Mysteries of the rhyming dictionary

I am one frickin' line away from finishing my latest song. The worst part isn't being stuck there. The worst part is that I'm not finding a line that ends with a suitable rhyme for "you."

D'you know how many words rhyme with "you"? Lots. An embarrassment of riches. Any songwriter who can't fill a rhymes-with-you line with something creative and brilliant isn't worthy of the name.

As I sometimes do in times of trouble, I turned tonight to the handy rhyming dictionary Ron the Drummer gave me for my birthday several years ago. Perhaps revisiting the available words would provide the poke I needed to get moving again.

I looked under do and found the following:

accrue, ado, bamboo, blew, boo, boohoo, brew, caribou, cashew, drew, flew, flue, glue, gnu, goo, grew, Hindu, hitherto, hullabaloo, igloo, impromptu, into, issue, Kalamazoo, kangaroo, kazoo, kickapoo, misconstrue, moo, outdo, overdo, overthrew, peekaboo, Peru, poo, rendezvous, screw, shampoo, shoe, shoo, shrew, Sioux, slew, slue, stew, taboo, tattoo, threw, through, tissue, to, too, true, two, undo, voodoo, wahoo, well-to-do, who, withdrew, woo, yahoo, zoo, Zulu (see you)

I puzzled at the instructions to see you at the end. Generally this dictionary only does that when all the rhymes are listed under the other word.

I flipped to you and found this:

adieu, anew, avenue, barbecue, bayou, chew, choo-choo, cue, curfew, debut, dew, due, ensue, ewe, few, guru, honeydew, hue, I.O.U., imbue, ingenue, interview, Jew, knew, lieu, new, Nehru, overdue, pee-ewe, pew, preview, pursue, renew, residue, revenue, review, spew, subdue, sue, undue, view, yew (see do)

If you gave both entries more than a cursory glance, you may have noticed that these are completely nonoverlapping sets. Any word that appears in the first list doesn't appear in the second.

Why?

Something else I just now noticed: neither list includes blue. How is that kickapoo has a presence here, but a basic, oft-used word like blue didn't make the cut?

Who isn't there either.

This bears further investigation.

Brainstorming

(Continued from last post.)

Brainstorming.

BRAINSTORMING.

Clock alarm declares a brand new morning
I lie awake brainstorming
How I will use the day

They said I could never do it. They thought me mad, MAD, but I showed them all. Now my song and I will RULE THE WORLD.

Ahem. Anyway.

So, yeah, I finally found a rhyme. The new line doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as the old one, but I like that I've worked the word "I" in there. (Or "I'm." I may substitute "I'm half awake, brainstorming." We'll see.) I figure I've at least broken even.

This is not an exemplary turn of phrase. It doesn't break new ground or present some brilliant new insight. It does, however, allow me to keep "Clock alarm declares a brand new morning," which sounds more poetical than I usually manage for setting-the-scene passages like these.

And it only took two days.

This is the point where I decide not to think about the songwriters I've known who could write an entire song in the car on the way to the bank.

Rhyme redundancy

After much searching and scraping, I think of a pretty good first line for my latest song. Shakespeare it isn't, but it sets the scene and scans perfectly: Clock alarm declares a brand new morning.

Great. Now all I need is an appropriate rhyme for morning.

Warning?

Oh, god no. Everybody rhymes morning with warning. Google it if you don't believe me. It is a rhyme cliche. Unless it's the only way to express exactly what I mean—and it isn't this time around—I'm not going there.

Okay, what then?

Very few words match up perfectly with orning. Adorning. Scorning. Those don't fit. So I try slant rhymes. Hmmm, forming. I could make that work.

Clock alarm declares a brand new morning
Hazy plans are forming
On how to use the day

Cool. But something nags at me. It's too familiar somehow. Have I done this before?

Eventually I do a quick search through my folder o' lyrics. Sure enough, it turns up in a song I wrote in 2004, "Night People":

Restless, I made my way down to the grocery store
2 in the morning
To claim a few treasures
That waited for me on the shelves
Riding my cart like a scooter
I saw that the path was clear
And no lines were forming
Checkout girl smiled at me
We had the place to ourselves^*

So now what? Should I really care that I've used this rhyme before? I run the problem past my boyfriend. He thinks that because it's an imperfect rhyme anyway, yes, I should care. Then he suggests "suborning." Sigh.

I'd like to avoid repeating myself, but I've boxed myself in. With lines already written above and below the "forming" part, whatever I substitute has to have a fairly specific meaning. If it doesn't, I have to recast everything else, and I like everything else the way it is.

I shall think on it some more.

Sometimes it sucks to have standards.

* * *

* Yeah, I know. Selves/shelves is even more of a cliche than morning/warning. What can I say? Very little else rhymes with those words. That's why you see the pairing so often.

Right rhyme, wrong time

Awww, man.

I came up with the perfect sounding rhyme tonight. Then I realized that it would take my song in a completely different direction than I intended to go.

Sometimes that works out. Sometimes a different direction turns out to be interesting and serendipitous. Unfortunately, this time it was the wrong direction.

Oh well. Back to the drawing board.