Over-Completing Songs

           I suppose I’m the only person who has heard a song and thought that the lyrics were too short.  That is, the song has only one verse or two, and instead of being more creative, the band just repeats that one or two verses several times.

             This really bugs me.  Sometime it bugs me enough that, out of sheer obsessiveness, I’m compelled to come up with my own extra verse.

            In Peter Beagle’s divine The Last Unicorn, on the title critter’s lonely quest, she comes across a spoiled princess.  This royal she-brat, as part of an arranged marriage, follows a weary (to her) ritual in which she goes into the forest to summon a unicorn with her supposed regal virginity.  Dreary though the princess is, her would-be incantation is quite affecting.

I am a king’s daughter,

And if I cared to care,

The moon, that has no mistress,

Would flutter in my hair.

No one dares to cherish

What I choose to crave.

Never have I hungered,

That I did not have.

I am a king’s daughter,

And I grow old within

The prison of my person,

The shackles of my skin.

And I would run away

And beg from door to door,

Just to see your shadow

Once, and never more.

            In 1979 I wrote music to these verses.  To my undying sorrow, when Beagle was a guest at SoonerCon, I was too chicken to sing my version for him.

            Many years later, in 2019, I committed the ultimate fan profanity by writing my own third verse:

I am a king’s daughter,

And if my life should end,

The stars will bleed to shadows

And darkness will descend.

Although my reign was glorious,

My wealth has turned to tin.

Empty gnaws the hunger

You have left within.

            Now it’s time to call the lawyers at Apple Corps.  Remember the 1970 Badfinger song “Without You,” covered by Nilsson, Mariah Carey, and others?  It, too, suffers from a too-skimpy lyric.   They are:

 

Well I can’t forget this evening

Or your face as you were leaving,

But I guess that’s just the way the story goes.

You always smile, but in your eyes

Your sorrow shows,

Yes, it shows.

 

No I can’t forget tomorrow

When I think of all my sorrow,

When I had you there but then I let you go.

And now it’s only fair that I should let you know

What you should know.

 

I can’t live

If living is without you

I can’t live

I can’t give anymore

 

(repeat ad nauseam)

 

            Here is my heretical third verse:

 

Ev’ry night I dream about you

But I still wake up without you –

I sit up in my bed and wonder why –

Even though my friends all said you’d say good-bye

I still cry ….

 

            What songs have you improved?  Merry Christmas!

 

I Want King Arthur for Christmas!

And you can have him too, if you believe Geoffrey Ashe.

This is from the December 28, 1982 Oklahoman.

I think Riothamus is a good candidate.  I have this copy of Ashe's The Discovery of King Arthur, which is an elucidation of this theory.  You can read the excerpts of various documents and decide for yourself.

See you Thursday, fellow Anglophiles!