iNSOYMADA » lyrics

Songwriting workshop

insoymada — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:37:53 +0000

We’re organizing a songwriting seminar-workshop to raise funds for TSINELAS. It’s going to be held this coming May. It’s going to be a four-day (two weekends) event to be held at the Tsinelas headquarters at the Saint Theresa’s College compound along Gen. Maxilom Ave.

We’re going to talk about the basics of melody writing, lyrics writing, musical arrangement and recording.

Award-winning musicians and recording artists Ian Zafra, Jude Gitamondoc and Brian Sacro have initially agreed to join us as speakers. I also invited myself as speaker, and myself said yes (haha).

We’ll be inviting other established musicians to join us as interactors during the open forums.

Anybody can join the workshop as long as he brings with him an original composition – in Bisaya, Tagalog, Cebuano and in whatever genre.

As a bonus, we might – i repeat, we might – choose a song or two from among the entries to be recorded for free.

Number of participants is limited to 25. You can’t learn anything in a crowd.

The workshop is not for free. We need to spend for the seminar kits and honorarium for speakers. Not a centavo will go to the pockets of the organizers. Proceeds will be used to fund various projects of Tsinelas, especially since another school year is opening.

We’ll soon be posting more details.

Join. Not only you will learn a lot from the workshop, you will also get the chance to help poor kids stay in school.

Rakenrol, Bisayang musikero!

We all write bad lyrics

insoymada — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:33:48 +0000

To Cebuano bands writing songs in English, stop dissing Cebuano bands writing songs in Bisaya. As far as lyrics are concerned, both of you write crap every now and then. The only thing is, it’s hard for a Cebuano to “analyze” English lyrics without exposing his own limited grasp of the English language. So, the easy target: Bisrock. So, while stupid Bisrock songs get the beating, stupid English songs by local bands enjoy the presumption of being brilliant. (Note: we are only talking about the lyrics, for now.)

And to prove that even English speaking artists suck in the lyrics department, take this:

I don’t think that I’ve
got the stomach
To stomach calling
you today

–Saves the Day’s ‘See You’

And we’re betting that this clever emo fella doesn’t have the eyes to eye you, the hands to handle you … or even the mouth to mouth your name. Oh, the humanity! — spinner.com

I wish I didn’t have a band so I can cite examples here without sounding biased. So I leave it to you to post samples here of stupid lyrics (English, Tagalog, Bisaya, Waray) written by Cebuano bands. Missing Filemon songs not included.

click-if-you-think-only-bisrock-bands-write-crap

Alive/Pearl Jam

insoymada — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:45:26 +0000

Last Christmas, a colleague bought me the book ‘Touch Me, I’m Sick – The 52 creepiest love songs you’ve ever heard’ by Tom Reynolds. The book pillories artists for writing songs that “for some reasons have gone off the rails into the realm of the tawdry, the overwhelming, the obsessive, the self-absorbed, and the completely weird.”

It’s so entertaining (and downright hilarious) that I can’t help sharing with you excerpts from some of the articles. To Mr. Reynolds (assuming that somebody other than my girlfriend reads my blog), I’m a huge, huge fan of yours, so I hope you don’t mind.

To you guys, If I leave you hanging after every post, it’s because nothing beats buying the book. So go check it out.

Let’s start off with Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive’…

“Since its 1991 release, I estimate I’d heard ‘Alive around 23,891 times while only deciphering that a mother was in her son’s room trying to accomplish something. I finally ran out of patience and Googled the freaking lyrics. Now, I figured out the rest and realized ‘Alive’ is even creepier than I assumed it was and not in a good way.

“… Alive exemplies the pretentious and self-important excesses that befell grunge groups and turned them into boring wank fests. Listening to the bands like Mudhoney having attacks over ‘selling out’ and ‘artistic integrity’ while impaling themselves to get record contracts really got tiresome.

“As for Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, they greeted every platinum sale of their CDs as some kind of whore deal, and by 1994 I was ready to scream ‘shut the hell up already’ when Kurt Cobain martyred himself with 20-gauge.

“While the decline of grunge is attributed to Cobain’s suicide and overbearing media attention, I think the 1996 music documentary Hype! shows what was really behind its collapse… The film features more than 30 bands in performance. The problem is, 26 of them suck.

“They couldn’t play, couldn’t write and couldn’t perform. Most sounded like 16-year-olds pretending to be Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. The best moment in the whole film is an electrifying debut performance of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by a then-unknown Nirvana, shot inside a seedy club.

“… The band’s raw sound was fresh and original, eclipsing practically every one of its contemporaries. Pearl Jam has good musicians, but I found Vedder to be a tedious vocalist who takes himself way too seriously. But at least the band is still ‘ahhh-laavvee‘”