a musical created on the internet by the award-winning writing team Kerrigan and Lowdermilk based on the lives of two young bloggers as they share the story of their freshman years of college
I am taking time out of my VERY busy Wednesday night (read: top chef and boston market) to issue lots and lots of props to a certain Erin Nelson of Viterbo University. She is (i believe), the first to perform, record and upload a FreshX song other than kait and i. And guess what? she sounds amazing.
Honestly, I just had a really lovely moment noticing what’s happened over this year. CC wrote a beautiful post called my heart is split, kait wrote a lyric, i set it, k+i bickered back and forth about how to finish it, and then suddenly it was done. And usually that’s all the happens, and in a few years maybe the song would have a life. But I made a pdf of the sheet music on my little mac, posted it here first, and we made a scrappy little recording. And Erin Nelson downloaded it, learned it, presumably found a piano and a pianist, and uploaded it here. I think that’s fucking rad.
So please! Other wonderful singers out there, let’s share the love, record some videos. Be like Erin Nelson, be a part of the weird creative cycle that is the freshman experiment. i swear, we’re all gonna win f’in pulitzers for this shit someday.
word, b
PS: Brian loves greasy food.
Fancy Restaurant + Excessive Sandwich From South of the Mason-Dixon Line = The Happiest Brian of Them All
Hey guys, Brian here. It just occurred to me that I made y’all a present and never passed it out. Very silly. Anyway, happy spring: here’s the sheet music to My Heart Is Split and a matching scratch recording of Kait singing the tune. So go ahead, make FreshX a part of your next Spring Awakening audition…
or sing it and post a youtube video…
or just disregard this and return to your normal sunday afternoon schedule…
Hey guys, so while Kait and I were up at Goodspeed they had a cabaret featuring the new artists that were in residence. So we performed “My Heart Is Split” live for the first time ever, and also talked a bit about the project. I think the audience was pretty psyched - and certainly surprised. Here’s a clip, courtesy of my dad and my crappy handheld flipvideo thing…
Writing “My Heart Is Split” has been a really bizarre process for us. I mean, first off it’s the first time we’ve showed our process so publicly. But beyond that this has been a really odd example to start with.
We pride ourselves on being very flexible about who “goes first.” (sometimes kait starts w/ a lyric, sometimes I start w/ a melody) but generally no matter how we begin the process is always the same: someone starts - someone finishes. if kait starts w a lyric, i set it and we’re done. sometimes we have to repeat that several times over several sections of a song. But rarely do we have as many “back and forth” passes as we have w/ this song.
Because we’re usually on my couch. My ugly, cardboard couch. (you can get your own here: http://www.homereserve.com) We sit there and eat thai food from Pam Real Thai or Yum Yum Bangkok (Pam has better Pad Ki Mao and YYB has better Pad Thai) or even calzones and chicken rolls from Fat Sals. But there’s always food. And we eat the food and fight about structure. Is there a bridge, what does the bridge do. Brian why do you want a double chorus, Kait why can’t you write lyrics to my prechorus, Brian why did you eat my fucking chicken roll.
It’s hard to adjust to this format. We’re trying very hard to make everything transparent, and to keep all of the information here, but it means we don’t work on these songs in the same room as much and sometimes there are miscommunications. Kait came over on Monday afternoon. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and soggy french fries. And we fixed it.
So here’s a recording of the full-length “My Heart Is Split,” the first finished song we’ve got so far. That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s me singing, so brace yourselves. Oh and also i just bought a MacBookPro. It’s beautiful. It’s going to teach us how to make better videos for you. I love it. It took a picture of me this morning:
hey here’s my response to kait’s “my heart post” from yesterday.
small things: i like “songs and details” better than just “details,” and I can make it work musically. thanks for the change to “somewhat impermanent,” though. that’s much easier to set.
I don’t buy not having the hook at the top of the second chorus - you’ll have to give me a good reason why it’s not helpful. also, what about having more of a rhyme there? something like: “of my present life now flying past.” if you really want that phrase to push ahead we could also change the second line to rhyme with heart and having the 4th line push into the chorus.
in terms of the end and structure, we definitely need to come back to the prechorus again at some point in the song. i think you said we couldn’t get to it after the second verse, thought-wise, and so we’ve ended up w/ this structure: V, P, C, V, C, P, C, (C). It’s actually pretty common, having your pre-chorus then function as your bridge. so i think after this second chorus we would have a short instrumental section (possibly w/ spoken text overtop), and then go into the prechorus again into a final chorus, extended chorus or double chorus. i think we should wait on talking about extensions work - i want to think about that musically.
But wait. Here’s a completely different, possibly simpler option, if we can’t get on the same page about the transition into the second chorus, is to revisit the idea of the simple pop structure: VPCVPCC. It just occurred to me that there’s a way to incorporate your list idea into the second prechorus. Something like:
Back home
With my dog Angelina
Back home
With my stuffed Eskimo
Back home with books about jesus
And cheetos and board games and pictures of Reno
My heart is split…
Which means the end of the song would then be just as you described it – just a double or extended chorus. I don’t know how I feel about it – it certainly seems like the best way to do what you’d like to do. I hadn’t considered it before because changing the lyrics in the second prechorus isn’t a very pop-like thing to do, but a) we’re in a musical theatre place as well and b) who gives a shit anyway and c) if it’s simpler then that sounds great to me.
