It’s a pretty well known song, and you could probably hum some variation of it yourself if you wanted to. I showed up to rehearsal and theīand began to play. I would much rather be Cruella de Vil than Mary Poppins. The album “Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films.”) I jumped at the chance. I was already going to sing “Stay Awake.” (This was a 20th-anniversary concert for

What I love is rhythm.Ī digression: Recently I was asked by the producer Hal Willner to sing “Cruella de Vil” at a fund-raiser. The idea that a melody could be its own clear idea didn’t really occur to me until much later. So you had to shape the melody to the chords in some cool way. The chords made a safe home for the melody,Ī bed for the melody to lie down on, sort of. So I would string together a few chords that worked with whatever the idea at hand was, or whatever the mood of the day was. (Actually, I have never learned to read music and still don’t to this day. Songs of the Sixties” that had little pictures of the fretboard and showed where to put your fingers. But in the beginning I worked from a book called ”Pop Most of the time I didn’t know the names of the chords or what kinds of chords they were I learned that later when I worked with a band and producers. Augmented and diminishedĬhords were spooky and spiritual, so I had a lot of those. Then the melody, and lastly the lyrics.Įach chord told a piece of a story, and by putting the chords together in a certain way you had a musical narrative. In those days the chords came first, and they depended on what I was singing about. Then, after dinner, when everyone in my family was doing other Saturday-night things, I would go into my room by myself and fool around with the guitarįor several hours, usually managing to hammer out some kind of idea. I would start to write a song sometime late Saturday afternoon.

Stay awake mary poppins suzanne vega