Song 14: Progress…
Jon Patton and I are collaborating, and we somehow meandered from a medieval Russian fairy tale to present day Florida to contemporary Italian literature to the Portugese ‘Carnation Revolution’ of 1974. I read Sostiene Pereira a long time ago and it always stuck in the back of my mind.
We created a Google doc, he wrote a story line, I wrote some nonsensical imagery stuff, and I mashed it together and pulled out some lines that caught me.
Some interesting info about the Carnation Revolution: the secret signal to begin the first part of the coup was a particular song – ‘After the Farewell’ – played on a particular radio station. And to begin the second part, the song was ‘Grandola, Villa Morena.’ Our first draft uses ‘after the farewell’ as a line, and matches the interesting repetitious verse scheme of the Grandola song.
In the end, the revolution was peaceful, and soldiers took to the streets with red carnations pinned to their uniforms and in the barrels of their guns. I think that’s a nice image to end my February project with.
I won’t post the lyrics yet, we are passing them back and forth for revisions, but here is the (unofficial) train of thought that led to the song topic… it’s kind of amusing:
Ivan, the Firebird and the Gray Wolf > Golden Apple > Golden Apple = Orange > Orange in Persian is the same word as Portugal in Persian > Sostiene Pereira, an Italian novel about a journalist during the… > Portugese Revolution
joescala 
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