Sparks from the Fire

Irving Berlin - Playing the black keyes

Great songs have long been a deep and rich part of the American culture and consequently the world culture as well.  I can safely say that it would be any composer/lyricist’s dream to someday write a classic – a song that is so universal and so iconic that it becomes a part of the fabric of history and lives beyond its time.

This century’s, no make it this millennium’s Ira Award for Best Lyricist of classic songs goes to Irving Berlin.  Of course he was also the composer of these songs as well.

The story goes that Mr. Berlin, who had small hands wrote most of his songs in the key of F# because he preferred to play on the black keys of the piano where the stretch was not so large for his fingers.  Later in life, when he could afford it, he had Steinway make him a special upright piano with a large crank on the side that when turned, tightened the strings and thus changed the sounding key of his F# fingerings – sort of a guitar capo for the piano.

This man had his fingers not only on the piano but also on the pulse of America like no other lyricist since.  Among the many great classic songs he wrote were “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”, “Easter Parade”, “White Christmas”, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “God Bless America”, “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody,” “Always”,  “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, and “What’ll I Do”.

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On Creative Writing
My first real adventure with creative writing began with a course I took back in high school with a tough, but inspirational teacher named Irma Erickson. This was one of the courses at my school that you didn’t miss if you were a creative kid.

We wrote a novel during the year – each chapter written in a different style of expression – first person prose, poetry, third person biography, lyrics, etc. It was a class that captured all our imaginations and we each would read our efforts each couple of weeks to the rest of the class amid gales of laughter or choruses of groans.

My efforts were fledgling to say the least, but the experience certainly got me hooked.

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What a strange thing it is that we do. Singing. To organize our thoughts and sentences into structured rhythms. To further organize the words and syllables into predetermined pitches on top of those rhythms and then sometimes hold those syllables and pitches to inordinate degrees. I’ve always felt that it is an odd method of human communication.

Animals do a form of it as well. They howl, they roar, they moan. And each of these moments in time expresses deeply their primitive feelings. We sometimes mimic them in their feelings.

As a song writer, I have often thought deeply about this strange expression of human emotion and communication called singing. In the musical theater I was taught that when the emotion of the moment becomes so high that dialogue can no longer handle it, it is then that a song is born, that the character moves into singing because mere words just do not suffice. When this happens naturally, the audience easily accepts the stylistic evolving into music and song.
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The Lyrics

I like story songs. And I love a parade. There is great drama in a parade. You stand on the curb and wait excitedly for it to come. Whatever ‘it’ is – it could be your daughter playing the piccolo or your high school marching band or the queen of the day waving in the back seat of a convertible. It’s proceeded by bands and clowns and majorettes and often followed by the same. You stand on the curb and await the big moment as the excitement ratchets up. You crane your neck in anticipation of the big moment.

And then it’s there! And the tears come to your eyes, and hope is restored and somehow the wait always pays off in a laugh or a ‘wow’ or a splash of pride.

And then it passes by and continues on its journey. And you wish you could prolong the moment, but you can’t. It’s the very nature of the parade. It gives you a taste, but for a moment. Sometimes you can run along with it for a moment or two trying to prolong it, but usually, by then, it’s over. The crowds are too much and ‘it’ moves on down the road to another place in time. (more…)

I come from the theater.  Oh I grew up on rock n’ roll and folk, but my real training in lyric writing was in the theater.  It wasn’t until then that I really began to grow as a lyricist, as a storyteller.

The lyrics of a theatrical song have to have movement, they have to go from point A to point B dramatically.  Otherwise they just tend to sit there on the stage, no matter how beautiful, and often end up getting cut from the show because they don’t move the plot forward and are too much of a stage wait.

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By Peter Link

Several years ago I had a disastrous experience with MCI Telecommunications (my telephone company). Through a billing fault of theirs, my phone was turned off (the absolute truth).

It then took me over 60 calls and countless hours of wasted time to get the service restored and by the time I had restored the service, I was so frustrated by the experience, I changed the telephone service to a new company out of spite. Somehow, even that was not enough to ameliorate my frustration. So I made the ultimate gesture to MCI – I wrote a song about it.

THE TRUTH BE TOLD
Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

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