Exploding supernova in a Western sky:
Mystic dark portent, or the evil eye?
Seems every hour another star in our galaxy dies:
Tell me, where did all the Appleweed take root
In our garden in the sky?
Like faceless marionettes in some grotesque display,
Contorted caricatures from some frightening play;
Sometimes, it seems that all our dreams of Passion’s endless spark
Are lost in green, or torn in twain, we take
Small solace in the dark…
My heart cries: lovely lady, don’t lose heart,
Don’t lose your peace of mind.
Don’t let yourself be torn apart,
Don’t leave this love behind.
If you feel that on your part
You gave too much too free;
Lovely lady, if you must lose heart,
Then please, re-lose your heart to me…
PART II: TWO STRANGE WORLDS
My love lives in two strange worlds: in one, I’m just a fool:
One world short of Eden, one beyond Ultima Thule
One world where it’s difficult to predict day and night:
Confused by alternating tidal waves
Of hate and love and spite…
And, in one of those two strange worlds, reality can bend;
Here, every argument’s a means to justify an end-
Through nights of helpless waiting, there is nothing I can do:
We never know, when I lie down with you,
Which world we’ll wake up to…
My heart cries: lovely lady, don’t lose heart,
Don’t lose your peace of mind.
Don’t let yourself be torn apart,
Don’t leave this love behind.
If you feel that on your part
You gave too much too free;
Lovely lady, if you must lose heart,
Then please, re-lose your heart to me…
Exploding supernova in a Western sky:
Mystic dark portent, or the evil eye?
Seems every hour another star in our galaxy dies:
Tell me, where did all the Appleweed take root
In our garden in the sky?
I need to come back to this when I have more time to figure it out. The rhyme is odd, (that one line out thing) and the meter is kind of throwing me atm...maybe this just needs more thought on my part. Some of the punctuation is a tad distracting (colon, semicolon) along with difficult words and concepts...makes this one I can't digest in just one or two reads. I'll be back, I promise.
Exploding supernova in a Western sky:
Mystic dark portent, or the evil eye?
Seems every hour another star in our galaxy dies:
Tell me, where did all the Appleweed take root
In our garden in the sky?
Like faceless marionettes in some grotesque display,
Contorted caricatures from some frightening play;
Sometimes, it seems that all our dreams of Passion’s endless spark
Are lost in green, or torn in twain, we take
Small solace in the dark…
My heart cries: lovely lady, don’t lose heart,
Don’t lose your peace of mind.
Don’t let yourself be torn apart,
Don’t leave this love behind.
If you feel that on your part
You gave too much too free;
Lovely lady, if you must lose heart,
Then please, re-lose your heart to me…
PART II: TWO STRANGE WORLDS
My love lives in two strange worlds: in one, I’m just a fool:
One world short of Eden, one beyond Ultima Thule
One world where it’s difficult to predict day and night:
Confused by alternating tidal waves
Of hate and love and spite…
And, in one of those two strange worlds, reality can bend;
Here, every argument’s a means to justify an end-
Through nights of helpless waiting, there is nothing I can do:
We never know, when I lie down with you,
Which world we’ll wake up to…
My heart cries: lovely lady, don’t lose heart,
Don’t lose your peace of mind.
Don’t let yourself be torn apart,
Don’t leave this love behind.
If you feel that on your part
You gave too much too free;
Lovely lady, if you must lose heart,
Then please, re-lose your heart to me…
Exploding supernova in a Western sky:
Mystic dark portent, or the evil eye?
Seems every hour another star in our galaxy dies:
Tell me, where did all the Appleweed take root
In our garden in the sky?
