Tag: lyrics Page 13 of 16

Music of the Cat
by Robert Wynne
Music: “Music of the Night” from the musical Phantom of the Opera
© 2000

Meowing, slinking
Hide under the sofa
Running aimless
Under and then over
Stop to lick your fur
Then remember where you were
And give out a plaintive mew
And crouch down flat
And start to make the music of the cat

Prancing, pawing
Partake any pleasure
Balls of yarn are
Such a priceless treasure
Toss it in the air
Then pretend that you don’t care
If a human observes you
engaged in that
For they can’t hear the music of the cat

Close your eyes and surrender to an hours sleep
Twitch your ear lest they think that you don’t hear
Warm and safe on the top of the TV
Only cats can know the true meaning of free

Prowling, pouncing
Rub against a pants leg
Wishing, hoping
But far too proud to beg
Curl up in a lap
Take yourself another nap
And if they stroke your fur
You’ll purr for that
And once more make the music of the cat
I wrote this one day while observing one of my cats being playful, unaware that I was watching. The moment she DID realize, she suddenly became very dignified and intent on washing her paw. I know too many parodies of this tune have been written already, but it really seemed to fit.

This song was published in the Contata 3 songbook

Fund Me Now

In Songs

Fund Me Now
by Robert Wynne (from an idea by Dan Reitman)
Music: “Hold Me Now” by The Thompson Twins
© 2000

I have an idea
A surefire scheme
A vision of making a few million off of technology dreams
There’s just one problem
I don’t have the cash
If I could just find some investors I’m sure we’d be rich in a flash

Oh-oh, fund me now
Oh-oh, fund my start
New VC
Is the hardest part, the hardest part

You say I’m a dreamer
We’re a dozen a dime
But this one’s a sure thing, I promise we’ll turn out
A profit this time
We’ll create us a new firm
That will draw in the dough
All we need is that first little push to get started
Can you make us go?

(chorus)

You ask for the numbers
What’s our business plan
But those are just details, and don’t you agree
Our idea is just grand
We’re not asking for billions
Just a few million bucks
You’ll make it all back in the end, all we need
is a whole lot of luck

(chorus)

Someone on rec.music.filk posted a filk of the Thompson Twin’s “Doctor, Doctor” titled “Dotcom, Dotcom”, and Dan Reitman suggested someone should write “Fund Me Now” to this tune. I picked it up and ran with it.

One of my favourite performances of this song was the first time I played it for my friend Robert Cooke, who writes grants for a living and actually gets to listen to just this sort of pitch every week. I’ve never seen someone laugh so hard at a song in my life.

Catcalls

In Songs

Catcalls
by Robert Wynne
Music: “Nobody’s Moggie” by Eric Bogle
© 2000

Somebody’s moggy just went splat on the stage
Somebody’s pussy thrown from just outside of range
Someone’s former feline, which landed with a thunk
Perhaps they wanted me to know they thought my new act stunk…

Yesterday when I played here, I was not aware at all
That those were jeers not cheers that greeted every curtain’s fall
But now the audience has booed me off
With a very strange cat-call
They’re all throwing moggies now…

Michael Liebmann and I did a filk demo for The Atlanta Science Fiction Society in September of 2000, which we then reported on in rec.music.filk. I commented that this was the first time I had ever performed music for an indifferent audience, which was an interesting and educational experience. Someone commented that indifferent was better than having them throw rotting flora at you, to which someone remarked that rotting flora was better still than rotting fauna. Mark Mandel said that the traditional form of the latter was a dead cat, and, well, this was the result. This is a show-stopper, which is why it ends after one verse.

Buggy Software

In Songs

Buggy Software
by Robert Wynne (with a steal from Dave Weingart)
Music: “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds
© 2000

Buggy software on my desktop
Buggy software built of hacky-tacky
Buggy software on my desktop
And it crashes all the time
There’s some perl code
and some C code
And I’d swear that’s some Fortran there
And it’s jumbled like spaghetti
And it crashes all the time

And the programmers at Microsoft
And Apple and Sun Microsystems
Hack out all this buggy software
So it crashes all the time
There’s a C hack
And a Perl hack
And an Object-oriented hack
And they write code in the wee hours
And they’re crashing all the time

And the boys down in Marketing
Design the pretty boxes so
When the code has been hacked up
It can be shipped out on time
There’s a blue box
And a red box
And an round multi-colored box
And they don’t care if the code runs
If it still ships out on time

Buggy software on my desktop
Buggy software built of hacky-tacky
Buggy software on my desktop
And it crashes all the time
There’s some perl code
and some C code
And I’d swear that’s some Pascal there
And it’s jumbled like spaghetti
And it crashes all the time
This was inspired by a thread on rec.music.filk. Note that I don’t single out any particular vendor or platform as a target — I wholly subscribe the theory that “All software sucks.”

