BMI Blog #5

30th October, 2023

The reason I started this blog was to put more information out there about the BMI experience. There didn’t seem to be much, but one of the few things I knew for sure was that at some point you have to write a song for Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire. This song has been part of the course since the workshop’s inception in 1961- Alan Menken has a Blanche song sitting in a draw somewhere. Much tighter parameters than the last assignment: no parody, pretend this is Blanche’s first song, and try not to use the Blues Piano referenced in the play. The setting was the end of Act 1, Scene 3 (Stella has just taken Stanley back). Add to that the hundreds of Blanche songs our teachers must have heard over the years, and it felt pretty hard to distinguish oneself. That said, I am once again very happy with our song, and once again it was fucking dicey getting there.

I was paired with Shino. I don’t know if he likes bugs, but he wears glasses and is intense. We were presenting first, he and Naruto were still finishing their subtext song, that and his job meant he didn’t have much time, and once again it came down to the wire. So, my music-first preference is a lesson I need to keep re-learning. It’s just I get antsy waiting around without having written anything, so I wrote up a lyric in the form of a rondeau redouble. This is a poetic form comprising six stanzas of alternating ABAB, BABA, ABAB, etc. Each line of stanza 1 is repeated at the end of the stanzas 2-5, and half of the opening line concludes stanza 6. I didn’t bother being strict with the meter, so the feet are all over the place, but here is my first try at a Blanche song. To briefly set it up, Blanche and Mitch are sitting on the steps late night and she looks up at the sky:

The Lonely Light

BLANCHE

NOT SO MANY OUT TONIGHT

HEAVEN’S ALL BUT EMPTY

ONLY ONE, THE LONELY LIGHT

FADING LIKE A MEMORY...

I RECALL IN LAUREL, WE

WOULD STARE, EYES SHINING BRIGHT

UPWARD AT A STARRY SEA

NOT SO MANY OUT TONIGHT

LEO PROWLING FOR A FIGHT

TAURUS ROAMING WILD AND FREE

THE BEASTS ARE ALL DOWN HERE TONIGHT

HEAVEN’S ALL BUT EMPTY

ONE, BY ONE, BY ONE, THEY FLEE

BLACKNESS BLOCKING OUT THE WHITE

ONE YET STANDS IN THE DEBRIS

ONLY ONE, THE LONELY LIGHT

ARE YOU STILL THERE, SHINING BRIGHT?

OR ARE YOU JUST WHAT USED TO BE?

SLOWLY FADING OUT OF SIGHT

FADING LIKE A MEMORY

TIME CREEPS IN JUST LIKE THE NIGHT

ON A FADING BEAUTY...

ON A WORLD WHERE ALL SEEMED RIGHT-

MITCH:
BLANCHE, COULD IT BE YOU AND ME?

BLANCHE:

FADING...

There are bits I like here. The image of a star unified a lot of different concepts- Blanche likes a soft light, its Latin roots make her think of Stella, and the idea of a single fading star where once there were many represents the gradual disappearance of Blanche’s America. Stella’s an astrology girl, and stanza 3 was a fun way of letting her jab at Stanley without Mitch registering any insult to his friend. But I’m not sure poems make for good musical theatre- for one, you can’t sit and ruminate on the meaning of each line in musical theatre, it has to be simple without being boring. Stanza 5 is a good example of this. I tried to link Blanche’s memories of her family’s lost plantation “Belle Reeve” with the idea that often what we see as stars are really just the light of dead stars only now reaching us. Shino told me he didn’t really get it, and fair enough- we went back to the drawing board.

This time, we were thinking we’d try a rondo (ABACA, ABACADA, etc). It’s basically a music style where you keep cycling back to the A section, interspersed with new sections. In this song, we planned the A sections to be Blanche working her charms on Mitch, with the B sections being her memories. We liked the idea of doing the A sections in 4/4, and the memory sections in 3/4. She would be more in control in the A sections, whereas the 3/4 sections would gradually devolve from a waltz (memories of her youth in Laurel) into a demented Polka (her memories of her husband’s death). Shino was excited at the prospect of crafting these 3/4 sections so that if you took away all the A sections, you’d have a complete waltz. We came away from this session suspecting we had the makings of the Blanche song to end all Blanche songs.

