The Story of The Girl With The Pens (In Her Apron)

The Story of…

The Girl With The Pens (In Her Apron) is one of the few songs I have ever written that is based on a real person but a made up scenario. It is a daydream, if you will. But not my daydream, but the daydream of a made up character based on anyone and everyone who does not think too highly of themselves and is too afraid of speaking out about their emotions, wants, desires. 

First, let’s talk about The Girl. She is very much a real person. She is based on a friend who is one of the most lovely, honest, goofy, fun-loving, beautiful people I have ever encountered. To met this person is to instantly like her and want to be her friend. 

One evening while I was playing a songwriter event with some of my favorite songwriters from my home town area, The Girl pointed out that no one wrote songs about her or songs with people with which she could identify. A few joking comments later between us all and a few tossed around ideas meant to make light of that statement, all in good fun, I had an idea for a character that fits her. 

See, my friend wore numerous pens in her apron because “people keep stealing them and I don’t want to run out”. Instead of buying all black or all blue pens she, being who she is, wanted to have brightness and color to make things more colorful and bring happiness to her job. I could not think of a better way to visually represent her. This description leaves physical identifiers out and lets you know who she is as a human being and, as lovely as she is in a physically aesthetic way, she is even more wonderful in a humanitarian way. 

Now, how do I tell a story about her that is identifiable for her and those like her? How do I describe her personality without just describing her exactly? Enter the narrator, the voice of the song. 

I wanted to take that comment made about not identifying with song characters and add that to the song but I didn’t want to diminish the description of her personality or make her seem like a downer. So how to do that? Separate the personalities.

I played a Sunday brunch time gig at the same restaurant where The Girl worked as a server for about four or five years. I logged many hours watching people from the obscurity of the stage. The stage is a place where reality doesn’t exist to those not on it. Restaurant patrons treat live entertainment the same way they treat a TV playing a sporting event. Somedays it is the reason people are coming to that restaurant to eat and somedays it just happens to be in the background. On the days when it is the reason for patronage the existence of entertainment can not be too obvious. On other days it is more of a bothersome distraction from dining experience. In either case, the stage isn’t a real place. 

Being onstage is just like being inside a television. People don’t think of you as being a real, breathing entity. You are just there for their entertainment, as a distraction from silence, or as something for them to complain about. This gives the entertainers a unique prospective on what’s going on in the place where you are working. A performer can watch the people who are people watching with absolute obscurity. It isn’t a voyeuristic pleasurable way of watching though. More like uncontrolled and constant observation of one’s surroundings. This was to be the vantage point of the song. Eureka!!

I got up the next day with this well-laid plan for the song. I gathered my guitar, coffee, cigar, and little white pesky dog and sat down outside to write. Within ten minutes I had abandoned everything about my plan. You see, a melody and a chord progression presented itself and changed all of my plans. The style I had in mind changed. The tone of the song changed with it. The only thing I had left from my initial genius idea, or so I thought briefly, was the title, The Girl With The Pens (In Her Apron). 

It is a lengthy title. I liked that about the song because it meshes with the personality of The Girl. That title is eight words long and has nine syllables and music is very seldom written with nine beats in a measure or stretched over two measures. So to try to even things out I added more words. This made it harder to even them out because when I sang the words I didn’t use even stress points for each syllable. This lead to extra beats in the parts that contained the title. This was musically odd, yet, in a quirky way, it felt correct. 

From there I did what good writers do and I let that mood and oddity of meter guide the song. Twenty minutes later and with the approval of the little white dog a song was born. I let stream of consciousness dictate the lyrics in much the same way as one would have pretend conversations correcting the things we didn’t say in an argument that happened to us earlier at some point. The words, chord changes, musical meter differences just sort of happened. The title and a vague concept of the original concept where my rough outline but I shut off the analytical part of my brain to allow the song to arrive. 

Basically, I am saying that the music wrote the song. I just used my time observing how patrons respond to The Girl as my focal point for returning to the subject at hand. I tried to put hints of the original idea inside the lyrics. Some made it, some did not. I was not going to let my calculated thoughts get in the way of a story. This is what occurs to us when we don’t listen to what is happening and we insist that our prospective and idea is the only thing that matters. The Girl doesn’t live her life this way, the little white dog does not abide by such preventative laws, and neither will the song. The observant narrator of the song, however, defines their life in this manner. Thus, the self doubt. 

That is the story of how The Girl With The Pens (In Her Apron) came to be, and how it ended up sounding so odd and quirky. Now, how it came to be as a recording with its unusual paring or 1980’s synth, singer/songwriter acoustic guitar, Post Modern electric guitar, melodic bass parts, heavy/hard hitting drums, and Beach Boy harmonies as a recording? Well, that is an altogether different story for a different day. Hint: I part right on each instrument as though I play that instrument and that instrument only, Man, I play keys! I don’t care what the guitar player is doing as long as he stays out of my spotlight!!