The Song Brian Didn't Write
A new song from Jonathan Feinberg's Commission project.
Commissioned by Peter Lurye, who observed:
It's an impressive project. But there's one issue—is there anything Brian Woodbury HASN'T already written a song about? Hey, that's your song—“The Song Brian Didn't Write.”
Brian Woodbury is a brilliant and prolific and eclectic composer/lyricist/bassist/singer/bandleader, and has been a good friend and mentor to me since I met him in the early 1990s. I played drums on his album Brian Woodbury and his Popular Music Group, and did some drums, singing, and arranging on 3 of his 4-album series Anthems and Antithets. He has many other albums and projects besides these.
Brian introduced me to They Might be Giants, and was instrumental in getting me that amazing gig in 1992.
Peter and Brian got to know each other through their almost ludicrously prolific work, separately and together, on the children’s TV show Bear in the Big Blue House. Brian wrote many songs for TV, including the Pepper Ann opening and closing credits, which I also got to play drums on!
Anyway, he didn’t write this song, and the lyrics explain just how to tell the difference between my music and his.
Lyrics
It was the song Brian didn't write
It wasn't long; I wrote it in one night
It didn't have much of a melody
No rhyme or euphony
Nor his humanity
Mostly inanity
Vanity
No counterpoint, and no complexity
A simple song, without a change of key
Nothing to lead you to perplexity
Garden variety
No strings, no tympani
Idiosyncracy
Only me
It had no acerbic commentary
And nothing to say politically
The words sounded kind of arbitrary
But that's what you get when it's not Brian but it's me
This is the song Brian didn't write
It might have been a minor oversight
And he could write this one so easily
But he left it to me
And so it is that he
Can write his songs and be
Woodbury