Pop songs
If you've read some of the things I have had to say about popular music, you might be a little surprised to know that I have written some myself. There was a time when I had a strategy to make money writing pop songs while spending my free time writing more substantial music. It doesn't quite work that way. Making it in the popular music world requires an enormous amount of time and energy, which I quite frankly believe can be put to better use.
What Price Love? is a song cycle about lost love. The idea for this cycle developed in small stages. First, I had wanted for years to write a song cycle like Schubert's Die Schoene Muellerin, but decided to do it from the feminine viewpoint, since Schubert had already portrayed the male viewpoint to perfection. In 1985, I woke up one morning, and in the confused state just after waking I momentarily confused stories of the divorce of my fiancee's parents with an old Doonesbury cartoon where a distraught girl calls a radio request line threatening suicide. In this cartoon, the woman requested a song called "Can't Live Without You". I wasn't familiar with this song, but my brain began to spontaneously fiddle with the lyrics until I had the third song in the cycle (see below). The rest of the cycle was built around this.
The song "When the Well Runs Dry" was originally an independent song, but it works well as an introduction to the cycle, so it was "assimillated".
Unlike Schubert's song cycle, this one is not about unrequited love, but about love lost, regained, then lost again. Having grown up in a Catholic family, the idea of a long-term relationship just ending abruptly was alien to me (at least, it was at that time). The song cycle explores the emotional consequences of such a division.
Get your own Free Home Page