Dorothy
What do people think it's about?
"Nothing is ever what you think it is, and there's always stories you didn't hear, and the same story's always different when someone else is telling it." -- Vixy.
"L. Frank Baum was an idiot." -- Kate.
"Sometimes a girl just has to set the story straight about the way it all went down, see?" -- Mars.
When presented with this question, what does Seanan say it's about?
So you think you know this tale? Every story has two sides. History and fantasy are both written by the winners.
What is it actually about?
'Dorothy' is the story of a modern-day Dorothy Gale, a girl who was so fed up with the everyday of her gray existence that she ran away...and ran into something amazing. Terrible, and amazing. It's a dark mirror held up against the story of the Wizard of Oz, only instead of focusing on the witches -- as they do in Wicked, a somewhat more familiar Oz retelling (for most people, anyway) -- it focuses on Dorothy herself. What if she was an active part of her own self-discovery, rather than a passive pawn in a bigger adventure? What if she resented being ripped out of her own world, and made to be a part of someone else's?
And what if all that resentment came from years of being lied to, being forced to take other people's realities in the place of her own, until she could barely recognize freedom when it was offered to her? What would Dorothy Gale of Kansas become then, when faced with the chance to recreate herself?
'Dorothy' isn't an answer. But it's the beginning.
Genesis of the song:
We begin, oddly enough, at a comic book convention: WonderCon 2005, the San Francisco Bay Area's largest comic book and geek media gathering. It happens every year, and is conveniently located within walking distance of several BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) stations. So it's probably inevitable that I would wind up there, every year, trucking merrily through the throng in search of treasures.
2005 marked at least one major WonderCon first: the first appearance by the fabulous folks from Illusive Entertainment, who had begun publishing a photo comic entitled Dorothy, a dark reinterpretation of Baum's original Oz. (I'm always mystified by the copyright issues surrounding Oz, as the original books have fallen out of copyright, but the later ones haven't. Dorothy is public domain. Is Ozma? Polychrome? The Patchwork Girl? It makes my poor head spin, and also, I digress.) I'll admit it; I wasn't looking for a new comic title, and I blew by their booth with a sunny smile and a distinct lack of feeling like I was missing anything. Sometimes, I am a bad blonde.
Fortunately for me, Julie was with me at the con, and she saw the screaming 'Seanan will love this' signs scrawled in the air all around the booth. She purchased the first two issues, got them signed, hunted me down, and dragged me back to the booth, where I was quickly forced to admit that yes, she was absolutely right; this was exactly my sort of story.
Six months later, I was following the ongoing adventures of Dorothy Gale as she faced off against a sometimes dark, sometimes disturbing, always dangerous Land of Oz...when I started to hum. And paused, considering what I'd been humming, before pulling out my little snake notebook and writing:
Pick me up, then put me down,
Spin my whole damn world around;
I don't think I'm in Kansas anymore.
Gray dissolves to emerald green --
Children's stories can play mean,
And no one wants to tell me what's the score.
The whole first verse just came like that, bam, with absolutely no choice or question about what it was. I frequently spend half a song trying to figure out what the song's about; there was none of that with this one. It knew what it was. I could suck it up, and deal, because I was writing it whether I actually wanted to or not. (Believe it or not, I love it when a song does that to me. I spend so much time fumbling around in the dark with a set of lyrics that it's sort of nice to have one come up, punch me in the jaw, and inform me that it's going to be written the way it wants to be written.)
Things fell together fast after that. My favorite part of the whole song may well be the start of the second verse, which runs:
I was tired of seeing gray;
Guess that's why I ran away,
A twister in the body of a girl.
'A twister in the body of a girl' could practically be a tag-line for the comic book the song is based around. And it balances the fact that my least favorite part of the song is the girl/curl rhyme that ends the same verse -- I kept swapping 'curl' and 'twirl' on that last line all the way through recording, until Vixy came sadly close to killing me to make me cut it out.
The only hard thing about writing this song was finding the place where it ended. It could have gone on for ages; it ended far too soon. And that's all right, really, because there's more down that yellow brick road.
A lot more.
Story of the Song.
So you think you know this tale? Guess again. Check out Illusive Arts Entertainment to find out what's really going on with this Dorothy and her Oz.
Just watch out for the flying monkeys.
Arranging the Song.
'Dorothy' started the way many of my songs start: with me accosting one of
my favorite guitar players (in this case, Tony Fabris) and asking him to
help work out the chords. Tony, being an agreeable sort, was happy to do
so...right up until he ran into the bridge, which was, like so many of my
songs, written with the stresses of voice, not guitar, in mind. "This
won't work," he said; "try this."
Tony, you were right, and I was wrong, and everyone who listens to the line 'careful now -- these woods are scary' can thank him for its eerie perfection. That was none of mine.
When we went into the studio, the basic guitar line was one of the first things we recorded, in the same session as the guitar for 'Sycamore Tree'. Vixy's backing vocals were also recorded that day, designed to nestle in and around my own. Kristoph was still fairly new to working with our little cadre of fools by that point (remember that the track order in no way represents the recording order), and was fascinated by the potential of the song itself. We started discussing what I wanted to do with it. I said that I was hoping to bring in Debbie Ohi on the flute, and while he agreed that this was awesome, it didn't give the song a bottom end. What would? Well, how about the cello?
Genius. Sheer genius. If I needed any indication that working with Kristoph was going to be a pure pleasure, it was that statement, because I would honestly never have thought 'cello' on my own. Kris Yenney, the cellist featured on this track, happens to be a part of Kristoph's band. Her cello part is entirely her own design, including the fabulous echoes of the score to the classic 'Wizard of Oz'. I am forever in her debt.
Debbie, meanwhile, was laboring away in Canada, and managed to send us (without once hearing the cello part) a high, trilling flute part that both complemented what already existed and added a sudden urgency to everything. The storm was coming. This, too, was none of my doing, but oh, I'm happy to have it.
With everything else nailed down, we re-recorded my lead vocals to bring them a little more into synch with Vixy's backing vocals (which were already fabulous), and discovered that, after mixing, we could no longer tell us apart. World of wow. Kristoph took the track -- which I would have been happy to sign off on, although I'm now glad that I didn't do so -- and gave it his spectacular bass-and-drums treatment, opening and expanding the bottom end of the song.
This was truly a group effort, in the end, and it's all the richer for it, in a great many ways. Thank you to everyone involved.
Factual Bits and Bobs.
Written on: September 26th, 2005.
Structure: Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus/Bridge/Chorus.
Arrangement: Lead vocal, backing vocals, guitar, bass guitar, cello, flute, drums.
Tempo: Moderate/high.
Length: 3:11.