Then we heard this thing we made. Jumping back and forth between 4/4 and 3/4 did not make for easy listening, and the two stories of the song muddied the narrative. We had forgotten a couple useful rules. From Pat’s Ten Commandments “thou shalt be about one thing, and one thing only”, and from Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat “content dictates form”. We were just doing rondeaus and rondos because they appealed to us as a songwriting challenge, but there was nothing inherent about that moment of the show that suggested these would be appropriate song forms. So, with time running out, Shino set my lyrics for The Lonely Light, with the result being neither a homerun, nor a disaster- we both thought it was pretty mid.

Then it happened again! We set up one final meeting to lock in/rehearse an average song, and by the end of the day we had something totally new and superior. I pretty much wrote the lyric on the commute to Shino’s place in Jersey. I knew we didn’t have time for a new tune, so I listened to his music for The Lonely Light on repeat, and came up with a new song set to essentially the same music. I knew Shino was pretty burnt out from work and BMI, so rocking up to his place with a new song had to be handled delicately. I put it to him that we spend an hour trying this new song and if it’s not working, we scrap it. To his credit, he gave it a chance, and we worked out the song over the rest of the afternoon. Here it is, same setting, sung to Mitch.

Soft

BLANCHE
SAY THAT I’M NAÏVE

SAY I’M SENTIMENTAL

BUT PEOPLE SHOULD BE KIND

PEOPLE SHOULD BE GENTLE

A SOFT LIGHT, A SOFT HAND

SOMEWHERE SAFE AND SOFT TO LAND

LIKE THE SHINING OF THE MOON

SOFT

STANLEY IS A BRUTE

STANLEY IS A STRANGER

STELLA IS A FOOL

STELLA IS IN DANGER

A HARSH MAN, A HARSH VOICE

A HARSH WORLD, AND NO CHOICE

BUT TO STAY AND KEEP THINGS SOFT

KEEP IT LIGHT, KEEP IT WARM

STAY AHEAD OF THE STORM

KEEP IT NICE, AND KEEP THINGS SOFT

SAY THAT I’M NAÏVE

SAY I’M SENTIMENTAL

BUT PEOPLE SHOULD BE KIND

PEOPLE SHOULD BE GENTLE

A SOFT SMILE, A SOFT HEART

A SOFT TOUCH, A NEW START

LIKE A BLANKET. LIKE YOU...

SOFT

BMI Blog #4

17th October, 2023

Whew. This will be a long entry. It’s a twisty little dance throwing two creatives/strangers together and saying “write a song now”. To protect the innocent, and because I’m a weeb, I’m going to use Naruto characters as aliases for my BMI collaborators. For this first assignment, it’s me and Ten-Ten (please don’t look for a deeper meaning to my choice of characters). Ten-Ten and I get along well, but we have pretty different tastes. We finally landed on a song we are both proud of, and which was very well-received, but there were some dark days there. Here, with the equanimity of hindsight, are some bloody episodes on the way to writing it, and the lessons learnt thereby.

Lyric or music first? I like music first, and it seems like the pantheon of musical writing teams worked this way. But a major reason for joining the workshop was to push myself out of my comfort zone, so when Ten-Ten asked for a lyric first I went for it. Dunno if this a mistake, but usually when I have trouble finishing a song with a collaborator, I can trace it back to me not speaking my mind. Since the assignment was to write a song where the character wasn’t saying what they really meant, you’d think I would nail it first try. Anyway, I wrote up a lyric and it looked like this (the words in parentheses were meant to be sung by a second singer, verbalising the subtext of the primary singer).

The Subtext Song

It’s been... interesting since we met

(You’re a dickhead)

We’ve said some things I think we both regret

(You’re a dickhead)

And you deserve somebody who

likes you for you, you know I do,

It’s just I’m going through some things

(like you, and how you’re a dickhead)

I think our lives are at a different stage

(You’re a baby)

And lately we’ve been on a different page

(An ugly baby)

But there’s someone out there who’ll

Be that lucky person you’ll

One day make so happy

(Yeah! Me! When you die!)

