Monday, December 26, 2011

Oh, Sweet Pea!

Lyrics are fun to work with!

I think it was about a year ago when I was listening to my music and came across 'Sweet Pea' by Tommy Roe. If you don't know the song, here is a video for it:


When I heard it, all I thought of was somebody's post to Petra at the Haven, as they started it with 'Sweet Pea' instead of Petra.  I thought the song as funny enough lyrics that it would match up nicely with a cap:

Oh, Sweet Pea
Come on and dance with me
Come on, come on, come on and dance with me
Oh, Sweet Pea
Won't you be my girl
Won't you, won't you, won't you be my girl

I went to a dance just the other night
I saw a girl there she was out of sight
I asked a friend of mine who she could be
He said that her friends just call her Sweet Pea

Oh, Sweet Pea
Come on and dance with me
Come on, come on, come on and dance with me
Oh, Sweet Pea
Won't you be my girl
Won't you, won't you, won't you be my girl

I walked on over and I asked her to dance
Thinkin' maybe later on
We'd be makin' romance
But every guy there was thinkin'like me
I had to stand in line
To get a dance with Sweet Pea

Oh, Sweet Pea
Come on and dance with me
Come on, come on, come on and dance with me
Oh, Sweet Pea
Won't you be my girl
Won't you, won't you, won't you be my girl

I finally got to whisper sweet words in her ear
Convinced her that we oughta get away from there
We took a little walk
I held her close to me
And underneath the stars I said to Sweet Pea

Oh, Sweet Pea I love you can't you see
Love you, love you, love you can't you see
Oh, Sweet Pea
Won't you be my girl
Won't you, won't you, won't you be my girl

So I went ahead and started a cap.  But a problem quickly came up... what image to use?  If this was a cap for Petra (and really... who else could it be for?), then it really needed to be a redhead.  But the only thing I could think of was using the theme of peas.  You know.. the vegetable.  Well after a long search, I didn't find a single image that I though would work for it.

Time passed, and I would occasional hear that song pop up.  Each time I would give more thought to a Sweet Petra cap, but I couldn't get over the image hump.  If only the lyrics has more detail.   One time (I think this was about Mid Summer), I got the idea of re-writing the lyrics.  Making it a much more overt TG theme.  I liked the idea, but I was in my creative slump at the time, and I couldn't get any actual traction out of the idea.

Fast forward a few more months, and we come to this morning.  I was in a creative mood, and I had just opened up myself for caps at the Haven.  I figured if I was opening myself up, I should go ahead and use this creative time to create a cap for someone else.  And what better way to use this happy time to make a fun/funny cap for Petra using this now almost year old idea.

So I put the song on repeat, pulled up the lyrics and started messing around.  I took it line by line trying to get it to flow right... and yes, I was singing in a quiet voice for a couple hours 'Oh, Peter, Come on and change for me'.  It wasn't easy... but it wasn't really that hard.  I think something that made it easy is that I started with the premise that I couldn't tell a whole story using this method.  And I was fine with that.  Really, beyond the chorus, this song only has three verses.  So.... want to change Peter, change Peter into Sweet Pea, and finally take advantage of Sweet Pea.  It had to be that simple.

Most of the lines will match up syllable to syllable with the original song (Hence me using 'Peter', instead of Petra's preferred 'Pete'... I needed another syllable).  There are a few lines that don't match up perfectly, but I tried to at least use the beat of the song, to keep it sing worthy.

Design wise... well I just accepted in the beginning that I wouldn't be able to really work the photo and the lyrics together all that well.  Thankfully I found this image with the beautiful redhead wearing green.  Peas are green right?

2 comments:

  1. For someone using the rough style of matching word by word, you made a nice song at the end.

    Music caps... for me works in a different manner. As you know words come with a special phonetic sound. This is much easier in spanish... no not by the language barrier, but because we don't have something like:

    Out it would like o u t in spanish instead of english /aut!/ more or less transcribed.

    Anyway when you want to make a word come to the music reference, this is a little bit more trickier than the method you used. You actually need to know the reference between the "sounding line" and the match for the "phonetic line"

    Once you had that, is pretty much, matching verse by verse in this case by a rythm of 3/4 bar in the slow parts to a faster rythm but that's depend on how much fast you want to play this *giggle* and that's only for the singing part!!!

    Nevertheless it was a great song that you made there!

    Hugs and Kisses Alectra

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  2. I loved this cap Caitlyn and I love reading your description of creating it. Oh and the image is perfect for the lyrics. You rock my socks off babe.

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