The musings of Sean Paul Murphy: Editor, Producer, Screenwriter, Author. Or, Hollywood -- and beyond -- as seen from an odd little corner of northeast Baltimore, Maryland.
Sean Paul Murphy, Writer
Sean Paul Murphy, Storyteller
Monday, July 15, 2024
THE ELUSIVE FARM GIRL released!
My album The Elusive Farm Girl has just been released. It is available on streaming services everywhere.
The Elusive Farm Girl is a concept album. The fourteen songs taken in order tell the story of a failed romantic relationship from its heady, optimistic beginning to the breakup and eventual transition to a platonic friendship. It's an album I wanted to make for nearly forty years.
I began playing the guitar and writing songs in the wake of my breakup with my first girlfriend back in 1983. I immediately wanted to write an album that would track a romantic relationship from the hopeful beginning to a crushing breakup. Unfortunately, being the throes of a breakup myself, I found it easy to write the sad songs but I couldn't write the happy ones.
It wasn't until the 1990s that I finally developed the material to make my musical dream come true. I met a delightful farm girl on AOL and we began a relationship late in 1993. As we dated, I wrote forty-something songs and/or poems to commemorate the various peaks and valleys of our complicated relationship. By the time our romantic relationship came to an end in early 1996, I had the material necessary to create my album. Unfortunately, I did not possess the musical resources.
I had been in a band during the 1980s called The Atomic Enema. We did make a serious effort at recording the song Tell Me, but we were not satisfied with the results. To create an album with the musicians necessary to capture all of the colors I wanted to express would have cost me thousands of dollars, not to mention studio time and a producer. It seemed like I would never be able to create my concept album.
Then came Udio. I saw some YouTube videos about the new AI Music Generator. I tried it out and I was impressed. I knew I finally had the tools at my disposal to tell my story the way I wanted to tell it. Do I feel guilty or immoral for using AI to generate my tracks? Absolutely not. No more than I would if I had used a drum machine or a synthesizer. It's just another tool. I feel Udio had done my audience a favor. I had previously recorded all of these songs solo on acoustic guitar and posted them on my YouTube channel. Trust me, you will find the Udio versions more interesting and entertaining.
Here are the tracks:
1). A LONELY SENTRY. This is the only track listed out of chronological order. I thought it was a good opener since it revealed my perception of our respective states of mind prior to our relationship.
2). THE CANVAS. I wrote this song the night before I met the farm girl in person after a long Internet and phone flirtation.
3). YOUR FIRST KISS. I wrote this song the night I met the firm girl in person. Obviously, I enjoyed the evening.
4). WILDFLOWER. Being a farm girl, my love songs always equated her with nature. I think this was her favorite amongst the songs I wrote about her.
5). THAT DREAM. Uh-oh. This song reveals some doubts on my part as to whether we had the same goals in the relationship.
6). SO RIGHT FOR ME (BUT SO WRONG FOR YOU). I was ready for a full, committed relationship, but my farm girl wasn't. She said she wasn't ready after a myriad of disappointing ones. I spent a lot of time during our relationship trying to get her trust again after some previous romantic disappointments. This song exemplifies those attempts.
7). MY SWEET LOVE. I can't remember the exact context of this song, but I was obviously happy about the way things were going. More natural imagery. She was, after all, my farm girl.
8). SOMEONE MUCH LIKE YOU. By this time, the farm girl and I had gotten to know each other warts and all. I knew our relationship wouldn't be all unicorns and rainbows. In this adult love song, I tried to convey that our respective emotional scars made us more suited as partners.
9). A DARKENED CORNER. In wrote this song to try to convince the farm girl to come out of hiding emotionally and trust again.
10). WONDROUS YOU. Another upbeat love song with a natural theme. I must been very happy with the farm girl the day I wrote it. We certainly had our good times. Late in our relationship, we even enjoyed a very brief engagement.
11). FOREVER HAUNTED. Our relationship had its ups and downs, but it was definitely in its death spiral when I wrote this song. I don't have a date associated with this song, but from the lyrics it must have been after our brief engagement.
12). NO ONE ELSE FOR ME. Romantically, our relationship was doomed, but I still couldn't let go.
13). OH, CURS'D DAY (AND THE NIGHT THAT FOLLOWS). Just a gloomy song about life without the farm girl. I wrote a number of them, but this one is my favorite. I think Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn would have had a hit with this one back in the day. Listen and you'll find out why.
14). ALWAYS AND FOREVER. The first verses of this song are contemporaneous to the events. The chorus, however, came from something the farm girl said years later. She told me that although our story didn't turn out the way we intended, we did truly love each other and that love would bind us together forever. Her words reminded me of the end of Casablanca when Bogart said to Bergman: "We'll always have Paris." I felt it was a good way to sum up our relationship. And we're still friends to this day.
I realize I will never make any money with this release. However, it allows me to cross a major item off my creative bucket list. As I said in other blogs, I have "succeeded" at all other forms of writing I attempted except songwriting. With this release, and the subsequent ones that will follow, I can now claim some degree of success.
But this is about more than success. To me, the key to effective writing is the ability to convey emotion or achieve a desired emotion in your audience. I think songwriting is the most emotive form of writing. A three minute song can easily have a greater emotional impact than a feature film. I don't know what emotional affect my songs will have on the listeners, but they are the purest expression of what was going on in my heart when I wrote them.
And I want to share that.
You can listen to The Elusive Farm Girl on these and other streaming services:
Be sure to check out my novel Chapel Street. It tells the story of a young man straddling the line between sanity and madness while battling a demonic entity that has driven his family members to suicide for generations. It was inspired by an actual haunting my family experienced.
You can buy the Kindle and paperback at Amazon and the Nook, paperback and hardcover at Barnes & Noble.
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