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Performing the Full Eight Unks
A friend and musical collaborator was putting on a concert in Ottawa a few weeks ago, and invited me to participate by singing a nonsense song I had written a few years ago called Chipmunk Strut. Fastidious readers of this column will recall that the song has earned me precisely $36.10 in royalties. I don’t want it to be the lead item of my epitaph.
However, the ties of friendship prompted me to accept the invitation. And so, with a couple of weeks to go before the big event, and not having played the song for a long time, I set about re-learning it. Surely this can’t be hard, I told myself—especially since it was my own work to begin with.
The conceit of the song is to create various rhymes around the “unk” in “chip-munk”; so I sing about a “chip-munk” who’s living in a “chipbunk”, and who plays his banjo with a “chipplunk,” and so on through eight different “unks.”
To re-learn it, I began pacing around my room singing the song time after time, assuming that repetition would do the trick of re-entering it in my memory. And yet every time I told myself that next time through I would perform it flawlessly, I hesitated or stumbled over some line. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.
The Waring House’s kitchen party hosted by the Frere Brothers took place just three days before the big concert, and offered an openmike opportunity to try out my full eight-unk routine. After having repetitively rendered the song in the safety of my car all the way to the pub, I felt confident as I stepped up to the mike that I could ace this performance.
I started all right. But as my brain was finishing the oration of the first couple of unks, I asked it to roll out the next couple to have on the tip of my tongue. My brain refused to assist; it was a total blank. I’d never foundered at this point in the song before. I was stranded. So I improvised by slurring my words and making it appear that it was the audience’s fault if they didn’t catch my meaning. I left the stage a much humbled man.
Fortunately, I had a forgiving or indifferent Waring House audience. And I still had three days to overcome whatever obstacles were preventing me from giving the work the performance it deserved (a skeptic would argue that I had just given the song the performance it deserved). Needing more than constant repetition, I turned analytical and decided to memorize a prompt word to remind me of the third and fourth rhymes, and to pause for a break and collect my wits at two points in the song. This seemed to do the trick and the performance at the show went off, barely, without a hitch.
But I was sobered enough by the Waring House episode that when I got back from Ottawa I searched for advice from the commons of the Internet, keying in “10 tips to help remember song lyrics.” Some of the advice I couldn’t use. Constant immersion and repetition I had tried. Frank Sinatra apparently wrote lyrics out by hand as a way of learning them; but I had already done that. I had also already adopted the cue word technique. I could not use the internal “unk” rhymes as clues, because they were everywhere in the song. I was told to befriend the song and sympathize with its point of view. Well, okay, but I’m not sure how that directly helps me remember unks five and six.
There were two more practical tips. One, when you are learning a song with multiple verses, try memorizing the first line of each verse; and then the first and second, and then the first, second and third, and so on: they call this “stacking.” Two, treat the lyric as a story being told in a logical and orderly way: what should come next probably does.
This struck a nerve. My friend had also asked me to perform his musical setting of Edward Lear’s poem The Owl and the Pussycat. I found it much easier to commit to memory than Chipmunk Strut. The poem tells a (decidedly wacky) story that unfolds, relatively speaking, in that logical and orderly way, whereas Chipmunk Strut is all wordplay, without a storyline. To test this proposition, I chose a ‘story’ song (Me and Bobby McGee) and found I could indeed recall the words just by continuously asking myself “Okay; what happens next?”
I’m faced with a choice. Do I continue writing and performing songs like Chipmunk Strut, with its big $36.10 payday, and run a risk that forgetfulness will overtake me at any moment and wreck a performance; or do I start writing and performing songs with stories that I can remember? Another option may be occurring to you at this point, but I would ask that you keep it to yourself.
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