Okay, so, you can call it the after-effects of the spectacular Buffy Musical from this weekend which swept Garbage, Erin McKeown, DeathCab for Cutie, Rufus Wainwright, and Leona Naess right out of my musical rotation as soon as i finished downloading it … but i want to write a musical.
Hey, stop laughing. Just stick with me for a minute.
For my Creative Writing class i wrote this awfully belabored story, and i could have passed it off as excellent work to any other teacher, but my instructor leveled her gaze right at me and said “you didn’t like that assignment too much, huh?” So, after much negotiation we decided that i would write another short story and hand in a cd of a few songs to make up for some of my least favourite poetry assignments, and that my grade would somehow be triangulated from the both of them. Mind you, i’m getting an A in the class either way, but both of us agreed i should at least try to get some criticism out of the class for my effort, and i can’t really do that with a story i’m not feeling at all. So, once more with feeling…
Meanwhile, we have the new songs. Some of them are quite nice and i like them, but this year i’ve found a lot of them work just as much as stories as they do pop songs. For example, there’s the inverted pair of “Over You” and “Excuse,” the latter of which details a sexual escapade that might not have been the best idea in the world and the former pretty much saying that the narrator can’t get said escapade out of his head. While working out the puzzle of what songs are heading for my next demo earlier i found myself with a heap of these narrative songs, with an entire handful of them that are as good as those two but that i wouldn’t leave standing alone in the middle of an album.
And that’s when it hit me… i should turn in a one act musical to my Creative Writing class… or, at the very least, a story with narration via song. Yes, it sounds insane, especially since i typically hate musicals and writing drama, but it makes some sort of crazy sense in this post-Buffy world. So… we’ll see. (Nevermind that i just wrote the synopsis and the main character’s theme, we’ll see. Honestly. I’m not going to spend all night doing this instead of studying to retain my perfect score in communications).