Filk.

It sounds like a bad word.

Okay, what it actually sounds like, provided you’ve fallen in among actual filkers, is AWESOME. It’s music named after a typo, and sung around subjects near and dear to genre fans.

Tom Smith, filker extraordinaire and musician magnifique, joins Brandon and Howard at Penguicon to talk about writing music, and to talk about the Filk genre in particular.

Our only episode with actual music in it, this is the last episode of Season 5, and Tom Smith sends us home with a brilliant little song he made up using requests from those in attendance. Tom, we expect an eventual epic song-cycle centering around “The Wizard of Wheat.”

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett, narrated by Stephen Briggs.

Writing Prompt: Tom ended up singing his response to our writing prompt. What can you do with the words “wizard” and “bakery?”

Additional References for Filk: The FuMP, Filk resources on the Internet, and (per Tom’s suggestion) a YouTube search for Filk.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: music is a part of world building. What is the song about? Can you imagine people singing it? Filk is the music of the science fiction and fantasy community. Filk is everywhere!

[Background started with typing sounds and guitar, typing faded leaving guitar]
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, season five, episode 39, filking and writing music with Tom Smith.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we’re not that smart. I’m Brandon.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Tom] I’m Tom.
[Howard] Tom has been playing the guitar, giving us intro music.
[Brandon] Wow.
[Howard Jordo is not going to know what to make of that. Usually we have typewriter noises, and he’s just going to have to dial those all the way back.
[Brandon] That was pretty awesome. I’m way impressed already. Tom Smith, tell us first off about yourself and where people can find out more about you.
[Tom] Ah. I am from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Have been living there for most of the last 35 years. My music is at http://www.tomsmithonline.com/ The short form of my life is that I tried to be a computer person. I ended up getting into banking. I ended up getting kicked out of banking because the mortgage industry went belly up several years ago. For the last few years, I’ve been making it as a singer-songwriter.

[Brandon] Awesome. This is a very different podcast for us. But I think it’s going to be pretty awesome because basically we’re going to theme this towards… We’ve got lots of writers out there who… Music is a big part of the fantasy genre. We can thank Tolkien for this, but also lots of other writers are including… Part of human existence is music, we’re always making music, we love music. So building a world for your fantasy or science fiction book in which music is integral to the lives of the people there, is just going to make it feel that much more realistic. So the question is how can neophytes like me, how can we make something that feels real, how can we actually write songs that we can include the text of that would be awesome?
[Tom] That’s a tricky one, but it’s not as tricky as you think it is. The first thing is trying to figure out what kind of songs you would need in this situation. For instance, if you were doing a musical or you wanted some songs… Let’s say you were doing some kind of fantasy. We’ll start there. We’ll start with a fantasy milieu, and assume, say, you’ve got some neo-caveman over here and some neo-Romans over here. Okay? The neo-caveman would probably start out with something percussive [syncopated beat]. They would start making sounds in the background going along with the percussives, and maybe they would start putting words to it and maybe start putting them in tones [beat continues, droning begins, grunts join in] Yeah, exactly. They start making sounds and go in and underlie it and everything. The Romans, or the neo-Romans, would probably be more organized, because they would have more technology and be able to actually perhaps have plucked instruments or metallic gongs or things like that, that would add to the atmosphere that they were trying to build.
[Howard] Suddenly it becomes tonal.
[Tom] Suddenly it becomes tonal. They would probably… There would likely be things for the entertainment of the court or for rituals in the religious or patriarchal or matriarchal societies. Where back over here, these people are trying to get themselves fired up for the hunting, or they’re trying to appease the spirits, so that the spirits don’t kill them, or the spirits help them kill their enemies, so it’s much more visceral. When you’re trying to do anything like that, you’ve got to figure out what this song is about. That’s the first thing. The first thing is what is this song actually trying to convey. When you have that, then you can start working on it. Now some of them are a lot cruder and a lot more direct and in my case, mostly a lot sillier, because I’m usually trying to convey a bad pun.
[Howard] One thing that I’d like to add to that is that… You mentioned the Romans, and yes, you’re more likely to find the artsy music in there, but if you look at slave galleys or marching cadences… That’s the origin of much of our military music.
[Tom] That’s a substrata of the society there. The people in the court would never indulge in something like that.
[Howard] Drums? Drums are for people who walk for a living.
[Tom] The only drums they would have would be to go along with the elephants that the palanquins are on.

