“Maroon Steel Daffodil” :: this is where the delusion sets in :: Part 1
The cool air threatens me with a hotter week. I ignore its clammy appeal and push through the self-doubt. A sip of coffee and I’m typing.
It feels presumptuous to call the piece I’m working on a “song”. It’s not a sing-along. Nobody is crooning about opulent micro-concerns. It’s more of an orchestration of sound in the service of melody and harmony. It’s pretentious. And probably not that good. It could be a film soundtrack.
I’ll give it a codename — I’ll give them all codenames. And I’ll eschew brand names, too. Yeah. No partner affiliate links. No reference to capital. No talk about AI. Or crypto.
Just the post-Post of it all; of making something that is categorically useless.
A return back to humble “modernist” beginnings when everything wasn’t part of an advertising spend budget line item.
We’re cruising now but the run-ons hurt. We’ll have to clip them. Keep them short and manage their egos. These sentences might get a mind of their own.
“Maroon Steel Daffodil” appears in the codename generator. The ads obscure most of the screen like a weed with a result determined to be “best fit” for my demographic. For me, this time, it appears I am in the market for a heavy t-shirt: I am slightly bemused.
“Maroon Steel Daffodil”. Sure, let’s use that. Much better than “Song 10” of an album I’ve been slowly working on all year. Much better than any of the proposed titles such as:
- Across the dark waters, I’ll wait for you there
- Filtration
- Peripheral Infection
They don’t capture the _idea_. They don’t manifest the imagery. The piece is a journey — it “spans time” to quote Billy in “Buffalo 66”.
“Spans time” in 7-ish minutes.
The piece — “MSD” now for short — isn’t fully written either. I have the spine of it. The through line. The plot and theme. But I don’t have the full story yet. Only a chord progression that follows the contour of a journey. A chord progression in A-flat. The key of “death”; of “finality”; of “ending things”.
Maybe I’m thinking of ending things.
My eyes roll seeing the text.
Should I delete?
I must admit: I’m a bit excited. This seems to be the ending of the album writ subconsciously, and now, bubbling up to the surface, polluted and slick.
Sure. Ten pieces is enough. Ten somethings. Sure. Maybe through the blur of my deformity I’ll be able to properly label them as not-songs; not about opulent micro-concerns; not about fashion. Post-post, remember? No, it was post-Post. Right. A world in and of itself, post post-Post.
But not _hauntological_!
Yeah, ok.
This is where the delusion sets in.