I had a difficulty understanding this at all to tell the truth, so i wont try to guess or make any statements as to what youre saying. And though poetry is about using heightened language and sometimes odd or confusing symbols, anything too confusing becomes downright tedious. That said, the stanza i enjoyed and understood the best was the third in part two (the last in part one), great stanza. The others, i feel lost, not just in the subject matter, but the odd rhyme scheme that changes (and sometimes rhymes the same word), the sort of clunky rhythm, and repetition. Repetition is used to underline or emphasize an idea, but i think repeating whole stanzas makes the poem uneccesarily long and dangerously repetitive. Not sure about the grammatical accuracy of your punctuation, but your use of it is interesting. Picking a rhyme scheme and maybe changing the line lengths or adding some sort of meter would be the first steps i would take if you were to revise this.
Just my opinion
Mel,
Thank you, I'll look forward to your returning to this when you are able to. Hopefularahant,
First of all, thank you for taking the time to read this and comment.
Perhaps I should have mentioned : this is a lyric for a song, so that may explain why you think you are seeing a repetition of a whole stanza: that is the Chorus. I gather that is the bit that made sense to you and that you liked.
As regards repeating the opening lines again at the end.... that is for dramatic effect and that is a device I have used in more than one of my songs.
Apologies if this lyric came across as a little obtuse overall: I often "cloak" my lyrics to retain the privacy of what they refer to, since often my work refers to people and incidents from my life.
As regards the "odd rhyming scheme" you refer to: if you think of the 4th and 5th lines in each verse to simply be a single line , albeit longer than normal then you will find what we have here is a simple AABB rhyming scheme in the verses.
Not sure if it helps, but here is a link to the SUNG version of this song: perhaps the line length and rhyming scheme will make a little more sense. https://soundcloud.com/psyve/appleweed
Thank you again for taking the time to listen and give feedback.
Well...it does make more sense now that I've listened to (as far as rhyming scheme and meter go)--trouble is it is hard to critique a song as a poem. Overall I think it is still rather too much on the ambiguous side for me. Since I did listen to the song, I would like to say that as a musician, I would have loved for Part II to be a different tempo...since you are working within the same chord structure and melody. Just a thought.
I listened to your song, and enjoyed it. The ethereal sounding words in part 1 work well with the music. The chorus words add a contrasting clarity to the mystery of the words in the verses. I was drawn in. However, I agree with Bena. When I got to Part 2, I needed something to change in the music and because it didn't, I got bored. A suggestion would be either to keep part 1 as the song and use the words of part 2 as lyrics for a different song, or allow the music to progress in part 2 by bringing in a change of key. Hope this helps. G.
Exploding supernova in a Western sky:
Mystic dark portent, or the evil eye?
Seems every hour another star in our galaxy dies:
Tell me, where did all the Appleweed take root
In our garden in the sky?
Like faceless marionettes in some grotesque display,
Contorted caricatures from some frightening play;
Sometimes, it seems that all our dreams of Passion’s endless spark
Are lost in green, or torn in twain, we take
Small solace in the dark…
My heart cries: lovely lady, don’t lose heart,
Don’t lose your peace of mind.
Don’t let yourself be torn apart,
Don’t leave this love behind.
If you feel that on your part
You gave too much too free;
Lovely lady, if you must lose heart,
Then please, re-lose your heart to me…
PART II: TWO STRANGE WORLDS
My love lives in two strange worlds: in one, I’m just a fool:
One world short of Eden, one beyond Ultima Thule
One world where it’s difficult to predict day and night:
Confused by alternating tidal waves
Of hate and love and spite…
And, in one of those two strange worlds, reality can bend;
Here, every argument’s a means to justify an end-
Through nights of helpless waiting, there is nothing I can do:
We never know, when I lie down with you,
Which world we’ll wake up to…
My heart cries: lovely lady, don’t lose heart,
Don’t lose your peace of mind.
Don’t let yourself be torn apart,
Don’t leave this love behind.
If you feel that on your part
You gave too much too free;
Lovely lady, if you must lose heart,
Then please, re-lose your heart to me…
Exploding supernova in a Western sky:
Mystic dark portent, or the evil eye?
Seems every hour another star in our galaxy dies:
Tell me, where did all the Appleweed take root
In our garden in the sky?
