Dragonfly Season from Dragonfly Season by Man Go Be

One evening I laid down to go to sleep as I had to be at work at five or six in the morning. As soon as I laid down, a small repeating piece of melody bubbled up all lively from wherever melodies come from and began dancing cheerfully inside my head.
As much as I enjoyed it, I expected it to pipe down and let me rest at some point. It didn't. I tried to sleep but could not get the melody to settle with me into restful mode. Like a child thrilled with a big trip coming up the line hopped around with glee and would not stop.
Eventually I relented and got up to turn on the light and grab my tape recorder and guitar, intuiting that if I could get the melody down, then I could pass the heck out and go to sleep.
I began picking the lines out note by note and then repeating to locate the harmonies. I probably stayed up another three and a half hours before I had captured all that was there. Sure enough like a child often will after bouncing around the house on a sugar high, the melody relaxed and fell silent and I went to sleep.
During the year following I would pick up a guitar and from time to time play the lines again. The melody was acrobatic and fun and therefore unlike most of what I had been writing.
This was all during the nearly twelve years, I drove a tractor trailer. I mention this only because I used to write a lot during my long solitary days inside a noisy truck cab. One particularly hot muggy late summer day, some lyric lines began occurring to me as I drove.
My route that day was a fairly short run back and forth all day. There happened to be a lot of stop lights and stop signs on the route so, as the words began surfacing with more and more urgency, I found myself writing them down one stanza at a time at each stop I came to.
As I approached the next stop sign or pause, another line was forming in my thoughts and by the time I had completed the route three times, I had the lyrics for what is basically a poem about summer time called Dragonfly Season. I really enjoyed the lines and had a lot of fun seeing them come together. Once they were there they went into a pile of papers which is the eventual fate of dare I say all of my scribblings.

One day that fall, I was at kneeling on the floor in the early evening sunlight streaming through the picture window in the foyer of my apt. at the time. I had a stack of lyrics that I had written in front of me. And I would pull one page off at a time and see what bubbled up musically for just a few minutes with my recorder running. Then I would drop it into the back into the box pile.I was practicing left hand technique exercises on my electric guitar for a moment during a break… Ascending and descending legatos to be precise. The words to Dragonfly Season were sitting in front of me. Suddenly I stumbled on a rolling pattern on the guitar that sounded really cool to me. I took one look at the words and began singing the lyrics. That is pretty much the end of the story. As soon as I began singing the rest of the changes automatically fell into place but for the instrumental bridge part that developed later when I had taken it to a band to record and we needed a part that broke up the form a bit. I stumbled on the intermission riff and the band I was with and I came up with the strum pattern part.
Honestly I have often felt that there are more lyrics for that part. I have only sat down once to write with that in mind but it did not pan out. I have often performed the song live and felt inspired to improvise some lyrics that fit the buoyancy of that section.

Spencer Scholes writes songs

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