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.