not up for a herculean, visually-stimulating blog post, bail out now. Warning, do not click the “Continue reading.”

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