Hi,
As others have made clear it is difficult to critique lyrics, and that is what you present us with here, in any way which could improve the poetic dynamic. If you had maintained the cover, and not divulged the prime intent, then critique would be biased against the piece on several levels...all poetic.
So, notwithstanding your obvious sincerity in seeking improvement of the "lyrics", and as you are not self-aggrandising, nor are you promoting your work towards commercial gain, I suggest two things...one of which is a fait accompli, the other is up to you.
I will move this whole thread to where it surely belongs, Miscellaneous, and leave you to decide what to do with it should you wish to "convert" it to a piece of poetry. There is nothing wrong with posting lyrics in Misc. but you are better placed there to get what you want from this site.
Best,
tectak
Thank you, Tectac,
Miscellaneous is probably where it is most aptly located, being a lyric.
May be wise to move my other lyric here too at some point?
Mel, Grace
Thank you both for listening and responding to this.
I thought about the point you both make about the second verse, and perhaps a key change might be a possibility.
I certainly see this as a single lyric ... in my understanding the content flows from one part to the other meaningfully. I guess the cloaking may not make that all that apparent.
Appreciate the time you both invested in this one.
-Psyve
'Song lyrics' are not poetry? Jeez, more of these fucking 'thin'
definitions! Whatever.
Repetition is important no matter how fat or thin the definition.
Poetry is about rhythm and you can't get more rhythmic than repetition.
I liked the expanse of the poem. Yeah, sure, it's grand hyperbole of the
'worst' sort; but that's what it's supposed to be and it works.
Especially: Lovely lady, if you must lose heart,
Then please, re-lose your heart to me…
ray
P.S. ... I'm not sure if you were referencing the term 'appleweed' or the
play and/or movie. I loved the movie, I met the director/writers/actors
Johnny Cotugnoin and Tamara Reynolds in Austin when my wife was doing
a story on the movie.
More about Johnny Appleweed the movie:
I loved the movie. Maybe not the best movie by conventional standards,
but it's surely ranks as one of the the highest. What IS supreme is the
dialog/script... no, wait, oh hell, I just plain loved the whole thing.
Youtube has excerpts of various productions of the play and the trailer
for the movie. Maybe the whole thing is there in parts, don't know.
To watch it you need to be able to view .avi files.
A free viewer for them is available here: www.irfanview.com/
.avi is not streaming video, so you do have to wait about 10 to 60 minutes
for it to download (depending on the speed of your internet, it's about 720mb);
BUT the video quality of the .avi is MUCH superior to Youtube, worth the wait.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
Am glad the repetition and "hyperbole" didn't bother you.
As regards the title of the song, the movie you refer to came out in 2008. This song was written (and titled) two decades before that, in 1988.
The term "Appleweed" was something I coined for the song (.... or think I did.... I certainly wasn't aware of any such real word or any prior usage of the term) to refer to discord in Eden.
There are two references to the Garden of Eden in the song lyric:
"Tell me, where did all the Appleweed take root
In our garden in the sky?"
and "My love lives in two strange worlds: in one, I’m just a fool:
One world short of Eden, one beyond Ultima Thule..."
Am glad the repetition and "hyperbole" didn't bother you.
Far from it. In the context of the song I liked
them; I thought they were used well.
Repetition, in fact, is a technique that's basic to poetry,
that I like, and that I use often. PigPen has quite a few
people that aren't that big on repetition. Can't blame them,
I used to be that way myself.)
On appleweed: I guess what they say about great minds...
But your great mind was a faster.
I went over to your site and listened to a few tracks.
I especially liked "The Last Day of April, April..."
(Good audio quality, by the way.)
Off-topic audio stuff:
I couldn't help noticing the quality of the recording.
Maybe that's normal these days?
A long while back, I did audio work. Quite different though.
I worked at a radio station and mostly recorded interviews
and news events; lugged around Nagras and Stellavoxes.