[Brandon] Well, um… Let me throw this one at you. I don’t know if you’re even going to be able to answer this. Maybe there’s no answer to it. But when you read fantasy books and people include music or songs or lyrics in it, are there things that really bug you? You’re like, “Oh, they got that wrong” or “Oh, they’re obviously not a musician themselves?”
[Howard] Tom Smith’s pet peeves.
[Brandon] What are your pet peeves? Do you have any?
[Tom] I actually don’t worry about it much. If it’s supposed to be… If it’s part of their world, that’s what they want. Okay? That’s the kind of thing they got here. Unless it’s something that seems to me to be unsingable. Which… I heard part of your Scalzi podcast.
[Howard] Oh, yeah. Last week’s podcast with John Scalzi.
[Brandon] That we totally didn’t record just 15 minutes ago here at Penguicon.
[Tom] I’m trying to be cool and cover up here. You’re the one blowing the illusion.
[Howard] And the live studio audience makes noise.
[Groans]
[Howard] Welcome to Penguicon everybody.
[Brandon] Apparently populated by zombies.
[Howard] Everybody make zombie noise.
[Groans]
[Howard] There was almost no difference.
[Tom] Zombie activism! What do we want?
[Brains]
[Tom] When do we want it?
[Brains]
[Brandon] All right. So…
[Tom] What was the question?

[Howard] What are your pet peeves? When you hear somebody who’s doing it wrong in a book?
[Brandon] He was saying that there really weren’t any, just… Unless it’s unsingable.
[Tom] In a book, when you’ve got somebody who is trying to put music in there, they are often trying to do exactly what I’m talking about. They’re saying, “Ah, this is a song of our gypsy tribe” or “this is our cavemen” or whatever it may be. It’s going to be whatever they think works. Unless it’s like completely out of cadence and you can’t sing it. If you can’t imagine any way that these people could sing that, then that’s a problem. But most of the time, they actually look up something about poetry and cadence and try to go with that.

[Howard] Do you ever… When you’re reading, do you ever take what you’re reading and put music to it? Hum it to yourself? Try and turn it into a song?
[Tom] Sometimes I do.
[Howard] Correct me if I’m wrong. Isn’t that kind of the origin of filk, is people saying, “Oh, these songs that Bilbo and his crew came across or Frodo and his crew came across — let’s sing them?”
[Tom] Not even so much, although there was a lot of that. I actually got into filk officially by way of the Tolkien Society of Michigan State University which did in fact do precisely that, they’d sit around and play the songs of the Tolkien novels.
[Brandon] We should mention, for someone who might not know, filking is science fiction and fantasy folksinging.
[Tom] It’s the music of the science fiction and fantasy community. There’s a lot that’s involved in it. It’s not just folksinging, but folksinging is the true root of where it started. What happened was, not even so much Tolkien as a bunch of people would go to conventions late night, because during the day they were doing important things like talking to authors. A couple of people would have their guitars, and they’d have things like The Streets of Laredo and a bunch of other folksongs that they’d put space or fantasy lyrics to. It’s like “I ride a white spaceship and go through the asteroids…” That kind of thing. It got formalized roughly sometime in the late 50s when somebody in a fanzine… You remember the blue mimeograph ink that would get on your fingers? Yeah. Somebody did up a fanzine and misspelled the word folk when they were talking about late-night folk music. A bunch of people, particularly Karen Anderson, Poul Anderson’s wife, saw that and said, “Yeah, that’s what we’re doing.” It didn’t really get big until the late 80s at which point we started a few conventions. Right now, there are at least 15 or 16 dedicated filk conventions all over the world. It’s a much larger part of many conventions in the United States and Canada.

