On "alone"

I know, I know... just another boat meets atoll story...  I had "Dust to Dust" by the Civil Wars stuck in my head this week, so naturally I decided to rip it off.  Add a heaping helping of metaphor, and voila!

Here's what I think went well this week:  I started with lyrics this time, though not by writing a poem and then setting it to music.  Instead, with the imagery of an island and a boat in mind, I brain dumped a pile of words and phrases.  Then, I grabbed from this list both while I was working out the melody and while assembling the final lyrics.  I will do this again in the future.

And an observation, though I haven't decided whether it's good or bad: the music portion of the writing seems to depend heavily on what instrument I'm using.  I originally started generating ideas this week by tapping away at the piano app on my phone.  I had something going, but I was unable to keep working on it without a real piano.  Trying to move to the guitar or mandolin was prohibitively frustrating, because I don't know as many chords on those.  I've noticed that I get very different sounding music depending on the instrument, I think because I don't have a strong intuition of what notes will come out when my fingers do different things.  I guess that makes instruments pretty useful as random sound-idea generators, each with a different probability distribution function.  So maybe it's good.  Either way, I think I need to get a piano.