Catch it to Me (Part II) Of Plosives and Cliches

" Catch it to me!" He said.

Now in the normal universe, we find it adorable when our little monkeys transpose ideas in their search for language. We want to put on a multi-colored knit sweat shirt and share this verbal guffaw with the rest of the known world.

"How cute is that?" we ask our ambivilant friends and family.

"Soooo cute!" the girls will answer.

"Uh huh." the men will shrug.

But a songwriter's brain is wired a little differently.

Okay, way differently.

Calvin just uttered a perfect plosive line of four strong beats.

Catch it to me. Bum Ba Ba Bum. You can hear the pounding of the honky tonk piano. Bum Bum Ba Bum.

It is both melody and percussion.

What's more, to Calvin, it has a precise meaning. No metaphore, no softening of concept, most importantly no cliche.

This isn't Harry Chapin softly whining about a game of catch with his alienated son/father. This is a three year old saying "Throw me the freaking ball, dad!"

There's power in the line.

And when I refer to cliches I'm not just refering to the kind of lyrics that seem to prepetuate themselves in coutless songs, but also the cliches of rhyme (moon june to quote my dad) and cliches of concept. Boy meets girl kind of stuff. I hate that in writing (especially my own).

The most common life line from the cliche hole is to write in the abstract. Write lyrics like throwing paint on a canvas. This is where the plosives come into play. A good abstract line has to have more giong for it than the rantings of an 8th grade diary. "A soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the national trust" As far as I'm concerned the Beatles can get away with it, the rest of us . . . not so much.

Lyrical perfection is tougher to obtain than the poetic because a lyric has to be sung too. Words have sit comfortably on melody and rhythm. They have to flow easily to accomidate the articulation limitations of the jaw, and consanants can't run together or the line will be lost.

It gets worse in front of a microphone. Too many "p's" and those ipod head-phones would blast off your ears. To many esses and the drummer will throw a tantrum that no one can hear the symbols.

Catch it to me. Perfect. Its direct. Its a nice turn of phrase (as the country writers would say) It has a nice plosive quality that won't push the mircophone into the red.

But there's only one problem.

it ain't a song

yet.