[Howard] Filk… Much of what you sing… Well, last night you did… The tune was the 12 days of Christmas, but you were singing the 12 days of Star Wars. That qualifies as filk, because it’s… You’re singing about science fiction, but it’s inherently funny. We’re laughing at it, we’re having a good time. Is filk inherently funny? Is it a parody, or is there a serious side?
[Tom] There are many serious sides to it. As a matter of fact, there are subdivisions of the serious side. The most notable one is “ose” as in “ose,” “ose,” and more “ose” (morose). And a derivative of that, cheery “ose” (cheerios) … Oh, we’re all going to die, but it’s going to be great.

[Brandon] Right. Let’s stop for our book of the week. Our book of the week this week, I wanted to promote Nightwatch by Terry Pratchett because I just finished it. I may have mentioned on the podcast before, I am slowly working my way through Pratchett because I discovered him late. I tried some early Pratchett long ago, and just didn’t get into it. Then I discovered some of his later works, and they’re just brilliant. I just finished Nightwatch which I think is my favorite of all of them ever. It has kind of a stereotypical plot, cliched plot, I should say. Vimes gets sent back in time, and yet it’s fascinating. It’s wonderful. It’s got the most powerful characterization of any Terry Pratchett book I’ve read. So I highly recommend it. Go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse, you can download a free trial copy, start your 14 day free membership, and you get this free copy just for free. Did I mention it’s free?
[Howard] You mentioned it’s free.
[Brandon] Okay. It’s free. Audiblepodcast.com/excuse.
[Tom] Free book!

[Howard] So, we need to… We need to pick up the thread now. Tom, as I was asking about funny, it was because I know you are part of this FuMP thing…
[Tom] Yeah, the Funny Music Project, at the FuMP.com [http://www.thefump.com/]
[Howard] Funny Music Project. So FuMP contains filk, but not all fumpers are filkers?
[Tom] No. Uh… Well, yes. Exactly right. That is exactly stated right. As a matter of fact, there aren’t that many filkers in it. It’s got a lot of people who just do whatever kind of funny music they like doing. All fans of Dr. Demento, and we basically got the idea of putting together a congl because of the way it started out, it usually is done late at night. Some of us are getting too freaking old Omerate like a lot of the other… Okay, like you two guys are teaming up on the podcast, like Bookview Cafe has gotten together a whole bunch of women writers. We wanted to do funny music, and give it a more prominent place, given that Dr. Demento’s show has sadly at this point all but slid off the actual radio. You can listen to it online, but… The Clear Channel monster has destroyed any kind of individually [inaudible] radio.
[Howard] Okay. We’ve got FuMP, which has filk in it. Where can we go if we’re just looking for filk?
[Tom] As I recall, it’s either filker.com or filker.org. That may be… I’m trying to remember, there are a couple of different things. There is an online filk archive which has lots of stuff. If you go to YouTube and type filk, you will find videos taken of me at conventions, a lot of other different people at conventions, you’ll find some of the bigger names of people who have actually made it fairly well, like SJ Tucker and Heather Dale and others. There a lot of conventions out there. The most prominent ones in the United States are OVFF, the Ohio Valley Filk Fest, which is every October just before Halloween in Columbus. That’s kind of like a family gathering. That’s like the musicians’ Thanksgiving party.
[Howard] Well, the reason I’m asking this is because so many of us who write are unaware of this culture that we have spawned. We don’t know about our music.
[Brandon] I didn’t know filking until I went to my first convention, and someone sang, “You bash the Balrog, I’ll climb the tree,” for me. I was like, “This is fascinating. I didn’t know this was here.”

