Filksong Lyrics by Steve Savitzky

Note: This directory is Steve Savitzky's working directory for lyrics. His collected filksongs are in ../Songs/, and you should be looking there. I don't really expect anyone but me to use this page.

Song Index

Compact index:

aengus alphabet another babies barratry bbblues bigger black bog bugs calm can-t cap changing cicero collarb crypto cypunk daddys demon deso-no diypl3 dmitri dream emerald eyes fanish ferret filking for-amy froggy guilty hackers heaven house-c inherit jabber lad lcm lfblues little lizard lullabye mad magic meeting memory merrymn mfarm mil-dawn monday mushroom nancy napster net oldtime owl-puss paper paul pigeon preorder queen quiet rainbow river rosie rrprayer runfree ship shores silicon silk sink small stolen store stuck stuff t-dragon t-fuel tbears teotw three thrill tool uncle vampire wannabe world y2k

Licensing:

License for Lyrics and Music:
Creative Commons License The licensing legalese for my songs is still unsettled, but the basic license for the music and lyrics is the Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license with a few extra permissions granted to make it more filk-friendly. In particular, if you record your own lyrics and only use my music, you'll only owe me half the usual royalties; permission for mechanical licensing of music only will automatically be granted (but you'll still have to contact me first because that's the way the law works).
 
License for Audio Files:
Creative Commons License Audio files for all songs both written and performed by me (when I get around to posting them) are posted under the Creative Commons Music Sharing License. (I'll try to get permission from other people to license their performances of my songs, and my covers of other peoples' songs, the same way. Trying to license my occasional covers and filks of songs by people outside the filk community promises to be something of a nightmare, so for now I'm simply not going to post any. If you're a songwriter whose songs I cover, and you don't mind my posting them, please let me know. If you're a listener, you'll just have to wait for the CD.)

Memorials:

Keep the Dream Alive [ogg]
was originally written in 1986 for the Challenger. It has (unfortunately) recently been updated, and a new verse added, for the Columbia.
     If you need comic relief and have a high tolerance for black humor, check out Thrill-Seekers' Waltz, and don't say you weren't warned. If you want to record Keep the Dream Alive you can send the royalties to a space-related charity instead of to me. Just drop me a note.
 
The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of [ogg]
was written for my late father. He went to grad school with Isaac Asimov, and introduced me to both computers and science fiction.
 
For Amy [ogg]
was written for my stillborn daughter Amethyst Rose

Prize-winning songs:

The World Inside the Crystal [ogg]
1997 Pegasus Award winner: Best Science Song.
Kathy Mar's performance on mp3.com is gone, along with the rest of the former mp3.com. (But here's a nice, fresh, and far too big .ogg for you.) A preliminary rough dump from the album currently in progress is here.
 
Vampire Megabyte [ogg]
2001 Kazoo Award: ``user unfriendly computer filk'' at ConChord 2001.
2001 Pegasus Nominee: best computer song.

Of note:

Ship of Stone [ogg]
by Don Simpson is one of the greatest filksongs ever written. This version was recorded at Baycon 2006, with me on vocals and guitar, and Callie Hills on flute.

Notes:

HTML Formatting:
Since the HTML is automatically generated by a rather stupid PERL script, don't expect the world's best typesetting. In particular, the spacing between verses is horribly inconsistent. This will eventually improve. For an example of what's possible, see the PDF files.
Audio Files:
We use the free, open Ogg Vorbis format -- it provides noticably better sound than MP3 and is unencumbered by patent restrictions. It's supported by most PC media players and some "mp3"-players. If you don't have one, here's a list of free player software. You might have good luck with jlGui, which is written in Java and so has a decent chance of running almost anywhere.
Editing:
For some reason, many people like to play their oggs with Audacity, an excellent cross-platform, open-source sound recording and editing program. I just use it for recording and editing. Being cross-platform it's great for collaboration, and it also makes short work of splitting a concert recording or ripped cassette tape into song files.
     For text editing, I use GNU Emacs. In the past Emacs has been derided for being bloated and slow, but back then 1MB was a lot of memory, and 1MHz was a blazingly fast CPU clock. These days, it's about a tenth the size of the popular Firefox web browser (which, like Emacs, is mostly written in an interpreted language), and I don't hear many people complaining about it.
Printing:
Note that the indices no longer have links to postscript files, which were eliminated due to space considerations (they took up about 5 Mb at a time when I only had an allowance of 35). If you really want a printed songbook, send me a note at <steve+filk at theStarport.org> and if I get pestered enough I'll think about publishing one. They do have links to PDF's, which are pretty repulsive but easier for most folks to handle than .dvi's.

Tools

Setlist Maker
A simple CGI for constructing and displaying concert set lists. Not on the website at the moment because all the operations were done using query strings in links, rather then forms. This created an astronomical number of virtual pages, causing the various search engines to gobble up most of my bandwidth. One of the few places where I really need to use Javascript.
../TeX/
The FlkTeX markup language, including the tools used to generate the .html files in this directory, and to produce the indices. FlkTeX is based on LaTeX, which in turn is a set of macros for Don Knuth's TeX typesetting system. TeX is basically an expert system for typesetting, and produces professional-quality output with very little effort and practically no manual tweaking.

Coming Soon

Sheet music
I'm a lousy transcriber, so doing this right will probably require a voice-to-MIDI translator. Anyone have one that runs on Linux?
``Source Code'' in FlkTeX/.
This is easy to put up, and would let people make typeset versions of the songs in the privacy of their own home directories.
$Id: Index.html,v 1.2 2010-10-15 18:10:20 steve Exp $
Steve Savitzky <steve @ theStarport.org>