People Who I Went To School With Who Died And How They Died
 

I figured that I can write a song which sums up the different ways in which kids I went to school with or new from other places who died. Gruesome, I know, but then again I knew them so I suppose that entitles me to write about it. For starters, I'm going to do it in a simple throwaway rhyming style... and might rework it later, after I've decided which of the numerous deaths would suit songwriting best... There's quite a lot of them to pick from...


I used to play football
With a boy called Jimmy
He was neither smart, nor dumb
A little short and skinny
Pretty normal, all in all
With a pretty normal name
Then one day Jimmy fell into a silo
And drowned beneath the grain

These things happen
To strangers
These things happen
To strangers
Or so we thought
So we thought

And behind me in my form room
Sat another kid called Andy
I used to mock the way he talked
I don’t think he could stand me
Apart from that, he was your average guy
Neither a scholar, nor a felon
Then one day his bike went under a lorry
And his head, crushed like a melon

These things happen
To strangers
These things happen
To strangers
Or so we thought
So we thought

I really like both the verses, has a good folk feel to it, the chorus however, I don't like at all, it might work for other people, but the whole ABABCC thing never sounds good imo.

Only question I have... what the hell is a lorry?

Lorry = Truck.

EDIT: I really see what you mean about the chorus. The style of the verse and chorus don't fit together at all. Think I'll scrap this one generally because I'm finding its plinky-plonky style a bit offensive to my own experience! (I have offended myself...)

I like it, I'd almost say it's too bad you don't know more people who died. Because 2 verses isn't really much.

And I agree on the chorus, personally I'd go for ABC, and perhaps just play/sing the chorus twice.

I wouldn't scrap the verses all together (just the chorus), you could definately use/improve them.

!!?? I know what you mean...

... but I do know far more than 2 people who died. I only had the patience to write two verses, so maybe I will write more verses then.

I'll try to make a list, that might force me to write about them all.

• Andy (written about).
• Jimmy (written about).
• Miss. whatever her name was... poop, I can't remember her name... (a teacher at my school who used to tell me off for messing around in the corridor. She died of a brain haemmorage when I was 14. She was in her late 20's.
• Zoe (girl in my 6th form who died of cancer after her 1st year of uni).
• Laura (I didn't actually know her, but she swam for our school in a race, won, got out of the pool... and died)
• Brian (my maths teacher when I was 18. one day a different maths teacher, Jamie, turned up and said "sorry to tell you, but Brian died at the weekend of an aneurism. today we will be studying forces which act around corners.")
• Mike (one of my dad's friends and the dad of another guy I knew. Me and my dad bumped into him one day in town, went and had lunch with him and talked and joked for an hour or so. A week later he hanged himself in his garage and his son found him and had to pull down down his dead body.)
• Cara ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1101022.stm . She was one of the younger kids in a drama group I went to )
• Thuli (one of my ex-girlfriend's best friends, who we both met in South Africa and my ex and her always wrote letters to each other. A year after we met her the letters stopped coming, then a few months later we found out she'd gone on a performing trip to America and had died of some horrible disease.)

I was going to read it until you said you were going to scrap it... does that mean you aren't finding worth in your own writing? What's goin' on? The basis of the story from the replies seems like they would make this song a bat out of the ribcage carrying chunks of beating heart... how is it not good?

Oh, I think my subject matter is really good but re-reading it I wasn't particularly happy with any of the actual lines that I'd written for it, apart from:

"Jimmy fell into a silo
And drowned beneath the grain"

The rest of it was all a bit 'oompah-oopah', or that's how it came across to me when I read it. I definitely want to write about it, but really need to feel I've done justice to each story because at times it preys on my mind a lot. In fact, I think that I might write a song about each individual death because it seems like a decent way to get that **** out of my head.

• My ex bandmates housemate, who took too much acid one night, tried to climb up the outside wall of Durham cathedral, fell off the wall, knocked himself out and froze to death over a January night.
• The guy who stood in front of me for our first year photograph on the first day of uni. I didn't know this guy at all and when I saw the obituary in our yearbook I thought 'who is that then?', forgot about it until I saw the first year photo again and there he is, his pasty, slightly ghoulish face frowning just below my tooth grin.

It's kinda scary the amount of people you know who've died young. It's never happened to anyone I've actually known, and I've only heard of around 3 in my area

I'm glad I don't know you Tom...your a fucking jinx.

You should write this song like your describing life as a battlefield...