7s7d: D7
“One Perfect Kiss”
Prompt: the softest shoulder
Submission of Member: Lisa T
In a radical breaking of tradition, the final song for this year’s 7s7d is actually an upbeat Holly Frost song.
Typically by Day 7 (or 30, or whatever 😉) I’m so tired and drained that all I can manage is some kind of wistful OBDR ballad. However, going into the 7s7d stretch this year (and all the simultaneous gigs I had, and streams, and, y’know, life, etc) I really set the intent to try to stay upbeat and positive for this one. Clearly that was represented in the output - with an astonishing number of ZERO One Big Dark Room songs in this batch (which I don’t think has ever happened before)? perhaps if I had had an available day to wallow after a deep-psychological-dive this might not have been the case, but for this round, staying bright was going to help me get through it.
Again, to try to stay inspired and upbeat (and continuing my recent 1960s US-Latin fixation), I had on a mix of Peggy Lee’s latin tunes… a lot of her songs from Guitars a la Lee (1966), but the last one that came up before my writing session is one I’m absolutely obsessed with: Sweet Happy Life, a 1965 English-Lyric adaptation of the gorgeous Samba de Orfeu from the 1959 Brazilian-music film sensation Black Orpheus.
Even though I’d already done a few latin tunes for this stretch, that’s where the muse led me, so I started the session first by figuring out the harmonic movement for “sweet happy life” as a starting point, and then let my imagination and very minimal knowledge of Brazilian music guide me from there. I also intentionally referenced a melody from a Bossa or samba standard in the bridge section, but despite poring over at least 20 just now I cannot figure out what it is! Maybe So Nice (Summer Samba) (1966)?
This song sounds like it might have some melodic recycling from some previous original songs, but I didn’t want to look into it at all just from fear. Not enough time to go down that rabbit hole!
Thus, our SEVENTH 7 Songs in 7 Days is complete! And we got several what-I-think-could-be solid HF songs… probably a good thing, since I have big plans to release a LOT of Holly Frost music next year so it’ll likely be nice to have some in The Vault. 😊
Speaking of SEVEN… I reviewed “The Vault Original Songs A-Z” playlist the other day and there are… wait for it… SEVEN HOURS of original tracks I’ve released here at The Vault. And, no, that’s not including the spoken word/audio books, or the public releases, or what’s in The Archive, or the good majority of what was at Patreon because I haven’t had time to migrate all that over. So mostly those seven hours have been just what I’ve been releasing here since we launched this iteration of the membership in 2021. That’s nuts. That also means that if I never wrote anything again for the rest of my life I could probably still release an EP or album every couple years until retirement age and not run out of songs.
So let’s start releasing stuff! 🎉
Thank you for being here. Thanks for holding me to the fire. Thanks for all the songs ❤️
… and see you on SATURDAY 9/30 where I’m gonna (try to) play all these songs for you LIVE for the first time!
(I am so pleased to have gotten this done this early because now I’m off to TWO IRL performances and it’ll be so nice not to have to do all this at 9 o’clock at night 😜 Also, as always, special props to Ian Branch for helping with the artwork for this and all the other years of this challenge ❤️)
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