Notebook : pages 33-34

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Another act of desperation that paid off: Let's Just Pretend that David Bowie Wrote this Song. Hypothetical brainstorming: I started singing the first couple lines to myself on a lark, making fun of myself with an very-outside-the-box writing joke, and it just kept going. I didn't really know what the song was going to be when I started it, so it takes a weird turn toward the more personal and meta-referential as it proceeds.

I had to research the Grammy line. At first (you can see the scratching-out) I had written Grammys, on the presumption that, hey, it's Bowie. Grammys galore, right? But it turns out not to be so. At first, googlery suggested he had none, and so I briefly considered leaving it as originally written as a sort of willful bit of poetic fantasy—giving Bowie the stack of Grammys, if only in song—but then I found that I was looking at old info and he'd recently won one as an Achievement Award or some such. So I went with the singular.

Weird flights-of-fancy admission: I wondered briefly about the possibility of getting ire from some sharp-eyed Bowie lawyer—where is the line, legally, between homage and copyright infringement? How about when highly-paid entertainment lawyers are involved?—and hashing it out with them and asking to talk to David about it, how about that, eh, why not put Bowie on the phone and see if it bothers him! I have weird, ridiculous daydreams when I'm doing manic creative stuff.

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