So, I did it! I wrote a song with chords and everything! It's been a decade since I started studying music and two years since I started playing an instrument, so this is pretty overdue as accomplishments go, but I'm going to celebrate, anyway.

The impetus for writing this song was truly strange and beautiful. I've been on a cross-country road trip with one of my oldest friends, during which she introduced me to Mobile Suit Gundam. As an old-school anime fanatic, the fact that I'm just now getting into Gundam is pretty incredible by itself. I watched Macross with another friend just before the pandemic got underway, and enjoyed that quite a bit. I guess I was putting off the Giant Robot Franchises because I assumed they'd be Pretty Silly. It turns out, the silly one was me!

Anyway, so we're driving across the country discussing the logistics of psychic space romances with psychic space ghosts and listening to Spotify playlists containing the sum of our teenage audio experiences. We get to NYC, where she lives, and punctuate the normal tourist activities (the ones still available during the pandemic, anyway) with long nights of watching Zeta: A New Translation, Char's Counterattack and Unicorn. We then finished the first half of Wing before I needed to head out to my next destination.

I charted a course to another east coast destination and drove out in a state of sleep deprivation on what I thought would be a 12 hour journey. A couple of hours in, with the radio turned off and my head still full of Gundam, I pulled into a service station and wrote a song about one of the principal characters. Lyrics stored in my Notes app, melody recorded to my Voice Recording app, I encountered lots of traffic and eventually hit my destination four hours overdue.

My first day off the road was spent recovering from my bad decisions (16 hours of solo driving after a Grand Sendoff the night before was certainly A Choice) and picking out chords on my ukulele. (I am, perhaps, not the best house guest, lol.) I've got an idea of how I want to arrange some additional MIDI instruments when I get back home to my DAW. I'm not quite sure when I'm going to record it, but I'm confident it's worth recording.

I really do like filk as a genre, and I'm glad to have finished something creative. I hope I get a chance to share it online when it's properly fixed to a digital medium. Until then, I'm just glad to have created something I genuinely enjoy. Perhaps there will be more where this came from, as well! Look at me, acting like a proper musician, lol.