[Tom] A lot of people don’t know it’s there, and a lot of people usually… Because of the way it started out, it usually is done late at night. Some of us are getting too fricking old for it to be starting late at night all the time. Also, there was a tendency for a long time to deride filk. One of the most important things about filk is not so much the writing as the community aspect of it. Fan fiction… You can put your fan fiction down in front of somebody and they can read it. You can put your fan art in front of somebody and they can look at it. Somebody has to perform your fan music. It’s likely to be you, and if you’re like a lot of people out there, you either have or think you have a bad voice, and you have anxiety about performance. So a lot of… We all know this and we accept it. We let everybody in. Everybody gets a turn. Somebody walking by could get one of those poor people who’s worked so hard on getting their dreams on paper and they want to share it with everybody and they haven’t really figured out where all the notes are yet. They hear that and they think that’s filk and therefore filk sucks. I’ve seen party signs that say, “Real music, no filk.” Those tend to be things… Oh, yeah, let’s get Kanye West. Yeah, that’s real music. Oh boy.
[Howard] When I was… I studied music… Had a… I have a degree in music. One of the things that we realized is that the visual arts and literature can be… They’re not intrusive. In order for the reader or the viewer to participate, he has to step up, open the book, step up, look at the painting. But music reaches out from wherever the performer is and intrudes in whatever you’re doing if you are within hearing range. That makes it very, very difficult to take something that is new, something that is groundbreaking, something that you’re unfamiliar with and get people to like it. Because often the way you accomplish that is by reaching out and grabbing them with your music, when they wanted to be left alone.
[Tom] The easiest way to find filk music is twofold. Number one, Google filk. You will find it. F-I-L-K. It’s there. It’s all over the place. The second way is to find a convention and hang out there and see what the filk is like. The East Coast tends to be what I call hymnal filk. Everybody’s got a couple songbooks, they all have them, they all know them, and they all sing along. On the West Coast, they tend to have what they call a bardic circle where it goes around the room and everybody gets a chance to pass, pick, or play. Which is nice for the people who are really scared of anxiety and performing and everything because they can find somebody that they like and say, “Listen, could you sing again?” It really sucks for those people because they get called all the time, and so they’re exhausted by the end. In the Midwest, we have what they call chaos, or basically everybody throws in a song at whatever point it seems reasonable. These are the open sings. This is not the same as the concerts. Again, cons like Penguicon,OVFF, Filk Ontario which is in April up in Toronto, they tend to have strong tracks with lots and lots of concerts. So if you don’t want to go to this author panel or that workshop during the day, it’s like “What do I do right now? Oh, look, there’s some music, all right! Let’s go check that out.”

[Howard] Tom, we’re little low on time. You made music at the very beginning of this. Do we want to try and put Tom on the spot at the end?
[Brandon] Will you make us some music just to bring us out of this?
[Howard] What I was actually thinking was a writing prompt that we give to Tom.
[Tom] Brilliant.
[Brandon] Oh, wow. That could be kind of fun. All right.
[Howard] Okay. Brandon, pick a fantasy element. Some sort of fantasy trope.
[Brandon] The wizard.
[Howard] Okay. The wizard. Someone from the audience, give me a location.
[Bakery]
[Brandon] Wizard, bakery?
[Howard] Wizard, bakery. Go, Tom.
[Guitar and Tom, singing]
The wizard of wheat,
He makes things to eat.
He raises his hand,
And they rise.

He covers them with sugar,
I won’t try to rhyme sugar,
But you know that whatever he’s going to do,
It will be a surprise.

He uses magic in the oven,
And magic in the wheat,
Magic in the sugar,
And it’s so tasty to eat.

He uses his incantations,
To get that thing to rise,
And then he puts it on sale…

The next morning though,
It leaves a surprise.

Because there’s nothing quite like
Stale wizard cookies!
They’re annoyed at being
Left out overnight,
And they’re all covered with spangles,
And their nerves are jingle jangled,
And they’re pissed off,
And they’re looking for a fight!

Which is why the Keebler elves
Are so dangerous,
Because they’ve had to learn
The ways of cookie war.

And that’s why that damn shrinkwrap
is so tough on the packages
you find in the store.

[Howard] Ladies and gentlemen. Tom Smith. Thank you, Tom, you are brilliant. Fair listener, you’re out of excuses.
[Brandon] Now go sing.