Songs (Patreon)

Rock DJ, Angels and Tripping

Or.

Zara's Journal.

She totally had an idea for a song last night. But what was it…?

Zara sometimes still has problems sleeping away from home which can be a problem when part of your job involves touring around the place playing gigs and staying in cheap hotels. 

But she sometimes wakes up out of nowhere way before everyone else does. And she'll sometimes use her “me time” to write down in her secret journal some of her ideas for lyrics of songs that no one will hear.

See, I think it started at the beginning, when she Lil and later Diana first joined to write some songs before Tony and Davo joined them later. 

It was a learning process for all of them but I think especially for Zara who has always been something of a very literal person, if that makes sense, and now was having her first encounters with the poetic and the dramatic.

Well, not exactly. She had experimented with acting before turning to music but for her writing turned out to be a more personal experience.

And in the end she ended up holding back. Just a bit maybe but she’d hide and dilute her more personal and emotional. Nothing necessarily bad with that I think and also not that rare of a thing either. 

And there were some exceptions of course. One example would be a cute love ballad she wrote for her back then boyfriend with whom she would later messily break up several times and that would end up making that song a hard to perform one for her. And that's just one of the reasons why she keeps holding back. 

Except in her secret journal. That's the one place where she lets all of it go, either as therapy or for the love of the game. Who knows? She doesn't. She also still doesn't know what she's even going to do with that old journal of hers but she still carries it around everywhere just in case.

…

I'm not sure where this piece fits lore-wise in the “timeline” if there's such a thing and I feel that vagueness works for it. 

I just know the band is doing their small-time touring and they either stopped at some small highway town to spend the night or they crashed some nearby hotel or rental after a gig. The point here is that somehow they all got their own room and that's cool before they often have to share. So I'm guessing the rooms are pretty small. And the place looks old.

So this is a sort of remake or reimagining of an old piece of mine featuring Zara and her old secret journal and as you can see I changed the journal to make it look cooler (IMO) and more worn down. 

I was actually thinking I could retcon that picture to be of a younger Zara with her first attempt at a secret journal that she later lost and replaced with this one. 

Also she has learned to rip less pages of her notebooks.

So, Zara's Notebook is a concept I’ve had in mind and even have kind of alluded to, I think. 

But lately it has been on my mind lately because a similar dynamic appeared in the recent Robbie Williams’ musical biopic Better Man which I'm starting to think is my favorite film of 2024. Statistically speaking you guys didn't go watch it, and I'll never forgive you for it. But anyway.

I knew basically nothing about the guy before watching it (I only knew 3 songs of his and one doesn't appear in the film) so I don't know how much of it is real and how much is made up but, Spoiler. “Songs are only valuable if they cost you something” is the type of lesson I think it could be good for Zara to learn if I were a good writer lmao.

Though one of the possible fates I have in mind for the story of the band does go into that territory so there's that. 

When I started working on this, I for a short moment considered making a full on, non canonical recreation of the scene I linked with Zara. So you can see it's heavily inspired by it.

And not to over hype it but if you like music, anthropomorphic animals and magical realism, (And I mean, if you follow me you probably do) go watch Better Man. Oh and Hundred of beavers! My other favorite from last year. Apparently I'm these movies’ strongest soldier. Though it would make a weird double feature I think.