Rhyming Couplets

As previously mentioned, I used to use songwriting as quasi-therapy for myself in an effort to help ease and get through the empty and lonely spaces that I found myself trapped in when Adrianna wasn’t with me (“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” as Jean-Babtiste Alphonese Karr, or was what Neil Peart, used to say.)

Of course, it was better when these little bits of musical creation would form naturally and without effort, but often I’d set ground rules or conditions I’d have to follow in order to mix things up a bit and create an artificial challenge that would also keep my mind from wandering and also hopefully jump-start a creative process that was in a new and different direction.

For the music, maybe I’d remove one of the guitar strings and write something from that starting point, or change the tuning, or decide it would be in 6/8 time, or try to create the bones on some instrument I wasn’t as familiar with such as a keyboard. Etc.

For the lyrics, I’d allow myself no rhyming at all, or formed entirely with intentional near rhymes, or no chorus, or contrived and complicated rhyming schemes such as AABA BBCB CCDC, or I’d want a story narrative, or maybe instead a random stream of consciousness.

Anything to mix things up; anything to access a different and perhaps unused part of my brain. Anything to ease the pain of missing her.

Of course rhyming couplets was an easy lazy way to go, and one of my favorites was a song called “Images.”  One of the recurring themes my whole life with Adrianna was that of being aware of desperately trying to remember and capture images and moments of her while they were happening in that present, knowing full well how futile that was.  This included of course both real photographs, videos and recordings, but also, and mostly, just memories that I was trying to sear into my brain at that moment.

This was years before one of the most heartbreaking scenes in all of television, the penultimate episode of “Six Feet Under,” where the ghost of the then-dead Nate whispers into Claire’s ear,

                   “You can’t take a picture of this, it’s already gone.”

 

That line almost destroys me as much as the final montage of the actual final episode of that series, and that’s saying something. Somehow the writer of that episode was living in my head and stealing my thoughts and emotions about life and my daughter.

The song I wrote with sing-songy rhyming couplets that I’d normally stay away from was my attempt to capture in words and music this idea. As usual, I didn’t fully succeed, but still, it’s something. And… surprise, surprise… still and forever relevant:

Soon today is yesterday;

Try to hold it fast but time just slips away.

Hope my memories always last;

Captured images escaping from the past.

Like my new-born daughter’s face:

Just a minute old yet oh so full of grace.

And her half-shut gray-blue eyes:

Full of innocence they stare right into mine-- and see

“Every time I watched you play, every time I kissed your cheek,

 every time I held you tight, I remembered you.”

Time has come but never stays,

So my head gets filled with one more yesterday.

Hope that I can always find

The mental photographs I’ve stored within my mind.

Like the day when Adri walked:

Just a little girl still learning how to talk.

Standing up without a care;

Step then sway then step then grasping for the chair-- she smiles

“Every time I tucked you in, every time I washed your face,

 every time I waved good-bye, I remembered you.”