This week’s assignment from Mitchell:

"I often find limitations creatively liberating. While we'll explore that concept deeper in a future assignment (Assignment? Challenge? What exactly are these again?), I mention it now as an explanation of how I arrived at your challenge for this week. As you know, a typical MM3AM week includes some sort of guideline for all participants to follow, but I often find that it's not quite limiting enough for my taste, so I'll challenge myself to meet some self imposed rules. One of my favourites is:

"All the gold and silver being stolen away"

You've surely noticed that each of my weekly assignments have begun with a song quote that somehow relates to the challenge topic and you've probably also noticed that I haven't credited authorship to any of those quotes. I'm gonna have to break that tradition this week. The above is a lyric from the Bob Dylan song "High Water (For Charley Patton)" from his 2001 album, Love and Theft.

Though it may not appear to be, even after multiple listens, Love and Theft is something of a concept album. The concept being that Dylan thieved the bulk of the album's material from works that he loved. There's old folk & blues songs, jokes, nursery rhymes, show tunes, poetry, various books, films, and so on referenced, rearranged, or outright cut and pasted verbatim into every nook and cranny of that album. And it's a truly great album. I encourage you to not only go give it a spin, but to also do a bit of research into just how much of that album is constructed using pre-existing works. Let me tell ya, it's a staggering amount.

Now, this is not without controversy. Plenty of folks have called it lazy writing and others have even gone as far as to name Dylan a plagiarist unworthy of praise. I don't see it that way at all. In fact, I think what he's done here may be some of the most brilliant songwriting of his career. Creating art from existing art as as old as art itself and it is a perfectly valid and meaningful form of expression. IF (and that's a big IF) it is done well. There is big difference between slightly changing a Queen bass line for a rap tune and doing what Dylan did on Love and Theft.

Taking bits from so many different and far flung sources and blending them together to create something that is not only new, but an exciting, vibrant work that stands on its own merits is a lot more challenging than you might think. And I'd know, because I've tried to do it a number of times myself.

Getting back to my introduction about setting my own limitations on top of a MM3AM week assignment, my most recent venture into this style of songwriting was a fairly mediocre song called, "Dirty Money." If you're so inclined, you can find here:
mitchellsnow.bandcamp.com/track/dirty-money

The challenge that week came from Artie and the assignment was that the lyric had to include the phrase, "Dirty Money." I felt like I needed more restrictions, so I decided that I would borrow (steal) as much of my song that week as I possibly could. In that song, I took bits from the Bible, Stephen Foster, Robert Johnson, the Who, Bing Crosby, the Doors and so many other things that I can't even remember now. Needless to say, although the song is not all that good, I did succeed in creating a "new" song almost entirely out of old ones. I must have done a decent job of that, as no one ever seemed to notice just how much of that song (seriously, it's nearly 100%) was not actually my work. OK, either they didn't notice, they didn't really listen to it to begin with, or they did notice but they didn't give a shit - all 3 of those options are just as likely as the other.

As I said in the introduction, this is one of my favourite techniques and I do it all the time. I confess that I've been borrowing (stealing) for years and years and I've never been called on it.

So that's what you're gonna do this week. Just borrow (steal) as much stuff as you possibly can (music & lyrics) and try and mash all of it together in such a way as to create (fool us all into believing that it's) an original work. Try and borrow (steal) from as many different sources and genres as you can. Use books, films, songs, soap-operas, jokes, so on and so on and borrow (steal) as much material as you can. Give Love and Theft a listen and dig how Dylan did it.

If you'd like, you can point all out the things you've borrowed (stole). I'd be curious to see it, but you don't have to if you don't want to.

OH YEAH:
That quote? Yeah, it is from the Dylan song, "High Water," but it's also a rearranged verse from "London Bridge is Falling Down."
Dig:
Silver and gold will be stolen away
Stolen away, stolen away
Silver and gold will be stolen away
My fair lady

M. Snow”