Travis Conrad

So I’m working on a musical called Dysfunction with my good friend Sean Kelly. He’s written the book (script) and I’m finishing up the songs. It’s a great story we envisioned about a break-up, and how each person deals with it. The show opens with guy (Cameron) and girl (Kimberly) after a year of dating, which is briefly summarized in a song (Friendship). The song also reveals the bonds between Kim and Cam and their best friends, Natalie and Jusin, and Peter and Ryan respectively. We learn that while Cam is still tits deep in love, Kim is getting bored. Needless to say, the break-up. Cam grieves, Kim parties, both try to move, yadda yadda yadda we introduce Charlotte, who hires Cam’s advertising firm for a project she’s working on. Things happen, events occur, scenarios transpire. It’s an awesome story that gives an adult view on what happens post-love.

Well we came up with the idea in November (I think) 2007, so shortly over a year ago, but at the time I knew next to nothing about writing music. Cart before the horse right? So I took a couple months to learn the craft of song writing. I read through several books on musical theatre, Sondheim’s biography, and a very useful book who’s name eludes me at the moment about orchestrating. I also did a good deal of studying songs themselves, just sitting down and listening. That was probably the most useful thing I could have done. Simply from studying songs I learned to identify the different instruments and percussion in a song, discern the time signature, pick out repeating parts. I learned more just from that than I did from any book. I was ready to rock and roll (and by rock and roll I mean maturely compose subtextful lyrics and professional music).

So we had our story fleshed out, picked out where songs should go and Sean had just finished the script. From about April til June I worked on the lyrics and structure of each song. Lyrics to me are the easy part. Conversation has a natural rhythm and I find sentences flow nicely into song. From there I can build and tweak, but I always need the lyrics done first. There were 14 songs, 10 speaking parts, and a whole new frontier just waiting for me.

Music, it turns out, is slightly more difficult than lyrics. There I sat, with a stack of blueprints, baffled. I’d attempt to start transcribing the vocals in my head into notes on paper. H-A-R-D. Clearly I was more unprepared then I thought, this wasn’t nearly as easy as writing the lyrics. But I kept at it like a dog humping a leg; some days I was the dog, some days I was the leg. I’d scrap half a weeks worth of work and start fresh if I wasn’t happy with it. I kept re-writing parts until they were perfect. Once I had the vocal notes, the music kinda came naturally. From my studying I knew simply having the music accompany the notes was a major faux pas; music had to accent and comment on the lyrics, not echo them. For some reason though, I couldn’t envision the first song just on piano. I tried but it always sounded dull and boring. Everything I read involved songwriters writing for piano first, and then having it orchestrated second, but that wasn’t working for me. So I added in some more instruments (violin, cello, double bass and a glockenspiel) and gave it another try. Success! Like magic the music began writing itself, and every artist will tell you that if a project starts writing itself then you’re on the right track.

Well, that’s the story about the first song I wrote for Dysfunction, called Charlotte My dear. The song is humourous in nature, and is sung by Kim, to Charlotte, in a public bathroom. Dispite me calling it humourous, it’s meant to be sung seriously and the music reflects that. For me, the humour arises in the context of what’s going on, not out of punch lines and jokes and funny rhymes. It has a brief opening where Kim and Charlotte are talking, so I mostly used pizzicato strings to build up some tension. I really do love the sound of pizzicato, always have. I’m still working on recording a version with the lyrics being sung, so unfortunately all you’re getting here is the synth generated song with a synthetic vocal track singing the notes. But that just means you can focus more on the music itself if you’re an optimistic loser such as myself.

I think that should be enough introduction. If you actually read all that, KUDOS TO YOU. 10 points for Hufflepuff!

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-Travis Conrad