Woke up this morning at three to find it 26° in the courtyard as opposed to 31° as it has been (42° in the afternoons), and to hardly any wind, after the force fives of yesterday. That info, like today’s photos and text, is apropos nothing apart from trying to raise a smile.
We’ve probably all heard of ‘misheard lyrics’, when you mishear the words to a song, and from then on, can only hear the wrong words. Sometimes it’s years before you realise what you thought was being sung was actually something entirely different. What I hear around the house is something slightly different to that, as my husband has this knack for producing song mashups. This is where you take parts of one song and put them with another, and I have to admit, on occasion, it works rather well.
Here’s an example. Imagine the song by George Michael, ‘Faith’ with the chorus line, ‘Cause I gotta have faith’ and the syncopated repetition that comes after it.
Got that in your head? Good. Now cast your mind back to Paul Young when he was in Streetband, and their 1978 hit, ‘Toast’ with its groundbreaking lyric, ‘Put the grill on, Slip a slice under, And have toast, A little piece of toast…’
Put them together while you are pottering around the kitchen, and, if you’re Neil, you get, ‘Cause you gotta have toast, toast, toast.’
That’s one. Here’s another.
‘I saw the sign,’ a song used in Pitch Perfect, the comedy about a cappella singers in the USA. Mix that with a bit of Bob Marley, and you have the mashup:
‘I saw the sign, but I didn’t shoot the deputy.’
I know, makes no sense, but it keeps me smiling.
I did a similar thing in a romantic mystery I wrote called ‘The Blake Inheritance.’ In it, one of the characters mixes his poetry, so his says things like:
‘Let us go then you and I, to a place where the wild thyme grows,’ which I rather like, though Eliott and Shakespeare might not.
Another one I rather liked from the same book:
‘One upon a midnight dreary, the owl and the pussycat went to sea.’
And, ‘Curiouser and curiouser, said the spider to the fly,’ which isn’t poetry, but by now, we’re so far down the rabbit hole, it doesn’t matter.
Let’s take it a stage further and I’ll give you a challenge based on a parlour game I’ve seen on TV where you have to sing one set of lyrics to a completely different tune. (This one’s for you, Louise.)
Imagine, remember or listen to, ‘Do you hear the people sing,’ from Les Miserables:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
Got that tune in your head? Right, now think back to the stage show/movie Grease, and Stockard Channing singing:
There are worse things I could do
Than go with a boy or two
Even though the neighborhood
Thinks I’m trashy and no good…
Excellent. Now put the two together and sing ‘Worst things’ to the music of ‘Do you hear.’ It fits rather well – to start with at least.
Anyway, there are worst things I could be doing than putting up this nonsense at 3.30 in the morning, and I should go and get on with them. I have the first in a new series due for publication early next month and the MS is going off to the proofreader in a day or so, so I need to get back to my final read-through before it goes to the abattoir of editing.
Back tomorrow with more ado about nothing.
