Saturday 11 September 2010

"It started out with a song"

Hi, and welcome to my new blog, "Something to be said..."

My name is Alex Knox. I'm twenty-two, a singer (about to start a Postgrad. course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London), and a writer and poet.

That's the boring stuff out of the way (hopefully)!

The plan is to use the blog to show you some of the work I've done, and give you an idea of what inspired me to write it.
I'll also try and inspire YOU from time to time with lines, stanzas, or even a whole poem by poets living and dead.

Please get in touch - would love to get feedback from you all.

...

I'll kick off in slightly unusual style, because this isn't a poem by me or even a poem at all. It's the lyrics to a song by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century: Stephen Sondheim. It's his 80th birthday this year, and i recently sang this song (from his musical 'Merrily we Roll Along') in a recital I gave during the Edinburgh Festival. I've not been able to get the words out of my head since:


Good Thing Going


It started out like a song.
We started quiet and slow,
With no surprise.
And then one morning I woke
To realise
We had a good thing going.

It's not that nothing went wrong:
Some angry moments, of course,
But just a few,
And only moments, no more,
Because we knew
We had this good thing going.

And if I wanted too much,
Was that such
A mistake
At the time?
You never wanted enough —
All right, tough,
I don't make
That a crime.

And while it's going along,
You take for granted some love
Will wear away.
We took for granted a lot,
But still I say:
It could have kept on growing,
Instead of just kept on.
We had a good thing going,
Going,
Gone.



Hope you enjoyed it!

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