Let's see if I can be theoretically entertaining even as I'm poking around the multimedia potential of this place.
On occasion, I write songs with Bazz Atlas--or, more to the point, provide the lyrics for songs that he pens. Not too long ago, we wrote a song that's turned out to one of my personal favorites. It's called "On Your Way (Racing the Sunset)," and figures into a novel I'm writing and also a theater piece that's a kind of adjunct to the book.
Recently--when I should have been working the revision of a chapter--I amused myself by designing a single "sleeve" for the song. (This isn't quite the dicking-around it seems: In the novel, the protagonist writes "On Your Way" rather than Mr Atlas and me, and it came time to describe the marketing of the song. And so I had to wonder what the sleeve for "On Your Way" looked like--a sound idea seeing that I'm in the word-picture business. It seemed most efficient to actually create the sleeve and then describe it . . .)
I took my lyric for the song and sent it through a service that's designed to create keyword clouds for websites, telling it to ignore common words. I then randomized the layout and spec'ed the typeface and color palette. I have to say, wrecking such havoc on a lyric I'd worked so hard on was liberating and I was pleased by the emotions the word-cloud generator had foregrounded:
Talk about multitasking: I get a sleeve that can be dramatically described, real-world Bazz gets a graphic he may want to use and I do the single most self-effacing thing a lyricist can conceive of--worse than not including the words at all--I've cold-bloodedly deconstructed all my careful rhymes and metrics. Can you say masochism?
In case you're interested, here's a demo of the song-in-question:
On Your Way (Racing The Sunset/Beatrice's Song) by Atlassheridan/Atlassheridan
And--because I'm not that self-effacing--here's the lyric:
And that's pretty much it: I've managed to test the posting of a sound file, a PDF and a JPEG while saying something with a bit more depth than "Let's see if this works"--though rest assured that as I'm pressing Send, that's pretty much what I'll be thinking . . .
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