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Phil-K Music
To be clear, the things I post here are created primarily so that I have reminders of what I want to play and sing. I will often vary from the timing, rhythm, and pitch...sometimes even by choice. Many of the songs are slowly mutating into something different from what they were to begin with. If I decide to change chords or lyrics, I will usually change the notation. Otherwise, it's all subject to whim.
Songs (ordered by when they were written)
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February, 2004 |
Firing Line was inspired by a Civil War/Time Travel book, Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove. It's my first filk song, written for (but not performed at) FKO 14. |
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September, 2004 |
Four Families is based on Terry Pratchett's book The Fifth Elephant, where some characters have trouble being comfortable with their relatives. |
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September, 2004 |
Read All About It is a tribute to Science Fiction authors. I was in a conversation where I was explaining how I started reading fantasy and science fiction. Long after the discussion was over, I kept remembering.... |
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October, 2004 |
I insist that Universal Follower is a joke rather than a plea for help. When I started going to house filks (Summer, 2004), I was nervous that songs I wanted to try would be seen as misfits compared to what others were singing. I'm over that now. No, really! |
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December, 2004 |
Winter 2004, I re-read The Silmarillion and enjoyed it even more that I did when it was first released (Maybe I've learned a little patience). White Ships is my first attempt at writing a song based on incidents from that book. |
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January, 2005 |
Melkor's Blues explores the idea that all of Middle-Earth's problems might have been avoided if Melkor had been allowed to keep a pet. (When Randy Hoffman heard it, he called it Sympathy for the Morgoth, which I also like.) |
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January, 2005 |
Again with The Silmarillion, I kept thinking that Finrod was a great character except that he kept getting into trouble by making promises. I Swear is my idea of how his last promise might have gone. |
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February, 2005 |
Time That You Have Thrown Away is a song about recycling, written for FKO 2005. Too many revisions, verging on lobotomies.... |
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March, 2005 |
One day Judith Hayman mentioned to me that she thought silly songs just naturally went with Country & Western music. Queen of Heart Attacks was my response. Maybe I'll sing it again some day. Maybe.... |
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April, 2005 |
I'm noticing that new filk writers predictably write on certain themes...and I wish someone would give me the checklist so I can get it over with. A Long Way From Here is my what-an-amazingly-nice-community song. It's dedicated to the whole collection of FKO/UFO conspirators. |
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April, 2005 |
My Father's Rocket Ship is based on The Rocket from Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. I wrote it mostly because I didn't have any serious space followers when circles got into that mood. |
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April, 2005 |
A lot of different things went into the creation of One A Day. It started when I was introduced to Tom Smith at the FilkOntario 2005 banquet as someone who made other people uncomfortable by writing too many songs. (Ha! Compared to him? Heather: what were you thinking?) A bit later I mentioned to Tom on LiveJournal that I was going to tell people I was trying for a song a day to see what reaction I got. Later still, the idea turned into a song. (Revised September, 2005 because I felt it was a verse too long -- at least.) |
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May, 2005 |
Early summer of 2005, I re-read The Hobbit and went looking for song ideas there. How Could It Possibly Matter comes from thinking about Bilbo's change of heart in deciding to go on an adventure. (Revised September, 2005 because I didn't like the first line of the second verse.) |
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May, 2005 |
What could be cuter than all those fantastic animals in The Art Show? C'mon...think about it! :-) |
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July, 2005 |
One Dawn is about the three trolls in The Hobbit. Probably the stupidest critters in all literature.... A Tolkien moment: I thought that I would never see a monster dumber than a tree. |
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July, 2005 |
Mister Invisible is a song from The Hobbit that came out of thinking about Bilbo's irritation at how the rest of the party treated him during the first part of the adventure. |
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September, 2005 |
I wanted to write a song about ships...or spaceships...or something like that. I wrote All The Good Songs instead. |
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September, 2005 |
For my first trip to OVFF, I wrote Traitor Wind to enter in the Shipwrecked-themed song contest. True to the subject, it sank without a trace. |
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January, 2006 |
About the time Bilbo and friends are snatched from burning trees by giant eagles, I imagine him pondering how many Ways To Die he has suddenly discovered. |
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January, 2006 |
I don't know about Childhood Friends. I like it, but in spite of fantasy references, it hardly seems filk. Too autobiographical, perhaps. |
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February, 2006 |
Though I'll probably write more songs from The Hobbit, I see Tea At Four as being sequentially last: Bilbo contemplates the outcome of his adventure, getting it mostly wrong. |
