Every Day, One More Flower

The Great Plotnik and Davey Blue wrote a lot of songs together in the 1980s. But they collaborated in a strange way. Whereas songwriter class will teach you there are two parts to most songs...music and lyrics...Plotnik believes there are three. The third, often as important as the first two, is 'feel.' How does the song feel? How does it flow? How do the lyrics and music fit, not only with each other, which is called prosody, but with the rhythm and motion of the entire song? Maybe this is comparable to what chefs call 'umami' -- the fifth taste sense, not particularly describable but indispensable.

What it always comes down to is production. Plottie was, basically, the songwriter, while Davey was, basically, the producer. Writers get to say it. Producers get to fix it.

All of this works until mixdown. What happens when the guy who wrote the lyrics feels his words are being crowded out by the production? What happens when the guy who played those sweeping organ parts likes those musical pieces as much as the songs they were supposed to support? What if the songwriter's FAVORITE moment on one song ends up clashing with the producer's favorite moment?

What if one person thinks technology can fix everything and the other person hates it when technology is used to cover up average-ness?

Well, my friends, this is called collaboration. Every set of writers gets there sooner or later and we all fight about it and get our panties all bunched up about it, but, in the end, we work it out. In Plotnik and Bluey's case it's been a long time coming. But we're getting there.

One interesting twist is that two of the people who recorded these songs in the 1980s have been relocated and are interested in doing some re-recording. They're both still in Stiletto City. But in the two attempts that Bluey has made, one with each person, it turns out that voice and attitude change in 25 years. Even people who are doing no more than speaking (not singing) have a great deal of trouble remembering where they were when they were performing this show a quarter of a century ago in the recording studio. They were probably hungrier then. Their voices hadn't yet acquired 25 years of screaming at their children.

But, believe it or not, it's fun. TINAPOS. Back to work on Wednesday. More pretty flowers to find.