Take a Break

🎵…that’s the for’-est where weee all-joke-the-Pope’ll. 🎶 (“…now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople.”)

That is how my brain works when left to its own devices. I hear some familiar lyrics (in this case it was in a TRY video) and my auditory cortex automatically fills in and regales me with a , where in this case it nabbed the “Pope’ll” rhyme and then nearest-matched the associated joke. When I try to draw upon this behavior on demand, however, I am often met with an elusive, stubborn resistance (which I suspect is linked to my pressure-triggered word-retrieval challenges).

So I try not to get frustrated and just enjoy it when it happens spontaneously.

I don’t tend to face the same issues when working on songs, but then again I work unobserved. I love the puzzle presented by composing lyrics... trying to maintain rhythmic/metric consistency in the context of some ymagined musical context, usually some melody or other that I have noodled, and then conveying a message while working within rhyme and assonance and all of that good stuff. I am very fond of complex, multisyllabic matches and structural calls well across the song. My memory is replete with the databases needed for those games, and when not, I can just look stuff up. I have fun with all sorts of things like enjambment and retrograding and on and on, although I often don’t know the technical term for whatever it is until I do something and then go looking for the vocab.

Some people do crosswords and jumbles and so on. I do this.

In this case, that classic song (specifically the original version by The Four Lads) was earworming me something fierce when I was faced with the following situation…

I was putting the 12 existing songs in album order, and I decided that I needed another one to bridge between these two:

“Sooner or Later” (which is about resilience and perseverance, conveyed by a symphonically supported singer-songwriter), and
“Solitary Empathy” (which is about moderating one’s resources, with a cabaret atmosphere to it).

I had been generally mulling over pathological extremes of resilience, something along the lines of unrelenting tenacity, and decided that would be a good topical fit in that gap if I could keep the lyrics relatively upbeat (like the rest of the album), such as highlighting the personal resolution of learning to take breaks and rest and rejuvenate… the whole thing about when it’s okay to stop.

And that is where a variation on the auto-rhyming came in. I had a melody concocted for the song, which just happened to be broadly within the realm of the genre of the Istanbul song since I needed it to sit between symphonic songwriter and cabaret. As I was writing the lyrics in this lighthearted context, I was experiencing a bunch of Simpson-y moments (i.e., “…something something Burt Ward”), and the multisyllabic rhymes were wanting to be food related (after the first one decided that it was going to be quiche Lorraine). And since the song was about someone who was learning not to beat themselves into the ground while grinding on a task, I decided to leave those lines in (rather than trying to finesse them) and make that very decision a deliberate part of the message.

So here ya go.

I’m very happy with how well the rhythm of the lyrics matches with the music.

[2026-05]

Lyrics

Hear me out

and hear me in.

Play my tiny violin.

Light without

and light within.

Resting is no mortal sin.

Raised to always be resilient,

workaholic preordained,

ethics ruling word-for-word an'

somethin'-somethin’… quiche Lorraine?

(Relax, just fix it later.)

"No surrender" is the rule...

never gonna take a break.

Always more work to be done.

Never any give-and-take.

Oh, for goodness' sake

just take a break.

Take a break

and try again.

Shoulders rounded from the burden,

back bent double from the strain,

focus till my vision's blurred, I'm

laughing in the face of pain.

"Good pretender" at the school...

maybe I could take a break?

Always more work to be done.

somethin' … steak?

(Oh, Sally, someone has food on the brain.)

Oh, for goodness' sake

just take a break.

Get a snack

and let it end.

Squarshed male reproductive organs,

right up to my vein,

work until my speech is slurred, I

don't know what I hope to gain.

"Horse manure" had him fooled...

I think I should take a break.

Always more work to be done.

somethin' …chocolate marble cake?

(We thought you were getting a snack.)

Oh, for goodness' sake

just take a break.

Life can be

much more humane.

Resting is no mortal sin.

Light without

and light within.

Play my tiny violin.

Hear me out

and hear me in.