Wolf’s Bane

In Songs

Wolfs Bane
by Robert Wynne and Jeffrey Williams
Music: “Cocaine” by J.J. Cale
© 1999

When you’re out in the woods
And you’re trying to do good
Use wolf’s bane
When the eyes glow red
And you don’t wanna be dead
Use wolf’s bane
You’d best bring, you’d best bring, you’d best bring
Wolf’s bane

If you hear a loud howl
And your friend starts to growl
Wolf’s bane
If you’re out in nowhere
And you don’t have a prayer
Use Wolf’s bane
They don’t like, they don’t like, they don’t like
Wolf’s bane

Don’t you dare be a fool
Silver is the first rule
and Wolfs bane
Else you might find your own tomb
By the light of the moon
Wolfs bane
Till it wanes, till it wanes, till it wanes,
Wolfs bane

Don’t complain if you’re slain, you abstained
From Wolf’s Bane
Jeff is responsible for this one. He was sitting in on a friend’s AD&D game, in which he was not playing a character. The scene was in a tavern, so Jeff started roleplaying the bard in the corner and making up silly songs. This was one. When he showed it to me, I thought of the third verse and the final refrain.

Twelve Months of GaFIA

In Songs

Twelve Months of GaFiA
by Robert Wynne
Music: “The Twelve Days of Christmas
© 1999

On the twelvth month in Atlanta, the filkers sang to me
Twelve harped murder ballads
Eleven Tom Smith punfests
Ten McQuillen standards
Nine poems out of Kipling
Eight Westerfilk classics
Seven Leslie Fish tunes
Six Stan Rogers folksongs
Five NESFA hymns
Four BFA parodies
Three hours of Old Time Religion
Two old pagan folksongs
And a new variation of “Threes”

Depsite the holidays, we always manage to find time for a housefilk in December. I wrote this for the occaision in 1999.

Team Koudelka Girls

In Songs

Team Koudelka Girls
by Robert Wynne
Music: “California Girls” by the Beach Boys
© 1999

Cetaganda ghem girls are always so very nice
(On) Jackson’s Whole you can get whatever you want
If you’re willing to pay the price
Beta Colony girls all have such an open mind
(But) I cant wait to get back to Barrayar
Back to the cutest girls you can find!

I wish they all could be Team Koudelka
I wish they all could be Team Koudelka
I wish they all could be Team Koudelka Girls

Delia’s the tall one, with her golden hair and face
Olivia’s an athlete who can run with the boys
(But) never lacking style or grace
Martya’s often quiet, but she hides a razor mind
And Kareen, Kareen, she’s such a dream
Any one of them would do just fine

I wish they all could be Team Koudelka
I wish they all could be Team Koudelka
I wish they all could be Team Koudelka Girls
This song is based on Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan books, specifically “A Civil Campaign”. The song occured to me the first time Miles mentally refers to the siblings as “Team Koudelka”, and you must admit, they make a stunning quartet. It isn’t written from any particular characters point of view.

Superfundamentalists

In Songs

Superfundamentalists
by Robert Wynne
Music: “Supercalifragalistic” from the musical Mary Poppins
© 1999

(chorus)
Superfundamentalists enforcing my salvation
They say if i dont follow them, it means my ruination
And hope their faith will one day be the sole law of the nation
Superfundamentalists enforcing my salvation

Long ago in England by a goverment decree
The King told you exactly what your faith was going to be
So some folks bought a leaky boat and sailed across the sea
So their children would not have to live with tyranny

(chorus)

They landed on a foreign shore with no one else around
And said “Here in this frontier land, a colony we’ll found!
And since a free society is what we must achieve
No one here will tell just what you ought to believe!”

(chorus)

In time upon that virgin shore a mighty nation rose
And built their goverment around the freedoms that they chose
To speak their minds without reprisal and to print the same
And most of all, the right to choose just what their god was named

(chorus)

Much time has passed and once again the zealots have grown bold
They say the time has come that all the prophets have fortold
“This country has gone wrong,” they cry, “it’s up to us to fix!
We’ll save you from the heathens” but it’s all a bag of tricks

(chorus)

The fundies have forgot the things that made our country strong
They think that only they can know the truth of right and wrong
Be sure to keep an eye on them and every thing they do
Or else they may succeed in gaining power over you!

(chorus)

At a housefilk in 1999, a discussion of religious zealotry cropped up, and I made the comment that I was tired of of “Superfundamentalists trying to enforce my salvation.” Jerrie Adkins pointed out that the phrase “Superfundamentalists enforcing my salvation” scanned to the Mary Poppins tune, and I thought “Well, that’s clever”, wrote it down, and forgot about it.

Some months later, Gwen Knighton asked me for help finding songs about the separation of church and state that she could play at a Unitarian service. We looked through all our songbooks and couldn’t find anything we thought was quite right, and so both set out to write something. Gwen emerged with the sublime Six Days, while I remembered that throw-away line and crafted it into this song. This is another song that always turns into a sing-along.

This song is written about the myth of America, rather than drawing from real history. I’m well aware of the shortcomings of those settlers with regards to religious tolerance, but I still hope it’s not too late to try and capture the spirit of the ideals they imperfectly enacted.

SETI@Home in Cincinnati

In Songs

Baby, if you ever wondered
If this earth was life’s only home
I’m listening to the airwaves for a signal
That tells us that we aren’t quite alone

Got radio antennae pointing skyward
Scanning across every frequency
One day we’re sure that we will make a contact
As long as we don’t give up on SETI

(Running) S.E.T.I.@Home in Cincinnati
This was written right around the time that SETI@Home was become the passion of several of my friends. I include it for completeness sake.

Sam’s Lament