I Hate Mornings

Yesterday I heard the most insipid song ever written. That’s a bold statement, I know, but this song really made me cringe. It broke almost every rule of good songwriting, and was delivered in such an earnest and well-meaning way that it was hard to know whether to laugh or wretch.

It’s going to be difficult to explain this experience exactly in prose, so I’m going to give you a list of reasons why I was so blown away by this song:

# It was called “Home”.
# It was introduced as “a love song in Sanscrit - the language of love”.
# Only one line was in Sanscrit.
# Sanscrit is not the language of love.
# The rest of the lyrics were stolen from a book of popular cliché:
** “Home is where the heart is”
** “I’ve travelled all around the world”
** “Now I’m going home”
** “Home sweet home”
** “Home is where you hang your hat” (only kidding ;o).
# The song went on for what seemed like 45 minutes.
# The structure was indecipherable. The closest term I can think of is a “ramble”.
# The chorus (my favourite Sanscrit part) only happened twice, then a whole series of new cliché-choruses were introduced.
# Just when it seemed like it was all over (strumming had stopped, singing had stopped, girl still had her eyes closed), she launched into an entirely new playout section with new lyrics, a new chord and much more swaying. It was like the extended outro on Layla, but without the great piano part.
# All the lyrics to the outro also said “I’ve been away. Now I’m home” in a hundred different (but not interestingly different) ways.

h3. We Are One

The rest of the hippie-fest turned out to be pretty cool, with an astoundingly energetic dance/video act and a young poet called Ros (or possibly Rhozz) who performed a wonderfully natural poem about coming to terms with being beautiful based around Aesop’s fables. That doesn’t sound as good as it was supposed to. I guess you had to be there.

So, apart from the “soundbathing”, the costumes (did I not mention the costumes?), the overly prescriptive instructions (”Clap now. That was a fabulous gift.”) and the insipid strumming lady, it was a good afternoon. Jont and I played a good set at the end, before everyone drew collaborative visualisations of how wonderful their summers were going to be.

Then we went home.