New lyrics

As I mentioned to cgoldfish at lunch today, while I was dreaming (or maybe waking up) I came up with some lyrics last night. If I have time today I might record them for the podcast (although my recording setup has been acting a little weird for the past week or so, which is a little worrying).

As far as what it means to write lyrics in my sleep: I remember hearing a couple of these lines (specifically the first couple of lines from the second verse) and singing them to myself over and over. The melody I used in my dream was from the Randy Newman song 'Rider In The Rain', and the song is kind of Randy Newman-ish in other ways, I think, so I am a little worried that I subconsciously ripped the whole thing off from him, or from some other preexisting song. Anyway, I wrote some more lyrics after I got up, and I fooled around with the chord progression and the melody so it no longer sounds like 'Rider in the Rain', so hopefully it is relatively original now.

It would have been relatively easy to write a whole bunch more verses, but I decided that three verses got the idea across well enough. I'm not sure if anyone else will like the song, but I think I do. Well, we will see.

( tentatively titled 'habit' )

Addendum: The more I think about it, maybe Liz Stahler has a song with a similar conceit? Does this ring a bell with anyone?

Recording of 'A Habit' or whatever I end up calling it

If anyone's interested, here's a recording of the lyrics I wrote earlier today. (This is tomorrow's podcast recording, so this is an opportunity to get a jump on things, I guess.)

It also features the Martin backpacker guitar that I was thinking about buying earlier this week and which I did, in fact, buy earlier this evening. So if you are a fan of tiny, very trebly guitars, check it out!

'decider' is a funny word

In computability theory, a machine that always halts — also called a decider (Sipser, 1996) — is any abstract machine or model of computation that, contrary to the most general Turing machines, is guaranteed to halt for any particular description and input (see halting problem).