Adolescence was not kind to my songwriting career.<\/p>\n
\u201cI Am A Cow\u201d showed real promise, but as the years dragged on, every other song I attempted to write was crap. The problem was that I was trying to be soulful and get chicks, so my songs were all about how deep and sensitive I was. Except that I wasn\u2019t deep and sensitive \u2013 I just wanted to make out. So I wrote songs that I was too embarrassed to actually sing.<\/p>\n
I found these lyrics in my journal to one travesty called \u201cAlone,\u201d which includes the couplet:<\/p>\n
I want to share my hopes and fears
\nBut I keep crying silent tears.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nGyaaaaagh.<\/p>\n
Or there was this one, from the song titled \u201cI Still Care:\u201d<\/p>\n
The world is always giving us new love songs to sing
\nBut each one fails to express the loneliness love brings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nOy.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more, but you can\u2019t read them, because saccharine has been known to cause cancer in rats. All I wrote during puberty were self-pitying, whiny little screeds that still make me itch, almost three decades later.<\/p>\n
In fact, the next song in my repertoire that doesn\u2019t give me hives wasn\u2019t written until 1985, when I was Senior Class President at Calabasas High School. I was in charge of the Homecoming Dance, and, given the fact that I had never attended a school dance, I was somehow at a loss for how to go about the planning process. That\u2019s a story in and of itself, but the song came into play when we needed to select a Homecoming theme.<\/p>\n
Usually, themes were based on preexisting music. My middle school graduation theme was \u201cDon\u2019t Stop Believin\u2019,\u201d despite inappropriate lyrics about the smell of wine and cheap perfume, and long before we knew it would be the most downloaded song on iTunes.<\/p>\n
But what should be the song for Homecoming?<\/p>\n
Well, I\u2019m not sure how it happened, but the theme we chose was \u201cColor Your Dreams.\u201d I think the class secretary thought that would help with the d\u00e9cor. And since there was no song called \u201cColor Your Dreams,\u201d I volunteered to write one.<\/p>\n
Stepping back for a moment\u2026<\/p>\n
The summer preceding my senior year in high school, I was in a show called The Video Zone, where, on closing night, I was part of an improv where I was making up lyrics to a blues riff. So I started singing randomly about some fat guy named Irving who used to bounce up and down a Laundromat.<\/p>\n
Several of my early songs cruelly make fun of fat people. I don\u2019t know why. I guess I just thought fatties were an easy target. Now that my own gut continues to spread, I realize just how unfunny mockery of lard really is. So much for my deep sensitivity.<\/p>\n
So when it came time to color my dreams, I went back to Irving and fleshed out his story, so to speak. He was in love with Matilda, who was 105 years old. That gave me the best line of the song \u2013 \u201cat the age of 105, they mistook her for mold.\u201d Matilda rejects Irving, but in the third verse, he catches a girl named Lucinda on the rebound. She\u2019s freakishly tall and \u201cused to trip and fall across the Chinese wall.\u201d It was stupid, but it was supposed to be stupid. Then there\u2019s a chorus about coloring your dreams that\u2019s insipid and has nothing to do with the rest of the piece.<\/p>\n
The song makes no pretense of being anything other than moronic, which is probably why I still like it. The one thing I can\u2019t stand more than anything else is pretense and sanctimony. That\u2019s why all of my songs that I enjoy are asinine.<\/p>\n
I debuted the song in a pep assembly for the whole school, and it was a smash hit. I had male dancers in drag throwing flower petals at the audience, and the school band joined in at the end and segued seamlessly from \u201cColor Your Dreams\u201d to the Scorpions\u2019 \u201cRock You Like A Hurricane.\u201d It probably helped that the lyrics were impossible to hear in the echo of the gymnasium, but it was still gratifying.<\/p>\n
Surprisingly, I didn\u2019t have a recording of this. It\u2019s not my best stuff, but I think it ought to be recorded for posterity. So I slapped a demo together this morning.<\/p>\n
Enjoy. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adolescencewas not kind to my songwriting career.\u201cI Am A Cow\u201d showed real promise, but as the years dragged on, every other song I attempted to write was crap. The problem was that I was trying to be soulful and get chicks, so my songs were all about how deep and sensitive I was. Except that ... 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-722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722","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=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}