One of the earliest songs we wrote, immersion composition society-stylee, was a song called Moneymaker at the 5-minute behest of Erik Ehn. It was supposed to be a successful song that would stand for Tyrone's line in Long Day's Journey Into Night:
CHORUS
That God-damned play
I bought for a song
And made such a great success in ā
A great money success ā
It ruined me with its promise
Of an easy fortune.
By the time I woke it was too late.
Iād lost the talent I once had
Through years of repetition.TYRONE
Thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season like snapping your fingers!
We recorded it into a cellphone in front of NohSpace, using the entire cast of the Cycle Plays as white-robed Causey Way chorus, then four-tracked it at House of Zoka, complete with my cracking voice, which producer A4 thought communicated the right sentiment. It took everything I had not to tear off into the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song each time we laid down another vocal track.
I do so hate that song Moneymaker. It encapsulated all the confusing things about the craft of music making on demand, It's pouring out of you like gold, or emesis. It's completely (not) within reach. It's either brilliant, which makes a repeat performance impossible, or shite, which means you have to try again. Hum a few bars and I descend into deep depression. Lexa Walsh found it again in another song in Letters from a Small House and started to sing a mash-up of Mary Tyler Moore Show Theme with Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now and I quietly went beserk.
No one in The Cycle Plays project cares about that, though. They sing the Moneymaker song as they wash cups, or pick up fans, or gather around the musicians for a vocal rehearsal of the one hundred new songs we've written for them since that one fateful song (which never even made it into a play).
So Erik, ending a three-year creative process as it was begun, deposited a piece of binder paper on each of our rigs with the request for a new song by the afternoon. We missed the deadline but caught up by lunch the following day. Five minutes later, Llu exposed us by singing Senses Working Overtime as he walked by. At least he was finally off of Moneymaker. I grabbed Jonathan Segel by the ankle, despite his attempts to be completely invisible during this process, and asked him to redeem this song. He did. And then Saturday night we grabbed John Oglevee by the ankle in a similar fashion, concatenated these two versions so we were not working overtime, but were ascending at the end, which is all you can do when your name is I love you. Llu was in the audience singing Moneymaker over the top of this new, final, closing song. Llu, I asked, stopping all activity. Did we just write Moneymaker again? He gently affirmed we had.
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