GrooveLily

Leap. Creative Commons attribution license, Sabrina's Stash on flickr.

Forgive me for being inconsistent with these “weekly” demos. It’s been kinda tough lately–and I’ll get into that shortly. But for now, here’s this week’s song, way more “adult contemporary” than we usually roll, but it still feels appropriate to the subject matter. Here’s “Leap.”

http://groovelily.bandcamp.com/track/leap-rough-demo

If you like it, download a copy and throw us some $, which goes directly to buy groceries and pay bills. Thanks!

Here’s why it’s appropriate this week:

Val and I moved out here to LA, among other reasons, to try to further take advantage of our growing relationship with Disney. They were flying us out once or twice a month, and it just seemed like the right idea. And as far as writing songs for the Tinker Bell movies, it has been, and continues to be, great.

Two weeks ago, though, a bunch of things happened in quick succession that really threw us.

First: we’d been invited to write two songs for a potential stage musical version of Disney’s “Freaky Friday” last fall. We thought this was a terrific idea. We knew we’d be competing against some of the best theater songwriters in the country, and we held out hope, and kept holding out hope, and kept holding…for about six months. And finally, we found out through the grapevine, that somebody else got the gig. (We wish him the very best.) But we were sad.

Second: We’d been invited to write spec songs (i.e.: spend a lot of time writing and producing demos, and don’t get any money at all, in the hopes that one or more of your songs gets chosen) for a spinoff of High School Musical. Once again, we knew we’d be competing against many other talented writers, and our chances were slim–but we poured everything we had into three songs, and found out that none were chosen. We were very sad.

Third: Toy Story The Musical, long in redevelopment for a huge, amazing, revised and revitalized production at the big, grand, awesome Hyperion Theater at California Adventure Park, was cancelled. The reasons for its cancellation are numerous, and I don’t understand all of them, but we didn’t realize how much we’d been counting on this one terribly cool thing until it was taken away from us. We were very, very sad.

Finally: Guy Adkins died. See this blog entry. I kinda lost it.

So it’s been a little tough here in the Milburn/Vigoda side of things for a couple of weeks. As in the song, we leapt, and fell. And leapt, and fell. And leapt, and fell again.

But there’s nothing like failure and being reminded of your own mortality to jump-start the creative process. Which is why it feels SO GOOD to have Gene out at our house for five days to finish writing the songs for Wheelhouse. Nobody is paying us any money to do this. No theaters are lined up to book it. Right now, we’re only doing this for ourselves. And it’s incredibly satisfying. It’s taking another big leap, and the three of us are doing it together.

The structure of Wheelhouse as of Saturday morning.

Mose and Gene perform a saxoflute duet during a rare break in our Wheelhouse toil.

Which leads me to the context for this week’s demo: Leap. It was never intended for Wheelhouse–but now that we’re building Wheelhouse into something bigger, stronger, and better than we originally envisioned, we’re finding ways to include things we hadn’t dreamed of when we started.

I don’t want to overshare here, but let’s say that the band dynamic in GrooveLily is a little bit like this:

Brendan: Oh, look, a cliff! Let’s jump off it.
Val: Okay! Me first!
Gene: Uh, guys? Hello?

This risk-inclined Val & Brendan/risk-averse Gene dynamic is what drives the story of Wheelhouse, and risk-averseness is what kept Gene in safe, static situations in work and love for a long time, until somehow a dam broke inside him. In a matter of weeks he found Suzanne, fell in love, and started a life with her.

Leap was written as a wedding present for Suzanne and Gene. Our intention was to write a song to play at Gene’s wedding that would make him cry.

It worked.

And then we recorded it as a VERY adult-contemporary styled demo for Warner/Chappell.

And now it looks like it’s gonna be Gene’s 11 o’clock number in Wheelhouse, in a far more direct, far less smooth-jazz version sung by Gene.

As I type these words, we are done with five solid days of writing and discussing and hashing it out, and the score of Wheelhouse is 99% written. We are no longer very sad. We are happy and hopeful and excited about the future again.