I feel awful (No I don’t)

Gonna miss you (No I won’t)

Maybe I was just holding you back? (What? No! How?)

Are you okay? (I don’t care)

Stay in touch (Don’t you dare)

I’m so glad we can still be friends (Please! Go! Now!)

You deserve someone who’ll treat you right

(You’re a snake)

You deserve someone who’ll squeeze you tight

(Like a snake)

And though it sounds cliché,

One last thing I want to say,

The cliché’s true, it isn’t you

It’s me!

(You’re a baby!)

It’s me!

(You’re a snake!)

It’s me!

(You’re a dickhead!)

Not particularly funny, and worse, it misses the entire purpose of a subtext assignment. Moreover, I really doubt we could have fit this into the stipulated 32 bar AABA- another drawback of going lyric first. But I wasn’t too concerned until I heard Ten-Ten’s first cracks at a melody for it. I pictured it as a pretty simple song (I vaguely based it on “The Internet is for Porn”), but what she came back with was more dissonant and complex than I felt was appropriate. This is where I should have said something like “that’s really not my style”, but being non-confrontational and way too concerned about not hurting other people’s feelings I nodded along and began working on an entirely new song to avoid having a difficult conversation (I know, I know). Here's song number two, sung by an older man giving an extremely generous sales pitch of his car.  

She’s a Real Beaut

This car to me is priceless

But the time has come to sell

Breathe it in, she’s got that (coughs, splutters) ...“history” smell

Like an old musty coat

With a hint of dying fruit

Yessir, she’s a real beaut

She’s a real beaut

I see that you’re admiring

That there hole in the floor

No sir, they just don’t make ‘um like that anymore

Like a glass bottom boat

and it ventilates to boot!

Yessir, she’s a real beaut,

She’s a real beaut.

Awful lotta memories in this car...

My daddy taught me how to drive stick in here…

Awful lotta memories in this car...

Me and Johnny stole that keg and we got sick in here...

Well, if you don’t want her

I suppose you can pass

Gawd, my old lady’s gonna beat my sorry ass

Though it ain’t worth a groat

I don’t want no substitute...

Yessir she’s a real beaut

My first car...

She’s a real beaut, she’s a real beaut.

A rambling mealfight to cram into 32 bars, but at least this time I let the subtext be subtext. And, having owned almost exclusively lemons, I had plenty of experience to draw on. But, a new lyric was a band-aid for the real problem, and sure enough, what I had pictured as a very simple number with perhaps a country feel came back feeling musically wrong. We got together in person and tried to find a middle ground but it became clear we had pretty different ideas about the how the character should sound, and the session ground to a cordial but unproductive standstill.

The deadline was getting near and we were nowhere, so we decided to try music first. Here’s where I fucked up. I completely forgot the lesson I learned from my botched NYU audition. A brief aside about that: They paired the applicants up to write a song over two days, and I sent off a bunch of ideas to my collaborator, Orochimaru (read into this choice of character all you want). There were a couple ideas I thought were clearly stronger than the rest, but I wanted to give lots of options, so I included a few half-baked ideas. Dumb. Sure enough, she chose the idea I liked the least and we proceeded to write The Worst Song Ever. Lesson: Don’t set off on a road you don’t wanna go down.

But I did just that. Wordy, stressed out, dissonant, disjointed songs don’t really appeal to me. I enjoy them when they’re really top-notch like “Franklin Shepard Inc” and “Not Getting Married Today”, but it’s totally not my bag. Ten-Ten likes them though. And in the interest of getting the damn thing done, we decided to try a song called “Have a Wonderful Day”, about a call centre employee taking a bunch of abusive calls and having to respond nicely while carrying a clear subtext of “fuck you I hate this job”. I liked it in theory, then the music came and it was everything I feared the BMI sound would be. Also, on reflection I didn’t think we’d be able to properly tell that story in 32 bars. But it was my fault, I shouldn’t have encouraged it when I sensed it was just going to be a waste of Ten-Ten’s time. At this point I cooked up a new lyric about someone asking their date up for tea (subtext: sex).

