Come, let me show you my tricks

I've decided that my recording project for 2007 will be a remake of a song I wrote called Magician's Plea. I originally recorded this song on my Cleverly Crafted CD; it was my first rock epic.

The words for Magician's Plea were inspired during a trip I took once with my parents to Disney World. This was back around 1987 or 1988 when I was still in school. I had a brutal exam schedule that term, five exams in the first four days of the exam period. They were all in the first four consecutive days of the exam schedule. It meant that I didn't have a lot of time over which to spread out my studying; I had to manage myself and pace my timing carefully. Fortunately, since all my exams had been crowded into that first week, it meant that after I wrote exam number five I had the entire rest of the summer off.

I used a couple of weeks of that summer to go to Florida with my parents, and one day we drove to Orlando, to see Disney World. I just wanted to be like a kid there and be wowed by everything. My dad was being cynical and pointing out how this part was done with mirrors and that part was a trick, and I was thinking like, yes, I know this is all illusion, but don't spoil it, let me enjoy the illusion. In thinking so, I got the idea that there was a song idea in this.

I decided to write the words from the magician's point of view and to write it in the first person. I was influenced by the song by Gowan, Criminal Mind. There's something about those lines being performed in the first person that make it so much more dramatic for me than if they'd been written in the third person.

I also used another writing device in constructing the lyrics to Magician's Plea, which is to describe a thing without using any words that are commonly used to describe that thing. So my aim in writing the words was to depict a scene that you know absolutely is about a magician, but I was careful not to use the word magic, or abracadabra, or hocus pocus, or even wand.

I picked Magician's Plea as my recording project because it clearly fits into the progressive rock genre. Last year I second guessed myself about what genre to submit Painted Smiles and Heart Like a River. The learning there for me was that I should know my genre better.