And it’s March.
This year is flying by. Please stop.
Right now, the gang are all exhausted from their Faith pieces, which will be available for voting shortly on the Voting Page. I hope you enjoyed reading them because we’re now going into the void of weird stuff.
The theme is a very simple one this month, so I shan’t keep you all. This month I want the writers to GO TO YOUR MUSIC PLAYER OF CHOICE, PRESS SHUFFLE, AND USE THE FIRST SONG AS YOUR STIMULUS.
If you could share the song with the piece, that’d be most appreciated 😉
Have fun, treacles!
Dreaming Again
Inspired by I’m Dreaming Again by Thunder
The two of them sat in the recording room with paper everywhere. There was a palpable atmosphere to the room, and it was not just the humid, lack of air-con heat that seemed to be settling in for the long haul. Each piece of paper had scrawling of lyrics, chords, scribbling over said writing, corrections, vetoes, and back tracking.
“It’s useless,” the woman said, her voice slightly hoarse from lack of hydration. “They’re written the way they were for a reason. You don’t fix something if it isn’t broken.”
The man sighed and rubbed the palm of his fretting hand, starting to ache from the amount of complex chordings the songs required. The two of them looked battered. She was a slim thing, with short brownish blonde hair, green eyes, and a smile that made you worry what she was concocting. He stood about a foot taller, and probably nearly a foot wider, with messy greying brown hair, and bags under his eyes that looked like the cause of his slight stoop.
“Great input as always.” She huffed and started tidying the papers into more organised mounds of mess.
“I don’t know why you want to change the way we play them anyway?” He offered as he stretched out in the chair. “The songs were good enough how they were, surely? I mean the record company seemed to like them.”
“Yeah, but it’s write a new album’s worth of songs or rework the old stuff in new ways and keep people waiting for that previously mentioned album. Which would you prefer?” She placed the pile on the piano and sat at it. Clicking her knuckles, she started to hammer out the beginning riff to Empty City. It was a crowd pleaser from the moment it hit the shelves, but that’s the problem with writing a great song; people want it every show. It had started to lose it’s feel, and although he did his best to make it different – changing up the way his playing or his solos – it always felt like flogging a dead horse by the end of the tour. That had been the reason she had suggested reworking some of the songs in the first place.
If we redo some of the ones that are losing their flame, and throw in some lesser played tracks, people will lap it up, she had said to the Label Rep at the monthly update meeting.
“I’m happy to write some new songs!” He chimed in, knocking her from her day dream and also the held chord ringing out through the room. “I’ve been trying to suggest new stuff since you mentioned a new album. The term ‘new’ really resonated with me, yunno?” The sarcastic quip on the end blended with the B Diminished chord to cause a need to pace. Up she got and walked over to the whiteboard on the wall, grabbed the marker and started making notes.
“Miracle Man is bang on, as is Bigger Than Both of Us”
“And I think Girl’s Going Out of Her Head will be well received. It’s completely off the wall compared to the other two.”
“So that’s three, we were looking at the acoustic version of Blown Away…” she trailed off mid sentence as a thought struck her. “We could always do Dreaming?”
His face dropped and he looked like she had just told him that he’d been fired.
“We both agreed we’d not play that again…” he said with a stern voice; juxtaposed against his usual carefree and sarky norm.
“People are going to be expecting the big numbers!” She shouted, tired of the pussyfooting.
“Then we’ll do a version of Low Life and She’s So Fine! What about Loser?”
“Oh, if we’re not doing Dreaming, we’re definitely not doing fucking Loser!”
The two of them stood staring daggers at one another, the heat of the room seemed to have gone up a degree or two. As per usual, he broke first.
“You left me, remember?”
She threw her hands up in desperation. “How could I forget?! Mr Never Forget’s A Fucking Thing! Shall we go completely on the nose and do Love Walked In but change it to Love Walked Out?!”
“Fuck me,” he retorted. “I’m glad you saved that one for now, because the five star reviews wouldn’t be enough. Step aside, Shakespeare!” He put the guitar down and waltzed over to the piano, starting to play the the opening of Love Walked In and started to wail in a strangled cat fashion:
“So tired of waiting, I walked an empty land,
I was looking for something to help me understand,
Cos bad luck kept turning my dreams into sand.
I didn’t want pity, I’d had my share, my friends,
I wanted somebody more special than the rest,
I was aching inside, like I was approaching the end.
Just about that moment, the timing was so right,
She appeared like a vision, sent down to my life,
I thought I was dreaming when I saw you that night
But then Love Walked Out of my door,
That familiar feeling, I’d had once before.
Love Walked Out of my door, and it felt so beige.
Like a long lost love freed from a cage,
Making you whole again.”
She stood with her arms crossed, watching him mock her words so easily. The marker pen dropped to the floor, pulling him from the clowning around and, opening his eyes, saw she was gone. He sighed, and the breath deflated him on several levels. She had left before. Always when he needed her the most.
“I’m not ready to play it again,” he called out to the room at large. The heat of the room started to drop and he looked around, hoping she’d appear once again. “You know that song goes both ways now.”
Waiting for some sort of response, he got nothing but silence in return. Taking another deep breath, he stepped over to the guitar, dropped it down to a Drop D tuning and started to busk those opening chords; his eyes started to water just at the thought. Not knowing how to get the verse to work, he jumped to a simply strummed version of the chorus:
“When I feel the touch of your hand, but there’s no one around,
I know that I’m dreaming
When I wake up to find it’s only me and the night,
I know that I’m dreaming again.”
He let the last chord ring out and his voice trail out. A knock at the door woke him from his own day dream. A slick haired man with headset poked his head around the door.
“Erm, sorry to interrupt, Sir. Warm up act is done, we’re ready to go when you are.” The disembodied head said before disappearing back out.
The guitarist cleared his throat and stood, guitar in hand. Stepping out into the corridor the green room and wandering towards the stage door, the magazine blew off the piano in the green room onto the floor. The front page a simple copy of the poster that hung on the walls outside the theatre, but covered with the headline: ACOUSTIC DUO RETURN AS SOLO ACT ON THE 10th ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF LEAD SINGER.
Novel Dreamers 