When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a teenager, I put away childish things and tried to figure out ways to pick up chicks.<\/p>\n
I concede that geekiness does make chick pickups difficult, but not impossible. True, you\u2019re not going to impress them on the football field, and success in the classroom doesn\u2019t translate into good lovin\u2019. So what do you do?<\/p>\n
You sing, stupid.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t mean join a choir, which I did, or break out in Christmas carols at inappropriate times, which I still do. I mean sing soulful, passionate songs that make you look deep, man. And if you can do it while playing them on the piano like a real artiste, the chicks will dig you.<\/p>\n
At least, that\u2019s the theory.<\/p>\n
I was a pretty credible singer\/pianist-type back in the day, but the chicks never really got into it. That\u2019s partially because I have a hard time taking soulful, dippy ballads seriously. This became especially problematic when I started writing songs of my own. I can think of very few love songs that don\u2019t make me want to vomit.<\/p>\n
Love songs are stupid. If you doubt this, try reciting them out loud. Dial up to a girl of your choice and try reciting the words from any song by Chicago.<\/p>\n
Imagine such a scene:<\/p>\n
\u201cHey, Louise? Hi. It\u2019s me, Herb. I just wanted to let you know that you\u2019re the meaning in my life. Yeah. Uh-huh. You\u2019re the inspiration. In fact, you bring feeling to my life. As I said before, you\u2019re the inspiration. That\u2019s all. Except it\u2019s like when you love somebody until the end of time, and you\u2019re always on my mind. Or something. Anyway, I gotta go, my biscuits are burning\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
You get the idea.<\/p>\n
Whenever I started writing a ballad, I\u2019d try to stick with the Moon\/June kind of crap, but I never buy it, so it all falls apart.<\/p>\n
Take this song<\/a>, for instance, which I wrote about ten years ago.<\/p>\n It\u2019s one of my favorites, and it plays well live. It begins with an insipid phrase I wrote well over a decade before I actually finished this song.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/span> I let that ferment in a rancid corner of my brain forever, never thinking I\u2019d have occasion to use it.<\/p>\n Fade out, fade in. The year is 1995, and I\u2019m trying to imagine what the \u201cnew\u201d Beatles song, \u201cFree as a Bird,\u201d is going to sound like. I noodle around on the keyboard with a tune I quite like, with the lyrics \u2013<\/p>\n I think my version ends up being better than what the Beatles came up with, but that\u2019s not saying a lot.<\/p>\n Anyway, that went nowhere, until one day I\u2019m keyboard-noodling again and I dredge up the fermented couplet about taking and giving, if only to induce retching, and, on a whim, I add some new lines.<\/p>\n So here\u2019s the new version:<\/p>\n I\u2019d offer you? What? What would I offer her?<\/p>\n My mind raced back to a video we used to show people on my mission. It was called Together Forever<\/span>, and it featured a segment with a \u201ctroubled\u201d youth who did some generically bad things but then gets turned around when the Mormons show up on his doorstep.<\/p>\n In describing his less-than-specific misdeeds, he says:<\/p>\n \u201cPeople lose their standards. They lower their morals, and you know what they end up with? Nothing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The thing about that was that the actor took this big, dramatic pause between \u201cyou know what they end up with?\u201d and \u201cNothing.\u201d That left room for one of my missionary companions to insert other possibilities into the audio.<\/p>\n Some of his alternatives:<\/p>\n \u201cYou know what they end up with? Eggs.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou know what they end up with? Freshly-starched socks.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou know what they end up with? Mustard.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Mustard! That\u2019s what I would offer her! A whole lot of mustard!<\/p>\n Then the faux-Beatles melody came back, only with new words:<\/p>\n The rest clicked into place pretty quickly. I even put in a non-sequiter Beatles parody line into the song \u2013 from \u201cIf I Fell,\u201d a dippy Beatles love song. Listen and see if you catch it.<\/p>\n So that, my friends, is how art is created. Sometimes, you don’t know what song you are writing… until you’ve finished. And sometimes, even then you still don’t know what you wrote. That is true crap.<\/p>\n It still won\u2019t help you pick up chicks, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WhenI was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a teenager, I put away childish things and tried to figure out ways to pick up chicks. I concede that geekiness does make chick pickups difficult, but not impossible. True, you\u2019re not ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4940,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions\/4940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Ghastly.<\/p>\n
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