Its A Dream Music & Lyrics by Chris James C2012 Background Info

As a singer / songwriter I am constantly in search of interesting and compelling stories to use as the basis for new songs. Most probably because I am currently entering the mid-life period and my own personal life has mellowed out and stablized. That in contrast to my earlier rock n roll years where adventures were on the menu practically every day of the week.. Although I feel quite relaxed aboutmy current state of bein,g I would hate to start writing songs about my activities in the IT industry or the challenges of parenthood & marriage, although I must confess that I have covered all these topics in some song or other..

In order not to indulge too much in my own goings on, I often read articles in search of acompelling storyline for a songs. Also I regulary investigate the context behind the lyrics to other artists songs as I like to discover what prompted or formed the inspiration for a song. Most people would be pleasantly surprised to find out how enormous the diversity is with regard to themes for songs. Sure, there is an abundance of songs about love, and falling in love but also many others covering grimmer topics like war, terrorism, crime, suicide, starvation murder, rape and god knows what else. There is very little in fact which has been overlooked. One of the few items which still falls under a taboe category within the songwriting community, is the topic of incest. I have only ever found one other song on this subject and that was carefully and cryptically hidden within the lyrics, most probably at the request of the record company as they are generally very nervous about sensitive lyrics and the affect they may have on record sales. As a non-signed artist I am lucky not to have a record company breathing down my neck and censoring my lyrics to suit their clients wishes.

Recently I was in the process of songwriting at home when I stumbled on an interesting melody line. To compensate for the lack of lyrics, I just started to mumble into the microphone reeling off words and half sentences, whatever that came to mind.. After a few run-throughs I ended up with something like;

Its a dream, so obscene

Something's lost

Nowhere seen

Does anybody know where it's gone to

Does anybody know where it's been

I was not so happy about the 'so obscene' lyric and thought that I would probably replace thatsentence later with something a little more appropriate.. However the melody line had a kind of scary eariness about it which started me off thinking about writing of song about a disappearance of some kind. After pondering for a few minutes and re-reading the mumbled lyrics I had come up with, I recalled the horrific story of Josef Fritzl. The Austrian pscychopath who imprisoned and raped his own daughter for 24 years before she and her children where freed from their life long captivity.

Although a little embaressed that I had made such an association between such a horrible experience and my new song, I decided to do a little research and within minutes I found a short but very informative report on the Fritzl case via the Wikipedia website. There I not only re-acquainted myself with the story which I had previously read in the daily newspapers, but also learned of some more recent details. One of these follow-on details was about the 'falling out' of the daughter Elisabeth Fritzl with her mother who she believed had been too passive during her long captivity. I immediately sympathised with Elisabeth and her anger at her mothers passive behavior. I find it also almost impossible to believe that the mother's suspicions would not have been aroused subsequent to her daughters disappearance. Especially in light of the emergance of 3 grand children on her doorstep at various points in time during her captivity. If you connect this to the fact that her husband spent days, sometimes whole nights in the cellar of their house in which the wife was not allowed to enter, then sure thing. Either she was absolutely stupid and mindless or she must have felt suspicous towards her husband. . Anyway without wanting to get too worked up about it all, I decided that I would focus my song around this small but not unimportant detail of the story. The passive mother. After reading more on the case I also discovered that when asked how she retained her sanity after such a long time in captivity Elisabeth had talked about fictitious walks she made in her basement room. She said that on some days she would turn off the lights to create total darkness in her cellar and walk around in circles in a clockwise direction for 2 hours fantasizing that she was walking up a mountain. After 2 hours when she had reached the top she would rest for a while enjoying the view she had in her imagination, then she would walk back in an anti-clockwise direction for 2 hours until she was back home. In doing so she had created a virtual day-out. This seemmed to give credibility to the first line that I had writen while mumbling away, having no idea what to write about. Its a Dream. Hence that become the title of this song.