On "Archery Lesson"

    This song is built off of one of my favorite lyrical techniques, one I intend to talk about more later (probably with "Light's Returned" or "Follow the Spark"? we'll see), where the one lyric is given multiple meanings by the dramatic context. In this case, the lessons double as Archer mentoring Apprentice through dealing with grief, trying to lead him to a place of stability and peace in a language Apprentice would actually listen to.

    I needed a backbone to structure the action, so I came up with the idea of Apprentice getting one shot per day. Later, I learned of a telling of the original myth where Hou Yi outpaced Peng Meng in a contest shooting geese; I wish I had heard of it before I started writing the song, so that I might have built it around this contest instead of contriving my own variation on the myth, but I'm very satisfied with how it turned out.

     When I was finding the musical material for this song, I built myself a short playlist that captured the world I wanted it to live in. Those songs were:

• "Over", JRB (the acoustic elegy I had been looking for from the start)
• "Morning Dew", Grateful Dead
• "Evol", Adrianne Lenker

    Ultimately, of course, other influences end up sneaking in.

    When I make these sorts of playlists, looking for bricks I'll use to build a song, I try my damndest to avoid putting musical theatre songs on them. I believe that musical theatre is a medium, not a genre, which means that the music that flows through a piece shouldn't merely be beholden to artificial "contemporary musical theatre conventions". (I'm talking about sus chords and noodly piano figures and just enough modal interchange to self-consciously "spice up" simple pop songwriting and what have you.) Those conventions come from musical theatre songwriters failing to expose themselves and their work to sufficiently diverse musical ideas, thus walling themselves off to wider fields of musical experience and pleasure. That's the vital importance of the Yazbeck challenge.

    As another example, here's the playlist for a song I'm working on now for OVERMAN, my Nietzsche rock opera, where Nietzsche and Wagner meet, get krunked out of their minds, and fall a little in love:

• "Rosanna", Toto
• "Hold the Line", Toto
• "Higher Ground", Stevie Wonder
• "Fool in the Rain", Led Zeppelin

    "And every day you keep trying/'cause if you don't, no one else picks up the slack..."