Comin’ up for Tea

Midnight. Not a sound

‘cept for me fishin’ round

For my key

...Are you comin’ up for tea?

Our first date has flown

Time is up, but it don’t

Gotta be

...Are you comin’ up for tea?

I got three different kinds

I got two matching mugs

I got one dirty sofa

Couldn’t you go for-

A biscuit or scone

Watching whatever’s on

The TV?

...Are you comin’ up for tea?

This would fit 32 bars, and I would’ve fixed up the imperfect rhymes, but neither of us loved it. Cue the dark days. Ten-Ten liked what she had written for “Have a Wonderful Day” and was getting anxious about the deadline and frustrated with me lobbing in new ideas. No lyrics to supply for “Have a Wonderful Day”, because apart from the title, I didn’t write any. I knew I’d fucked up, and I didn’t want to give that idea any more oxygen. Eventually, she sent me a logic file of a bunch of different music ideas, I set lyrics to one and sent back a recording of what would eventually be the song we presented. Some excerpts from her response:

//Oh God//I hate this idea//I shouldn’t have even sent it//What musical idea did you like second best???//That chord progression is sooooooo cliché//I’m sorry. Just so cliché//I’ll listen when I’m off work but right now it makes me want to die//I mean like jab my eyes out and set myself on fire//I sent you sooooo many ideas//Nothing else is acceptable to you???//

At this point, I turned off my phone and went for a walk. We’d been communicating over whatsapp and I’d started to develop a Pavlovian stress reaction anytime I saw a whatsapp notification. To reiterate, Ten-Ten and I get along well in person, but we lost a lot of that warmth over text. I think we started to view each other as obstacles rather than assets to completing this team assignment. When I stepped back to think about it, it was clear that the real obstacles were time, the inherent challenge of synthesising clashing styles, and the fear of public failure in front of our peers. Besides, she had just set off on a road she didn’t want to go down, and how am I supposed to get mad at a mistake I make so often myself?

So, we scheduled Judgement Day. A full day set aside to finally lock in a song. While I preferred the newest song, and she preferred “Have a Wonderful Day” we resolved to work on a middle ground neither of us particularly liked or hated; “She’s a Real Beaut”. I got to the Dramatists Guild early and prepared for what I thought was going to be a very rough day. Already that morning I had woken up to seventeen messages, one of which labelled our collaboration a “dictatorship”. I responded with my perspective, and pointed out I’d set lyrics to her music and respected it when she vetoed the idea. Ten-Ten sent me thirteen messages about half an hour before our meeting but I just couldn’t bring myself to look at them.

So I was very surprised when she came in and wanted to work on my new idea (recall “jab my eyes out and set myself on fire”). Apparently, she hadn’t realised I’d set lyrics to her music and thought I’d gone and rewritten her melody (which says something about my behaviour in all this that she’d believe I would do that). Her first listen had been at a short break in her stressful dayjob in the middle of our terse Whatsapp thread and hadn’t properly heard it. She’d given it another listen that morning and decided it had potential (hence the thirteen messages). It turned out to be great day, and we actually found the rest of the song together in the room. Here is the lesson: give ideas the chance to shine. Be in a peaceful environment and mood before you crack open that file.

So, here’s the song. The length of this entry maybe warrants a climactic masterpiece, but it’s just a straightforward comedy song about an Australian guy adjusting to life in New York:

The Greatest City in the World

Wake to the car horns hornin’

Headline’s a heatwave warnin’

It’s Sunday mornin’ in the Greatest City in the World

Outside, the asphalt’s steamin’

Guy on the subway screamin’

He smells like semen. It’s the Greatest City in the World

Lovin’ these hobos!

Lovin’ these rats!

Love spending big bucks on broom closet flats!

Who needs the ocean?

Who needs the sand?

Here comes a new friend with a knife in his hand!

Stabs me and off he’s flyin’

(Nice pool of blood to lie in!)

