the brief

a song for the days "the grind's got you ground, and you're not sure you can take even just another step forward" . . . calling on our younger selves to help us in the here and now

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Auspicious Omen by Kitaro was a track I had found circa 2014, when I was auditioning music for potential new collaborators in the late second phase. It was one of two Kitaro tracks that had 'dinged' my spidey song sense back then.* For this track, I'd got the sense of an adventure tale, with some kind of a 'sailing to the horizon' theme. It had gone nowhere then but had stayed on the 'maybes' list.

A song started coming forward in late Oct 2021, and had named itself just before the 'pick any song' experience that started the 4th phase. And the opening lyrics felt consistent with an adventure tale coming, though I had no idea where a song about Peter Pan might go.

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if i could be your peter pan and
you were my wendy darling
i would fly you to the morning
past the night side's slow turning

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It was the 46th karosong to start channeling, the first in what would turn out to be the 4.1 set, and the 3rd with an async track by Kitaro.

It would also be a song that itself did not seem to know where it was going — for months — even though it seemed to know how far that would be from the earliest days. It would be from the morning and the moon . . .

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if i were your peter pan and
you were my wendy darling
then i would fly you to the moon
past the twilight's last gleam

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. . . and on to Saturn's rings, then the black hole at the galactic core. I sensed four of these 'if i were' chorus forms, each a further step out into some kind of excellent adventure.

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Well perhaps not really an adventure story. Within just a week of the song starting, I thought I'd got its point or message. That it would be a wistful song around being grownup and losing touch with the magic of youth. Perhaps a rom-karo, maybe some sas. Something like that.

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but i'm not your peter pan and
you're my darling but not wendy
and we are happily embarked on
that most adult of all tasks

building a life together

but sometimes between the mortgage payments
and the teacher meets and all the crap at work
i think back to that 9 year old boy
and wish i could believe like him again

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But nothing much happened with the song before I went back to Lake Erie for the second lockdown winter and, even then, subvocal progress was stymied because this idiot musant couldn't identify the underlying stucture of Kitaro's async track.

Auspicious Omen, like the other Kitaro tracks I'd worked with, was a 'wall of sound' to my ears, an indicipherable flow that seemed to be one long verse/verse/verse build that I couldn't differentiate. I couldn't tell how many verses there were. And there was no musically clear chorus.

Still, I knew there were at least four chorus forms, and I knew the 'morning' and 'moon' forms were at the beginning of the song. But I couldn't tell where the 'saturn' and 'galactic core' forms would go because they kept floating around the verses I could not quite identify.

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Things stayed pretty much the same through the winter, spring and early summer. By the end of August when I sold and left my property on Sunday Lake , I still didn't know the point of the song — beyond some kind of maudlin message to 'honour your inner child'.

But — mind you, this is seven months after the song started — I thought I'd finally worked out its overall structure and knew where the 'saturn' and 'galactic' chorus forms appeared.

And there was even une petite francaise from an overly amourous — you might even say malodourous — cartoon character that snuck itself into the lyrics.

(Nice enough guy, but wouldn't trust him with my sister. Especially if I had one.)

Still, my song notes throughout that period were largely variations of "no progress" and "don't know where it's going".

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i'm sure that must sound childish mais ma cherie
c'est exactement la pointe, as pepe might say
we don't don't just outgrow our younger selves
we encase and slowly bury them

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Leaving Sunday Lake started a nearly 4 month rootless period of staying with family and friends around southern Ontario, then driving to Alberta and British Columbia for the winter. Channeling during this time was only when possible and mostly subvocal.

I can't say progress on this particular song stalled since it was already barely moving forward. In fact, several of the other 4.1 songs were in exactly the same uncertain, not moving forward state. Major sections of each song remained blurry.

I can say all of those unfinished songs went through what the televison cameraman in me would describe as a long, slow pull-into-focus on a telephoto lens. I started sensing the missing parts of each song, but only vaguely. Then they began to come into focus. Some bits became recognizable earlier, others only became clear much later, after I had started on the Vancouver recording sessions.

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For this song, I finally got it's gist, that it was about trying to connect with positive forces from our youth, to use them in our present lives. More or less. More a sas-flavour karosong than a rom-flavour, but with a good dollop of the latter thrown into the pot.

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but we all know the kind of crap from childhood
can affect us here in the present
which leads me to ask why can't we call on the good
from back then to help us in the here and now

and if i were your peter pan and
you were my wendy darling
i would fly you to saturn's realm and
wed you with one of her rings

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I also lost the ending chorus form for the black hole at the galactic core along the way. That was suprising, one of the few times an entire section of song has channeled then disappeared. But there was no room for it once I'd finally got all the verses.

And no need for it really. So the galactic core sucked out of existence into its own blackhole and became a final verse instead.**

A final verse that — finally! after 15 months! — fully completed the song. Finally revealed the song's full message. That wouldn't it be great if we could call on the strengths of our younger selves! Or something like that.

I guess that's a nice message. A bit Hallmark or internet memish. The kind of inspirational message you might see on a poster with a cute kitten doing cute kitten things.

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forgive me if I get all cosmic
i just think it'd be a really useful thing
for those days the grind's got you ground and
you're not sure you can put even just another foot forward

well just then a small hand at your back and
a wee word in your ear that of course you can do this
could be all it takes to make that next step
and win through to another day

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Yeah, I found the song's message a bit of a letdown. Seemed a lot of work for a small result, for just a smidgen of self-awareness shit. But put against that slight disappointment was the joy I found as the full-on karo blossomed in my singing through the 15 months this song was active channeling.

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the singing

I remember thinking the first several times I heard Auspicious Omen that it was too slow, it was beyond my vocal capabilities, that I'd never manage to channel and sing a karosong based on it.

And I was right. At the time. But that was back around the end of the second phase, many years and singing lessons ago. And my vocal capabilities had increased tremendously since then.

So the singing actually came easily once If i could be started active channeling. The style was slower, it was more drawn out, it flowed more. I quickly saw that it was a distinctive singing style for me, though similar to the style used in The phoenix must burn 3.3 (which is also based on a Kitaro track, and was itself still channeling when this song was coming forward).

The style lent itself to the emergence of the full-on karo as performer that summer and into the fall then winter. I could feel the performer rising into the song, finding nuance, drama and emotion in its lyrics. The song became more and more enjoyable to sing, more and more an expression of the whole/full/on karo.

The rest of the song had been long mastered when the last verse finally came.

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* The other was Silk Road, which was eventually used in the nearly eponymous karosong.

** When the chorus form for the galactic core was discarded, it caused the lyrics in the saturn chorus to veer from their original astrophysical bent into a more romantic trajectory. For the record, the original saturn and galactic core chorus forms were:

and if i were your peter pan and
you were my wendy darling
i would fly you to saturn's rings with a
gravity assist from ruddy mars

and if i were your peter pan and
you were my wendy darling
i would fly you to the galactic core
to watch the black hole spinning there