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March, 2006 |
Dwarves Will Be Dwarves is the song I'm least likely to try performing because, when I imagine hearing it, there are four voices. (But it wanted to be written, so....) |
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March, 2006 |
I posted the words to Adult Situations on LiveJournal some months before getting enough ambition to write down a tune. |
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April, 2006 |
Many things combined to inspire Earth Magic, including Orson Scott Card books, the traditional Shady Grove, and Escape Key's Ladies Don't Do Those Things. |
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May, 2006 |
In February 2006, I posted a 'challenge' on the FKO lyrics list, saying there weren't enough SF love songs and suggesting people should write some. One Hurt Wonder is my own attempt. (I think I now know why there aren't so many SF love songs.) |
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June, 2006 |
You know about Alternate Reality stories. Beorn (On The Plain) is not one of those...at least, not the 'Reality' part. It started as just another song from The Hobbit, but mutated. |
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June, 2006 |
Everybody has been portraying Gollum as a conflicted and slightly sympathetic figure. Me too, in Found And Lost...a song about choices. |
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July, 2006 |
True Monsters is based loosely on a character from The Truth by Terry Pratchett. |
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September, 2006 |
Bedtime Stories was written for the 2006 OVFF song contest with the subject Too Tired To.... Second place! Wow! Thanks, people! |
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September, 2006 |
Abby is a song that was inspired by the setting for three Richard Chwedyk short stories. It's not funny. |
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December, 2006 |
While I was filling in time by doing a bit of guitar practice, the last line of I Don't Think They've Noticed's chorus arrived with no warning. It turned into speculation on the nature of life and death. Riiiight! |
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February, 2007 |
Thorin gets a moment to apologise for his tunnel-vision (Oh, bad! The song's not like that, I promise.) in The Heart of the Mountain. |
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March, 2007 |
I was walking to the grocery store one day when I got a mental image of two people in a sick room, one in bed and the other beside it. The result was, I'll Remember. |
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May, 2007 |
Trout is another of those ideas that arrived while I was working on something totally different. But I have had a long-time feeling that the displays of live "food" in stores and restaurants was a bit grotesque. |
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June, 2007 |
For A Storyteller was written as a tribute to John Morressy, who died early in 2006. I was a fan of the short stories of his, published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, about Kedrigern the wizard and his princess wife. |
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June, 2007 |
Southbound is based on an idea that had been kicking around in my head for a year and a half: What if there were sensitive Orcs who were upset and dismayed about the management of the Mordor forces? I think it works better up-tempo than in its earlier, thoughtful incarnations. |
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July, 2007 |
While trying to learn the guitar part for Seanan McGuire's Maybe It's Crazy, I came up with the idea of Cheerin' For Chess. What if highschool had been the kind of place where guys like the one in her song were the most popular? |
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October, 2007 |
Powders & Signs is part of an experiment where I attempt to tell an original story using songs to advance the plot. |
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October, 2007 |
Insubstantially Yours is a song about a ghost who seriously cannot take a hint. It tends to cause arguments about which character is the victim. |
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November, 2007 |
If someone took the phrase, "A penny for your thoughts," to heart and made it their motto, Pennies might be the result. Whimsical. |
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December, 2007 |
The direct inspiration for Don't Love The Hero was a Firefly episode, but the concept of disposable love interests seemed universal. |
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December, 2007 |
In Smaug's Lament the dragon narrates his encounter with Bilbo and the adventures that follow. |
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December, 2007 |
There's a certain saying that suggests you should consider adversity as an opportunity. Lemonade explains that the strategy doesn't scale well. |
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December, 2007 |
Burning Ages is the second song that I've written in my attempt to tell a full length story in songs. This may take some time. |
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February, 2008 |
Sweet Nightmare is Bombur's song from The Hobbit. For all the real-world troubles, the dreams were the biggest problem. This was written for the 2008 FilKONtario song contest. |
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February, 2008 |
Sometimes I imagine that there's music in everything. Differences suggests that you just have to be attuned to it to find it in nature, or aliens, or that filker on the other side of the room. |
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May, 2008 |
There are any number of songs that celebrate the joy of a person being selected to go off into space, leaving everything and everyone behind. Frozen April looks at it a bit differently. |
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MP3s
Some of these songs are available on FilkArchive. The style and quality are variable, often depending on what I was experimenting with at the time: a piece of software, a guitar pattern....
