The journey of "Get Up And Get Going" began with the below video clip that I stumbled across on YouTube.



After watching this, the idea of embracing damage and using it to create something even more beautiful than the original started playing around in my mind. It's a very powerful metaphor for life.

While I was pondering this metaphor, I began zig-zagging my way around YouTube looking through old songs from the Tin Pan Alley era. That was when I landed "Put On A Happy Face" (POAHF) with Dick Van Dyke singing.



Because I approach songwriting mostly from an analytical perspective, my next step was to use POAHF to create a template.

When I looked at my sheet music for POAHF, the song was 32 bars long. Comparing this to the lyrics, I found that each eight bars of POAHF corresponded to four lyric phrases. In other words, the song consisted of four lots of 8-bar sections. The first and the third sections were musically and structurally the same, so I labeled these 'A' sections. The second and fourth sections were different from each other and different from the A-sections, so I labeled these 'B' and 'C'. The format of the song, therefore, can be described as A-B-A-C.

Since I've never written a song in this format, I was guided by POAHF and constructed my song in the same A-B-A-C format where each section was eight bars long. I varied the last two bars of my second A-section, though. This meant that while it was mostly the same as the first A-section, the second A-section was slightly different. Musically, such a section is often denoted with an apostrophe-like dash.

So the format for my song can be described as A-B-A'-C

I also noticed that in this format, the title appears as a lyric phrase on the second and fourth lines of the A-section.

Thus, with a format in mind about how to create a 32-bar song, I set about writing some lyrics to fit.

MY SONGS...
Audiophile BIAB 2025