Why Music Is Incomplete Without a Background Story (Part 1)

The title I used for this blog post (above) is exactly what it looks like: a definitive claim that I'm making about music. I decided to make this the topic of today's post because I am in the finishing stages of a narrative poem I wrote, which has now morphed into prose and has turned into a novella. It's a result of working on this project for about six years and refining it, again and again, not out of dissatisfaction but more out of sheer joy and the fun of playing around with it. The point I want to make about this, though, is that this started out as a music project, and not as a literature project.


Why I Decided to Create a Villain 

The idea, originally, was that I would record a piano album of about 10 tracks or so, and in the CD case would also be a collection of poems. There would be one short poem for each track (song) in the CD. The origins of this idea are rooted in nothing more than the fact that I have always believed that story-telling, poetry and literature should be deeply ingrained in music. I'll be touching more on that in "Part 2" of this blog post.

In any case, after I had thought about the "One poem per song" idea for the CD, I then thought, "How cool would it be if the poems all connected and told a story?" Many of the songs I've written are about my memories of living in Iceland, and so my first thought was to have the poetry collection be about a young man who takes a trip to Iceland to "embrace his roots".

This was intended to be the foundation of this project for quite some time... until another idea was pitched to me. And I have to give credit where credit is due, obviously, because I don't know if this next idea would even have emerged without an old friend, but my buddy Samuel DeLong observed one day that the current version of my story was too "bland", too uneventful, that it was missing something. I distinctly remember him saying, "You need a villain. You need a bad guy." Sometimes a story just needs a little spice. And I think he was right.


The Story's Initial Development

I spent weeks contemplating this, and I asked myself, "What possible 'bad guy' could there be in a place like Iceland?" Then one day it hit me: A young man goes back to Iceland to seek revenge against his childhood bully.

This became the central conflict that would drive the plot of this story. There are SOME autobiographical elements to this in the sense that, yes, there was a bully who used to pick on me when I was a kid, but the severity of the bullying and the victim's anger in the story are both grossly exaggerated in order to make the story more dramatic. When I taught middle school English a few years ago I was involved in the school district's safety committee, and I participated in anti-bullying programs that helped reduce bullying incidents on elementary and junior high school campuses. It was my way of trying to "give back" to the community and responding (in some therapeutic way) to those experiences I had as a kid. Either way, I figured that returning to one's homeland to seek out an enemy could be a cool plot for a story, and so it stuck.

The six or so years that I've worked on this project have involved not only the revising and re-arranging of the story itself, but also composing, re-arranging and morphing the music that goes with it. Throughout this process, the story went from 10 poems to a total of 33 poems (what can I say? I added stuff. You know, a love interest, another character, a couple of sub-plots, etc. So sue me ;) ) As a result, I had to dig up, re-arrange, and/or compose a total of 33 piano pieces to go with these individual poems. As you might imagine, 33 songs is a lot to try to fit onto one CD, so I had to make the album span over 3 CD's, like a "trilogy", the first one containing 10 tracks, the second one containing another 10, and the third one containing 13 tracks. By now I'm guessing you can see why it has taken a while to put this project together. (And by the way, the only way I can describe my experience in doing all of this, is WOW was it fun!).


Poetry to Prose

At some point, after proofreading the draft of the poetry collection several times, I began to have mixed feelings about the poetry itself. Poems can be fun, but to me they can sometimes start to sound "hokey" if there is too much of it. This seems to be a common reaction. Poetry can be beautiful if it's well-written and not clichéd, but at the same time, some people feel that too much poetry can start to sound pretentious, especially if the poems follow a lot of the traditional formats and devices (such as rhyming and a constant overuse of meter, making it sound like a Dr. Seuss book). In response to this, I first experimented by alternating back and forth, having one chapter (or "song") be a piece of prose while the next one be a poem, and so forth. But that just seemed confusing. So I ended up taking the entire manuscript and morphing it into prose. The end result is an 80-page novella containing 33 chapters, each chapter being associated with a song on the CD's. There is still poetry "embedded" within the prose, though, which makes for a new and interesting style that I've never tried when it comes to creative writing.

I do plan on releasing all three CD's some day, and publishing the novella. My idea regarding the combination of these two art forms is that I would provide excerpts of the novella in the leaflets of the CD cases. The listeners, if they want, can read the excerpts as they're listening to the songs. I can't fit the entire novella into the CD cases because it's too long (I've checked). Even if I divide the novella up into the three parts to make them fit each CD, it would probably still be a little too much. Those who have the three CD's will just have to read the excerpts and buy the novella if they want to read the entire story. :)

FYI, I don't plan to stop writing poetry when it comes to other projects. It can still be fun, inspirational and effective when used in small doses.

Another end result of this project is not just that it turned into a novella, but, because it used to be a collection of poems, the prose itself is unusual. Whether or not it's a "good" or "bad" unusual remains to be seen, as I am just now starting to have others read it to give me some constructive feedback. But the fact is that the prose is very "flowery," poetic and metaphorical, and somewhat archaic-sounding, because of what it used to be. The title of the novella is The Lost Enemy. And no, I'm not telling you how the story ends. No spoilers!

Now, believe it or not, my reason for even revealing any of this is partially to make a point about the importance of story-telling and its vital connection to music. Hence the title above. And given the length of this blog post I will announce this as the conclusion of Part 1. If you're interested in more information about why I believe story-telling and literature is so crucial to music, then go to Part 2. I figure that if you've read this much of the blog then you are interested enough in the subject. Either that or you have way too much time on your hands.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO PART 2