Songs inspired by The Hobbit
(These songs are already linked above, but this is the current set in story order rather than my chronology of writing them.)
Collaborations
Songs -- and comments! -- by Jane Garthson with music by Phillip Mills (freely adapted from Jane's humming).
The Pampered Ogre: I noticed several retail establishments in Toronto that seemed to serve overly specialized clientele, then looked for more. All the names are real except the title one.
A Pegasus Must Be White: A number of experienced horse people who should have known better said this line on viewing a certain Heather Bruton print of mine. They knew this because every Pegasus they had ever seen was ... oh. Shit.
Parody lyrics
Though Firing Line was the first filk song I started, Vicious And Cruel was the first I completed. Like, how long could it possibly have taken?
For some of us, Babylon 5 was almost a religion...not least because of all the foreshadowing. But foreshadowing of everything, including Shadows, had to be some kind of joke, right? Farther Along - B5 Edition
It's My First Filk At Sally's: in which our hero learns that the only way to get some lines out of his head is to force them into other people's heads.
I read Bob Kanefsky's notes on parody from Torcon 3. He says parodies can be serious. This one is...and LotR too. Those Days
Strange Pussycat Minds is based on a wonderful song by Rob Balder and Tom Smith. After hearing Rob perform it Friday night at OVFF, 2005, I just had to do something with it. It seemed to me that my cats were the ones with the richest fantasy lives.
After practicing this tune over and over in preparation for FKO 2006, I decided to re-cycle it into something that would remind me of that convention. A Song At The End Of 'Dead Penguin' came from that.
The Things We Learn From Spam was a quick inspiration one morning after cleaning the normal load of junk out of my email inbox.
I Don't Want To Watch "House" was written in a moment of clarity when I realized that there are enough maladjusted people in real life without wasting time on an imaginary one.
Life During Con Times is one I'd been wanting to do ever since my first filk con car pool.
Mice Ruined Terra combines Douglas Adams with total disrespect for a song that takes itself far too seriously.
Ouroboros was another quick song, written to externalize a song worm.
Pain, Death, and Mutilation came about when I sang a serious, semi-ose song at a house filk and everyone kept waiting for the punch line.
Public Transportation was inspired by a line in a comment of a friend's LiveJournal. I was given permission to paraphrase to something I could put into song.
Links
The sheet music above was created by starting with the ABC file format and some free utilities for turning it into interesting things like Postscript, PDF, and MIDI.
The other free musical toy people might find handy is Audacity. I wanted to set up an inexpensive way of recording myself so I could hear what needed fixing (most) and this was key to doing that.
Not free, but a good deal (IMHO), is Band-in-a-Box. The program is modelled a little on the idea of a spread sheet, but instead of equations the "cells" are bars that hold chords. Select a style and BiaB generates multi-instrument back-up arrangements. Add melody, change instruments, solo, define new styles, MIDI export...many other features.