I’m a big fan of classic films. I hate to admit it, but I’d rather watch a highly rated classic film than take a chance on a new release. The classic film has had decades of audiences to aggregate their opinion of it, while new movies are just “trending.”
Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of film noir movies from the 1940s and 50s. You know, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Robert Mitchum in gritty stories that happen at night and nothing is really what it seems.
I wondered if there was a way to write a film noir song. That is, could I write a song that has a lot of the features that I love about a good detective story in the genre of film noir.
I started writing this song one morning, and three pages later, it was still going. I had an idea of what happened at the beginning and what happened at the end but the middle required some long walks and even a drawing to figure what happened to the characters. Eventually, I just skipped writing the middle, wrote the end, and amazingly it somehow made sense.
So here’s a first take on a new song in the works – a song sketch – of Shadowland.
