Influenced

I saw this painting by Millais in art history- I immediately connected this painting with The Decemberists. This is the direction I want my music to go- lyrical illustration. I've made progress with The Wicked, illustrating Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique.

I will dress your eyelids

With dimes upon your eyes

Laying close to water

Green your grave will rise

Go to sleep now little ugly

Go to sleep now you little fool

Forty-winking in the belfry

You'll not feel the drowning

You'll not feel the drowning

Forget you once had sweethearts

They've forgotten you

Think you not on parents

They've forgotten too

Go to sleep now little ugly

Go to sleep now you little fool

Forty-winking in the belfry

You'll not feel the drowning

You'll not feel the drowning

Go to sleep now little ugly

Go to sleep now you little fool

Forty-winking in the belfry

You'll not feel the drowning

You'll not feel the drowning

Hear you now the captain

Heed his sorrowed cry

"Weight upon your eyelids

Is dimes laid on your eyes"

...
Now I'm thinking alot about Mary Shelley and her connection with Fuseli's The Nightmare... I think there's a damn good song there just waiting to be written. I'm writing my term paper on the Victorian occult, mostly on the connection between romantic painting and gothic literature.
"She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale distorted features half covered by her hair. Every where I turn I see the same figure - her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier... The windows of the room had been darkened, and I felt a kind of panic on seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber. The shutters had been thrown back; and, with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw at the open window a figure of the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife."(Frankenstein 189-190)
Shelley wrote that three years after seeing Fuseli's painting:

I think creative genres are meant to be mixed. Theatre should combine with fine art, fine art with music, music with literature- any number of combinations. The Baltimore vaudeville-style variety/burlesque scene is a good place to start- people like Amanda Palmer and Paco Fish and Little Dutch. Every kind of art influences every kind of artist- I'm trying hard not to be locked into a "fine arts sculpture" box.
~Let's do some cabaret~