Picking up from last time –
B didn’t necessarily agree 100% with Fareed’s notes about the end of the song being too much. She felt it was fine to raise the stakes at the end, and to have words that were a little intense. After all, I’m an intense person (she pointed out).
I also performed it in a style to try to soften it a bit, saying “I can’t go home” in a way of “that’d be preposterous” as opposed to begging, “Please for the love of god, I literally can’t go back to my home.”
B and I talked about the ending for a bit and whether I should leave it the way it is. But ultimately, we decided I’d do some tweaking with a new idea I had, and see if we liked that one better.
She said to go ahead and get to it, tweak it out. I changed the last verse and added 4 more lines to the bridge (making it seem more like 8 bars than 4… even when you’re just reading, I think you can pretty much tell.)
There’s a line in the last verse I got just by looking around, which I loved. That was funny to me (and oh so real).
After the changes, I read it to her. She thought the changes were good. We read it again to be sure. I was a bit skeptical ’cause I think it’s a little hard to tell in the moment, and I was worried about going with something so new. But I was pretty sure it was good, and I’d trust her with my life – which was basically exactly what I was doing with BMI on the line.
We came downstairs and printed it.
Thank goodness for the business center in the hotel! Our hotel seemed to charge for everything. Want a late checkout? It would’ve been $100. Want double beds? $40 per night. A sign for breakfast in the elevator makes you think it might be continental. It’s not. But printing is free!
My previous travel experiences would make me think usually the other stuff might be free and printing might cost money. Thankfully the only thing I actually needed here was printing. Cool.
So, we printed out the song, took it upstairs and finished putting together the packets. We put them aside and went into midtown, because she had to see Avenue Q.
I’d already seen it (twice – once on and once off-Broadway), and loved it! I would’ve seen it again, but I needed to practice and memorize my new song. Well, in memorizing it, I realized there were problems…
And this is where we’ll pick up next time.