Parasol Above and Crocodile Below

The whole point of this song is to honor a friend who not only adores Agnes (from Evil Me and Despicable Me) and Mirabel Madrigal (from Encanto), but embodies many of the same admirable qualities, such as: emphasizing and saving the family, driving rightful presence, treasuring childlike wonder (with wisdom born of experience), seeing the good in people, and helping to usher everyone to wholeness. And yep, she absolutely has a Tightrope Girl tattoo.

Yes, I know. Harper Goff’s original illustration was an alligator; however:

• I needed three syllables to parallel ‘parasol’ (which was the main reason),

• It was Tick-Tock the Crocodile who hunted Captain Hook (favoring brackish and coastal waters),

• Geisel’s “seasick crocodile”  is entrenched in my memory,

• And of course there’s Shel Silverstein’s “The Crocodile’s Toothache.” (Bless you Uncle Shelby for a lifetime of inspiration,)

So I settled on crocodile… after a while.

AI and my NI are both trained on a zillion (give or take a kuhjillion) samples of music and words, and because this work is an homage (of sorts), its particular design is by nature strongly influenced by other people’s creations. I am profoundly grateful to those originators (who had been, of course, influenced as well), namely: Sergio Pablos, Cinco Paul, Ken Dario, Elsie Fisher, and their associated crew for their portrayal of Agnes; and everyone who had a hand in the portrayal of Mirabel Madrigal, such as Charise Castro Smith, Jared Bush, Germaine Franc, Lin Manuel Miranda, and Stephanie Beatriz.

These people all naturally influenced my choice of lyrics, and in a mild sense the melodic style; that is to say, I started out by trying the likes of cumbia and sabor because I thought that they might sound good to the person for whom I was working on this project, but I simply don’t know enough about those rhythms for my lyrics to work well with them. The AI is usually very nice to me, but I think that I really frustrated it in the beginning. It tried to tell me that I was overburdening the style (by sending me only strained structures), but I wasn’t paying attention fast enough.

I’m really not a person who should be writing South American music anyway, so I went with one of the styles that I grew up with, where my dad had Herb Alpert albums, and Burt Bacharach was still very popular… so there is a little bit of festive, energetic Latin jazz dance/pop here with some nice orchestration.

This lighthearted, forward-looking rendition followed two earlier ones that I will post if I get permission, as it identifies the honoree by name. One was originally designed as a walk-on theme in an intense environment and so is more militant. The next was influenced by cartoon hero theme music, and is also dramatic.

So the inspiration sequence for those three versions was: trauma, drama, and not-a-llama (ding dong).