Expected + Unexpected

 

What I find as a writer is that I celebrate the little things that happen between the big events. ...It’s the big shit that you can do without. It’s the tiny stuff, like the way humans are when they think they aren’t being watched or when they’re at rest, that’s really fascinating. Hawksley Workman

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My dad was listening to an interview about music and the brain and apparently one of the things that makes music pleasurable is a combination of the expected and the unexpected. We've been thinking about this in relation to all the arts and have decided: 'Tis true. You're going along with a song, or movie, or book and you think you know what's going to happen next and them: Zing!

It's Canadian Music Week so I thought I'd share one of my favorite artists who demonstrates this principle. His songs never quite go the way I expect them to, so they're interesting to listen to over and over. He's also a fantastic lyricist--comes up with great images, a mixture of bombastic and silly.

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I’m very inclined to want to celebrate things that are wonderful; to me it’s exciting. The guy who poured my basement is so passionate about pouring basements. We would talk about all of the required things in a great basement and he had equipment that he had shipped in from the U.S. It shot lasers and made the slope towards the drain just perfect. And to me, people who love and are passionate, it makes me excited. Hawksley Workman

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You needn't sample them all. But I know some writers have trouble finding Soundtrack Music, so I put a little description of each song. If you'd rather just play them in the background as you internetize, I put them on a playlist:

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Piano Blink My favorite song, about the end of a relationship. 

Some things don't softly go
But it's over now
(Somebody gonna hurt somebody)
It's over now
(Somebody gonna hurt somebody)

You, Me and the Weather Another melodramatic love song. And a good example of the unexpected, when he reaches up into his falsetto, and the way he keeps cranking up the key.

Hey Hey Hey (My Little Beauties) A sweet little philosophical song. I like the child-like kerplunk of it, and the final line: "Hopeless isn't true."

One certainty of living

Is that you're gonna die

So why not stand in awe of it

Instead of asking why

Your Beauty Must Be Rubbing Off Workman's rah-ther obsessed with sex and death.

so let me say that you look lovely in all of this
and let me say that the death that i fear
could in part be a fear that I'd lose you, your just as i found you

Jealous of Your Cigarette On the rock side... he's jealous of her cigarette, cause she wants to suck on it, and not him. Did I mention the other thing I love in a songwriter is humor?