Every once in a while I recorded demos for friends who had
bands and no recording equipment (or money).
I was good at extremely fast editing as most times we
were on deadline for a news show. Back then it involved
cutting 1/4" audio tape with a razor blade and splicing
it back together with tape.
I still do a bit of recording for my wife. She does pieces
for NPR. Her work mostly involves studios, but every once
in a while it requires some field work and I lend a hand.
I use a Sony D50 digital recorder, an Audio-Technica
mini-shotgun mic and some Bose noise canceling headphones.
Really takes me back, love it!
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
Ray
I started recording back in 1984, when I got my first multitrack: a Teac Portastudio. This was a 4 track cassette unit and while it was nothing great, it suddenly gave me the ability to record my songs, then over dub vocal harmonies and add a keyboard track and ....wonder of wonders..... introduced me to bouncing tracks, a new concept to me whereby the first 3 tracks could be mixed down and bounced onto the available 4th track, then two of the remaining 3 tracks mixed down and bounced onto the 3rd track, etc etc.... allowing in essence many more than 4 layers of sound on a 4 track tape. As i listen to those recordings today, i find those were terribly noisy recordings.... lots of tape hiss and background noise , birds chirping at the window, the occasional car horn... but I hear a younger me in those. I transferred most of those recordings to digital around 2005 or so. Just as those cassette tapes were dying out from over play in my car cassette player.... and cd ' s were becoming the recording medium of choice. In 2008 I got my first digital 12-track digital recorder a Boss BR-1200-CD which gave me the ability to record many of my songs a little better... no take hiss....and all the recordings on my Soundcloud page have been home recordings using this device. Albeit with the same Audiotechnica mic I've had since 1984.... an AT 818 II. This time round I took care to minimize background noise too and decided to stick with a more minimalistic sound. Just me and a guitar for the greater part of the recordings.
Thanks again for listening ... and for your kind words.
Psyve
(05-10-2015, 01:26 PM)Psyve Wrote: Ray
I started recording back in 1984, when I got my first multitrack: a Teac Portastudio. This was a 4 track cassette unit and while it was nothing great, it suddenly gave me the ability to record my songs, then over dub vocal harmonies and add a keyboard track and ....wonder of wonders..... introduced me to bouncing tracks, a new concept to me whereby the first 3 tracks could be mixed down and bounced onto the available 4th track, then two of the remaining 3 tracks mixed down and bounced onto the 3rd track, etc etc.... allowing in essence many more than 4 layers of sound on a 4 track tape. As i listen to those recordings today, i find those were terribly noisy recordings.... lots of tape hiss and background noise , birds chirping at the window, the occasional car horn... but I hear a younger me in those. I transferred most of those recordings to digital around 2005 or so. Just as those cassette tapes were dying out from over play in my car cassette player.... and cd ' s were becoming the recording medium of choice. In 2008 I got my first digital 12-track digital recorder a Boss BR-1200-CD which gave me the ability to record many of my songs a little better... no take hiss....and all the recordings on my Soundcloud page have been home recordings using this device. Albeit with the same Audiotechnica mic I've had since 1984.... an AT 818 II. This time round I took care to minimize background noise too and decided to stick with a more minimalistic sound. Just me and a guitar for the greater part of the recordings.
Thanks again for listening ... and for your kind words.
Psyve
I love it when people got the Model#s. That Boss must have cost a bunch back then.
My 'short' (about 15 inches) shotgun mic is an AT835A. Got it back in? 1995? Once you get a mic
you love you keep it. Wonderful mic for noisy (or any for that matter) environments. Get it 3 inches
from someone's mouth and the rest of the world does not exist. Of course you need to record some
ambient background and mix it back in. Perfect control. Never got into multitrack as what I did
didn't need it. Well... I could have used it for discussion panels. Screw mixers, just use one track
per person and edit out the idiots that grab their mics, hum, tap on the table etc.
a brightly colored fungus that grows in bark inclusions
What IS supreme is the