At least I’m dyin’ in the the Greatest City in the-

Hey call a medic! It’s the Greatest City in the-

Thank God I’m dyin’ in the Greatest City in the World!

BMI Blog #3

26th September, 2023.

Been a big week! I’ve been entering the Broadway lottery like a fiend, but seeing the Back to the Future musical has slowed me down a bit. Maybe I don’t need to see every show.

We have a whole bloody month before we present our song! I don’t like this format! Musicals take years to write, and it helps lazy bastards like me justify slow writing! I need a deadline like that screaming eyepatch guy from Deer Hunter! We don’t need a month to write a chorus!

But with a class of 38 (19 composers and 19 lyricists), that’s how it’s gotta be. Each presentation gets feedback, so they only schedule in six teams per lesson, so it takes three weeks just to hear everyone’s presentation. I mean, we’ll learn from listening to the work and feedback of others, but I wish they had just opted for a smaller intake. The schedule is such that we’ll only get to work with about half the group before we have to choose a partner for second year. Dumb!

This week, Pat ran the class. The first thing he did was give us his Ten Commandments of Theatre Lyrics, which I’ll summarise here. “Thou Shalt: 1. Be Singable. 2. Be Understandable. 3. Be About One Thing Only. 4. Be Specific. 5. Write Dramatically. 6. Not Self Pity. 7. Scan Correctly. 8. Find Fresh Images. 9. Not False Rhyme or Transpose Words.  10. Not Be Rigid or Wordy.

Some explanation for the Commandments that need it:

Be Singable. Pat gave us the example of Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” and how Sondheim chose phrases like “isn’t it rich” to suit Glynis Johns’ singing style. The vowel sound and “ch” of “rich” make it more natural to be sung quickly without a sustained note, as this wasn’t Johns’ strong point. This is something I don’t consciously think about, and a clear area for improvement.

Write Dramatically: Abide by the three-act structure of a song (or at least end somewhere different to where you started). With a comedy song, make sure your best joke is your last joke, and get funnier as you go along. This one fucks me all the time, ‘cos inevitably you think of a funny joke that only works in the start or middle of the song and now everything’s gotta lift to top that. A good rule but a hard one.

Not Self Pity: I never really thought about this, but it makes sense. Audiences don’t feel sorry for characters that feel sorry for themselves. The only exception Pat gave us was in the case of comedy, provided the self-pity is funny. He gave the example of Tevye in Fiddler, who spends pretty much the whole show in self-pity, but he’s funny and endearing.

Scan Correctly. Amen! In fact, this should be number ONE. I am still triggered by all the shithouse parody lyrics I had to sing in university revues that scanned so poorly and mis-stressed so often that they had to put the lyrics up on a projector behind the performers, thus telegraphing every lame joke before it came out of our mouths. Scansion!

Use Fresh Images: Oscar Hammerstein is a great study in this. “Jumpy as a puppet on a string”, “...her long yeller hair falls across my face just like the rain in a storm”. It’s definitely a constant struggle for me to avoid being generic. It’s all about tapping into your individual voice. Another area for improvement.

Not False Rhyme or Transpose Words: The false rhyme goes without saying, but transposing words confused a few people. Pat gave the lyric of “Babes in Toyland” as an example, eg” “you must near me stay”. It’s unnatural, but I think, as with all of these rules, there are exceptions where breaking them is appropriate. There’s a very fine line between awkward, transposed words and a beautiful, poetic lyric. You don’t want to always be speaking naturalistically. Someone in the class pointed out “Baby Mine” from Dumbo as an example of these exceptions.

Bloody hell Sondheim was good. Every week in our booklet there’s a bunch of lyrics of classic songs, and without fail his are my favourite. Even just reading them aloud without music, they are beautiful. Last week it was “Cool”, and this week it’s “Not While I’m Around”. If that was my hook, I would probably start thinking of words that rhyme with “around”. Instead, Sondheim structures the rhyme to highlight “I’m”, which is the more important word in that lyric, in terms of what the character is saying. It’s a little boy puffing himself up and saying he'll protect Mrs Lovett.

RIP Steve. Oh, and I saw Josh Groban do Sweeney Todd this week and I’ve come around to “Parlour Songs”. Tune.

