I've always been aching to fly... --image courtesy of Kush on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kush757/4030326060/
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First: a little backstory. A year ago, Val and I finally inked our first-ever music publishing deal with Warner-Chappell. (Previously blogged about here.) One of the terms of the deal was that we needed to write and deliver demos of 10 non-theater songs to WC within a year’s time.
Well, a year went by VERY QUICKLY and suddenly, between touring concerts of Sleeping Beauty Wakes and rewrites of the SBW’s stage musical version with Rachel Sheinkin–and our first public performances of Shackleton, and Tinker Bell 3 and 4 rewrites for Disney, and Toy Story rewrites and workshops, we were in the incredibly-enviable-yet-difficult position of having had too much work to think about non-theater-related pop songs until the last minute.
As our deadline approached, our contact at WC gently reminded us what we’d delivered so far and what we’d promised to deliver. And now after a bit of sweat and a little less sleep than we’d like, we’ve dusted off old, half-finished stuff, written brand-new stuff, and made a bunch of new demos. We’re gonna share them with you right here, once a week, until we run out.
This first one is “Up, Up, and Away,” which has been written about so ably by Rob Bond in his Vimeo GrooveLily rarities channel here, here, and here. Val and I started this song in rehearsals with the 5-piece version of the band back in 2001, and Gene Lewin and Chris Tarrow (our former guitar player and frequent producer/mixer/man about town) contributed. Gene recorded drums for it at Pilot Studios back in October 2001, and we recorded the rest here at the Collaboratory last week, April of 2010. Glad we transferred those tapes to digital and kept them around–Gene’s drums sound mighty fine, and they make this a bona fide new GrooveLily recording. Now all we need to do is get his backups on the bridge and the chorus, so it’s not just me singing the cool “Janie’s got a gun”-inspired vocal arrangement that Gene helped make.
Back to the writing: In August, 2001, we had recently read this story about a purported Darwin Award nominee:
ARKANSAS CITY (EAP) — A Little Rock woman was killed yesterday after leaping through her moving car’s sun roof during an incident best described as “a mistaken rapture” by dozens of eye witnesses.
Thirteen other people were injured after a twenty-car pileup resulted from people trying to avoid hitting the woman who was apparently convinced that the rapture was occurring when she saw twelve people floating up into the air, and then passed a man on the side of the road who she claimed was Jesus.
“She started screaming ‘He’s back, He’s back’ and climbed right out of the sunroof and jumped off the roof of the car,” said Everet Williams, husband of 28-year-old Georgann Williams who was pronounced dead at the scene.
“I was slowing down but she wouldn’t wait till I stopped,” Williams said. “She thought the rapture was happening and was convinced that Jesus was gonna lift her up into the sky,” he went on to say.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been on the force,” said
Paul Madison, first officer on the scene. Madison questioned the man who looked like Jesus and discovered that he was dressed up as Jesus and was on his way to a toga costume party when the tarp covering the bed of his pickup truck came loose and released twelve blowup sex dolls filled with helium which floated up into the air.Ernie Jenkins, 32, of Fort Smith, who’s been told by several of his friends that he looks like Jesus, pulled over and lifted his arms into the air in frustration, and said “Come back here,” just as the Williams’ car passed him, and Mrs. Williams was sure that it was Jesus lifting people up into the sky as they passed by him, according to her husband, who says his wife loved Jesus more than anything else.
When asked for comments about the twelve sex dolls, Jenkins replied “This is all just too weird for me. I never expected anything like this to happen.”
Back then, we simply believed it. As it turns out, she’s not in the list of Darwin awards after all, and it seems to have been a hoax written by somebody named Elroy Willis. But whether it’s truth or fiction, it got us thinking about people who tried to fly and failed–and we saw a throughline from Icarus to “Lawnchair Man” Larry Walters to this (possibly fictional) Mrs. Georgann Williams. All of them wanted to fly, all of them failed in one way or another, and all of them died.
But: they were brave enough to try. And, as we wrote in the bridge of our song:
most of us aren’t so brave
we gaze at the sky
fearful of falling
and all that we can do is stand here and wave
Requiescant in pace, you magnificent fliers.
Tune in next week for a brand new, less obscure song.