soap opera | A Year of Songs

I'm gonna write a soap opera -- you're gonna be the heroine

Sure… you can try to cash out your relationship to the tabloids… but the money from that is here and gone like a found bindle of… someone else’s forgotten dreams.

No… to fully exploit your investment in a relationship you’ve gotta grow it. Now, we’re pretty much talking about mushrooms on a corpse, here, of course.

But circle of life and all that… media life.

This version of Soap Opera is a bit of a reinvention, musically. It’s still a blues but I recast it into a set of mostly harmonic minor progressions that give it a mock seriousness that amused me. I like to be amused, so here it is.

January 23 version
March 18 version

I’m Gonna Write a Soap Opera

I’m gonna write a soap opera
you’re gonna be the heroine
I’m gonna show the world just how ya think
I’m gonna write a soap opera
I won’t have to make up a thing
When we get the ratings back
you know I’ll take you out for a drink

I’ll get a famous model
to play your part for you
I was gonna ask you but you’re always busy
We’ll get a famous model
I know she’ll do real good, too
When the plot gets thick
She’ll be skinny enough to wriggle through

I’m gonna sell the rights
everywhere I can
there’ll be games and dolls and underwear
I’m gonna sell the rights
I suggest you buy up while you can
I said I’d make you famous
I think by now you understand

Soap Opera

I always figured I’d grow up and be some kind of Madison Avenue type. I liked their style in the movies. They seemed to have the prettiest wives — or the hippest bachelor pads if they weren’t married.

And, from my studies in front of the television, I knew that Mad Ave types had more sophisticated ways of dealing with sticky interpersonal entanglements — and particularly creative and craftful ways of dealing with situations that might see the less sophisticated resorting to insult, invective, or even violence.

What better way, I always thought, of doling out a little comeuppance than to put a troublesome ex-love or a friend who has betrayed you smack in the middle of his or her own soap opera, you know, a real TV soap opera. Finally a chance to argue it all out before the court of public opinion — all, of course, without the ex-friend’s input, which would only get in the way of the poetic truth of the situation.

A note on today’s song: Today’s entry is a bit different. It’s still highly informal, but it’s more a full band demo for a possible project.

[revised mix posted Sunday, 2006-03-19 23:30 UTC]