BMI Blog #2

19th September, 2023.

I’m gonna be late for the first day of class. Why do I always do this? It’s not like I had a jam-packed day. It was rewrites and grant applications, I can do that any time. I blame Majora’s Mask. It’s an old Nintendo game where everything’s on a schedule and you have three days before the moon destroys the Earth. That game brought out my lifelong love of being efficient with time, which often translates to me heading out the door with exactly enough time to get where I’m going as long as absolutely nothing goes wrong on the way.

Problem: something inevitably goes wrong, and I never learn. I’m still a subway novice and unless I’m somewhere in Sydney in sight of the ocean, I have zero sense of direction. As soon as the subway doors slide open, I’m out and bounding up the steps. I have two minutes to avoid being the dickhead that sidles in late on the first day. But I come out a different subway exit than I did for my audition, so I’m disoriented and all the WTC buildings look the same. When I finally get into the elevator I’m five minutes late.

Fortunately, the class is running behind. I step out and find the lobby full and buzzing. What the hell? There’s like forty of us. I thought this was supposed to be ELITE. It turns out a few are just auditing, but still, it’s more people than I was expecting. I’ve been living in Japan for most of this year. It’s been a very solitary and peaceful time. I go on walks by myself and nod politely at old Japanese men who know my Nihongo is Unko, and know it’s no use trying to talk to me. This is going to be a shock to the system.

This is where I get to the tricky part of the blog. How much do I say about my peers on here? If someone’s a jerk, or if I don’t gel with my collaborator, isn’t that useful information for the blog as a resource for those considering applying? Do I have to come up with Bob Dylan pseudonyms for everybody? Anyway, people seem friendly, and everyone gets a beautiful booklet and BMI inscribed pen. It’s a very nice touch. The course is run by Pat Cook and Rick Freyer, a longtime BMI songwriting team, who seem genuinely friendly and intelligent.

Rick runs this first class, and gives us our first assignment. “Write a chorus where your character or characters don’t mean what they’re saying”. So we can write whatever we like, as long as it uses subtext- a bit broader than I’d like, but at least there’s some formal constraints (four stanzas of eight bars, with an optional coda on the fourth).

We spend the rest of the lesson looking at the basic song forms we can use for the assignment; AABA, AABC, ABAC. Here’s a list of the example songs, it might be a fun exercise to listen through them and try to identify which of those three they fit into: “It’s Delovely”, “Waitin’ for my Dearie”, “You Don’t Know this Man”, “I’m Not that Girl”, “Days and Days”, “Cool”, “Put on a Happy Face”. They also played us a charm song example “Guys and Dolls” and a comedy song I’d never heard but is now a favourite “I Remember it Well”.

I’m feeling good about the class. The teachers seem knowledgeable, and a bit of enforced socialising is good for me. We all went to a bar after and I stayed until they kicked us out. That’s a big thing for me! I still get anxious at such things. Like when I’m at a table and the conversation has moved on and I’m not a part of it and I feel frozen and like everyone’s eyes are on me and they all know how uncomfortable I feel and I’m embarrassing myself and the longer I wait to chime in the worse it gets and etc.

Usually I just get up and do the Irish Goodbye. Or go to the bathroom and don’t come back until I have something to say. But this time I just sat through it, breathed, reminded myself that I am not in fact the centre of the universe, and got over it. Probably an irrelevant detour if you’re just reading this to learn about BMI, but here’s the lesson: therapy works! At any rate, now you know a little more about Our Hero, and I did warn you about the miscellanea.

Which reminds me, I’ve been making it a side goal to eat all the American trash foods I’ve heard about while I still have some youthful metabolism. I bought a big box of Cheez-It’s that I never want to look at again, but Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a winner. I’m also crossing off all the fast food chains. In terms of food quality, White Castle ranks pretty low, but the atmosphere is unbeatable (that is, if you’re a writer who likes listening in on other people’s conversations). I watched a guy hand over a tenner for his $9.90 sliders and say “nah girl you hold that ten honey nek time somebody short a dime you tell ‘um it on me”.

