Day 16: Ten Dollar Words (Song-a-day January)

 

Day 16: Ten Dollar Words
By Anna Yale French & David Coile

Part of my daily songwriting project for January 2025

Lyrics:

If you ask me how I'm doing
Then I'll say I'm fine
Not what I'm thinkiing
But when I try to speak my mind
My train of thought
Ends up being a tangled thread
Like a Gordian knot goes
The lexicon in my head

Wracking my brain for something simple to say
Ten dollar words keep on getting in the way

When I was young
I would sit there for hours on end
Perusing the volumes of
My favorite paper friends
When I was talking to people
They'd wince and cringe
My outsized words put me
Out on the social fringe

Wracking my brain for something simple to say
Ten dollar words keep on getting in the way

When I grew older
I found that my literacy
Brought me attention from
Like minded company
They'd ask me questions
When I sounded outre
My tribe of odd ones
All seemed to like me this way

I don't have to search for a simpler way
Ten dollar words are forever here to stay
Ten dollar words no longer getting in the way

***
Details:

I try to get all my friend groups involved with this song-a-day project, even my non-songwriter friends. I've worked with Anna before on comedy projects (like my "Very Scary with Gerry McCreary" podcast, and a short Halloween film called "Knock Knock"), and she had expressed interest in being involved in one of my music projects. So we veered a bit theatrical with this tune.

I asked Anna what her favorite musical styles were, and she said that she likes a broad range, from medieval music to rap, and so I said "Hey! Let's do a medieval rap song!" We dropped the rap part fairly quickly, but my guitar arrangement was an attempt to adapt some medieval style chords; or, at least, the plucking style.

The song is actually fairly autobiographical. Anna grew up reading a lot of books and has a huge vocabulary as a result. I think I have a reasonably sized vocabulary, but she stumps me all the time. The problem is that sometimes people feel like they're being condescended to if you use big words around them, even if you're just speaking naturally from your perspective.

It was fun to hang out with Anna and work in a new artistic medium with her!