The question of just who “Baby” is has come up before and less than careful readers will be forgiven if they missed my suggestion that Baby is, to some extent, a composite of ex-girlfriends (mine and OP’s) with a few of my own personality fragments thrown into the mix, too. If you’re trying to create an antiheroine of mythic proportions, you have to draw on everything you have. And then some. Think a little bit Mata Hari and a little bit Janis Joplin as played by… Oh, wait a second… I was slipping into the screenplay pitch.
But, really, I have been toying with the idea of tying some of the Baby songs together with a flimsy excuse for a plot and I may sketch something out a bit later in A Year of Songs.
Sort of a blog opera.
I’m not the first to come up with that phrase — but I’ve been doing a form of blog opera for much of the last decade. Last year marked the tenth year of my music on the web — although the first download was an unlistenably lo-fi 17 second clip that took 2-1/2 minutes to download.
Since then, I’ve been posting music downloads and writing vignettes and backstories for the songs, usually combining text and download links with some kind of graphics.
(I’ve toyed with video/multimedia versions. It’s a whole lot of work. More power to all you video artists and talented Flash animators. It’s all I can do to string a couple of semi-coherent sentences togther.)
Anyhow, I’ve been doing this blog opera thing for a long time but — now — I have an irritatingly catchy name for it.
The first two versions of Baby Said appeared on AYoS on December 25, 2005. With regard to this version, for the record: yes, you are supposed to laugh. In fact, at this point in AYoS, if you ain’t laughin’ already, you better get that checked out.
Baby Said
baby said she’d love me
she’d always stand beside me
baby lied . . . but that’s all right
baby said forever
baby said never say goodby
she left that night
baby said a lot of things a
fool wouldn’t buy
she got caught a thousand times
I sorta let it slide
baby said she loved me
I think she thought she did
baby said a lot of things
she was such a crazy kid…
baby said honey
you ain’t got no money
I like that so
my old man’s made of loot
and it don’t buy no truth
and Baby knows
baby said a lot of things
it was such a crazy time
Baby said remember
cause I’ll see you when you die
baby said its over
over and over again
baby said forever and then we
just begin again
baby said save me
sometimes I think I’m crazy
She’d say anything–even the truth
But once you surrendered
it really was forever and
there wouldn’t be nothing anyone could ever do
baby said a lot of things a
fool wouldn’t buy
she got caught a thousand times
I sorta let it slide
baby said she loved me
I think she thought she did
baby said a lot of things
she was such a crazy kid…
(C)1991, 2000, TK Major