I like this city.

BMI Blog #1

8th September, 2023.

This Autumn I moved to New York for the BMI Workshop. So many of my musical writing idols came out of this program- Flaherty & Ahrens, Jeanine Tesori, Bobby Lopez & Kristen Anderson-Lopez- it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a weekly class where lyricists and composers are paired up and given song writing assignments to present to the class- my favourite things: musicals and FRIENDLY COMPETITION.

That said, I’ve always felt a bit trepidatious about it. For one it’s on the other bloody side of the world and I don’t know a soul. But more than that, I’ve always had this idea of the typical, jaunty “New York sound” that never appealed to me, and figured I’d find the class full of that kind of composer. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, to me it’s that erratic, disjointed style that sounds like a bad Sondheim breakdown song, or a wannabe Ordinary Days.

The course is free, but New York’s a spicy town, and the Australian dollar doesn’t go far. So I didn’t want to be stuck here shelling out just to make wordy, tuneless songs for a year. But I asked around for opinions and everyone told me to just shut the fuck up and go- so here I am. At any rate, this blog might be a useful resource for composers/lyricists in the same position, considering the move to New York to do BMI. Hopefully not a cautionary tale!

I flew from Japan (different blog) to New York with a connect in Hawaii. It was supposed to be a nice relaxing layover in Honolulu... then I got detained by the Department of Homeland Security.

I don’t think I explained the BMI program very well to the immigration clerk. He seemed to think I was there to undertake a formal course of study, which I didn’t have the right visa for. Cut to: me in a very grim waiting room with a locked door and no bathroom, listening to the nearby interrogation rooms where DHS officials are humourlessly denying Japanese tourists and emigrants entry to the United States. Not a lot of “aloha” going on.

Eventually my time comes and I spend about an hour explaining to a confused DHS worker what the hell the BMI workshop is and why someone would ever want to do something like that. Not a Sondheim fan. I think everyone else in that waiting room missed their flight. I came close, but as always I cheaped out on my flight and booked an extremely long layover. Otherwise I would have missed my audition, so there’s the first lesson for future BMI migrants; don’t fuck with America.

Arrived at JFK the morning of my audition. Dropped some shit at my grim AirBNB in Queens and headed into Manhattan for my audition. That’s the other thing that irked me- the lyricists have to come in and read out their songs- no music- for the panel, in person. The callback email was very clear- no remote auditions. It kind of makes sense- they want to make sure you’re serious about the course, but I was going to be pretty salty if I flew in just to William Shatner my songs and not even get in.

I arrive at the World Trade Centre, where BMI’s located, take the elevator up and find a bathroom to see how Our Hero’s looking. I managed a shower back at the BNB and bought a new shirt, but I haven’t slept in 24 hours and my eyes are RED. I’ve been letting my hair grow out too so I look a little deranged. And I forgot to staple the stacks of lyrics I printed for the panel... Oh, here’s another tip for BMI lyricist auditions: they tell you to print out six copies of your lyrics- that doesn’t include one for you. I only considered this possibility on the ride in, and managed to scribble out my audition songs into a scrapbook on the subway. Unless you can recite your lyrics off the top of your head- under audition pressure- bring your own.

I chose a couple songs from Dubbo Championship Wrestling; “It’s Still Real to Me”, a jeremiad, and “Make Believe”, an AABA ballad. The third song got the best reaction, which was a surprise since it’s about The Jolly Swagman and Harold Holt living together at the bottom of the Pacific. I found myself needing to give the panel a brief summary of Australian history just to set up the song. Not a giggle for “his damper is damper than you would believe”, but I got ‘em in the end.

Received an email later a few hours later: I’m in!

And so we begin. Over the next few months, I’ll include as much detail about the workshop as I think would be helpful to potential applicants. Maybe some New York living advice, show reviews, strange subway people and other miscellanea. But for now I am rekt. I just ventured down to the nearby bodega and got one of New York’s fabled chopped cheese and fuark it knocked me out. I write this with my last ounce of energy before submitting to a glorious food coma.

Good night, Queens! Be nice to me!