Ron Irving issued the challenge this week. An EDGY country pop song......but no 'bro country'.
First up....ask Leanne Lapa and Dean Sawatzky if they would like to co-write with me. Yesses all round. Next up, the challenge of finding the right time to Skype write. Dean is traveling for the first part of the week, Leanne is traveling through the second part of the week. Also, both of them have young children, so the best time to write is in the evening, after the kids have been put to bed for the night.
Monday night we get together. Throw out some ideas. Decide on a theme (Open Skies), and dig in. In a couple hours, we have the bones of a song....everything except the bridge. We can't meet together again until Sunday.
Monday night we get together. Throw out some ideas. Decide on a theme (Open Skies), and dig in. In a couple hours, we have the bones of a song....everything except the bridge. We can't meet together again until Sunday.
Sunday night....edit the verses, and write the bridge. The original chorus was tight. Melodically we get fixed on one word in the chorus 'prairie'. Should it be sung over two notes, or stretched out over three notes? We go round and round the 'prairie'. We decide to syncopate it. At the end of two hours, we're happy with the complete song, but that word 'prairie' is still tentative.
Monday....the day of the deadline. Dean is recording our song "Open Skies". He sends Leanne and I an mp3. That 'prairie' word is still unsettled. He's syncopated it, like we wanted, but it doesn't sit right in the chorus. He's going to change it back to his original way of singing it. We're getting close now to the midnight cut-off hour.
Less than two hours to go.....here's our song. Many thanks to Leanne and Dean for writing this song with me. Extra thanks to Dean for all the work he did on recording it.
https://soundcloud.com/liminalmusic-1/open-skies
Monday....the day of the deadline. Dean is recording our song "Open Skies". He sends Leanne and I an mp3. That 'prairie' word is still unsettled. He's syncopated it, like we wanted, but it doesn't sit right in the chorus. He's going to change it back to his original way of singing it. We're getting close now to the midnight cut-off hour.
Less than two hours to go.....here's our song. Many thanks to Leanne and Dean for writing this song with me. Extra thanks to Dean for all the work he did on recording it.
https://soundcloud.com/liminalmusic-1/open-skies
Open Skies
© 2015 Leanne Lapa, Dean Sawatzky,
Lucy LeBlanc
I remember
daddy telling me not to go
He said “Out
here you’ll learn everything you need to know”
But I was
young, a little punk, thought I knew it all
Headed for
the city lights and got my back against the wall
I miss those
open skies
Cools my
wild side
Where’s
there’s room to breathe
Be who I
want to be
Horizons
circle wide
High on the
prairie
Where my
heart runs free
Under those
open skies
Six lanes of
traffic and I’m running out of gas
Not sure how
much longer I’m going to last
Caught
between the concrete city’s got me squeezed
I need to
head back to where I'm supposed to be
Under those
open skies
Cools my
wild side
Where’s
there’s room to breathe
Be who I
want to be
Horizons
circle wide
High on the
prairie
Where my
heart runs free
Under those
open skies
Out on this
backroad, the dust is flyin free
Know every
curve where every pothole’s gonna be
No it won’t
be easy to say that I was wrong
But
sometimes you gotta go away to know where you belong
Under these
open skies
Cools my
wild side
Where’s
there’s room to breathe
Be who I
want to be
Horizons
circle wide
High on the
prairie
Where my
heart runs free
Under these
open skies
