Song Preparation — Of pigeons and people

In just a few hours it’ll be February 1st, as you all know, and that means that February Album Writing Month will be here! As I mentioned in the last post, that’s very exciting for me. It’ll be a challenge, but I think it’ll be a good stretch for me.

 

Tonight as I was driving into work, I thought it would be a good idea for me to write about the songs I’m going to do. I’ll discuss the topics I’m going to cover, typically a few days before I produce the final product. I went through some days ago and wrote down a whole bunch of ideas.  Some of them have really great potential, and those are the first string that I’ll write. The first one has been percolating around my head for a while now and I’m really excited to be able to formalize it. 

 

This first song has a bit of a story behind it. My best friend and I had gone down to Washington D.C. to see Great Big Sea in concert. We got down to the city several hours earlier then necessary and we decided to hit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (after all, where else would two science fiction fans go?). 

 

While walking along, we were just jokingly making up song titles. It was probably sparked by seeing a busker while we walked back to the metro stop. Some of the stuff we came with was just smarmy or cute fluff — nothing worth mentioning. But then one of us hit upon “Pigeon of the System.” And something clicked. 

 

The idea of a pigeon in D.C. was really neat to me. These birds live in an environment that is charged with political vitality… and they don’t even know it. They spend all of their time walking around, scratching out an existence in an environment that they can barely understand. 

 

In some ways, those pigeons can be seen as a good analogy for people. We very often can be living in the middle of something that is miles above our ability to comprehend. A force of nature, a major news story, even issues of a spiritual nature… we can be really willfully ignorant. Unlike those pigeons, we don’t have to be ignorant. Though learning, debate, and thought we can come to grips with many of the hard issues around us. Not everything is within our grasp, but we can at least acknowledge that we are ignorant in those areas. 

 

So, “Pigeon of the System” is the name of my first song, and those are some of the thoughts that I’ve been considering as I prepare to write. Come on back over the next few days to see the results.