So you wanna write a song parody?
First a warning: once you write a few song parodies and perform them to an audience of appreciative fans, you start to get a reputation. You get a reputation for being the person who does those song parodies and suddenly people start to ask you, "Can you write a song for my mother's/father's 90th birthday?" And if you are truly cut out to be a song parody writer, you will jump at the chance, because it's an addiction. And when your friend Alice says she'll pay you, you will flap your hand at her and say, "NONSENSE, dahling. I LOVE to do it." But then when she sends you a gift card for dinner at Bonefish Grill you will feel very, very proud because you made her and her 90 year old mother/father laugh. And you will feel very, very happy.
How I made it
So how do you write a song parody for someone you don't know? It's helpful to get a list of songs they enjoy because picking the song to parody is half the battle. When you pick a song, make sure it is one that most people can recognize, and especially the person for and about whom the song is being written! One day I do hope to make a parody of Katy Perry's Firework, but this would not be the time, since the song is for a woman turning 90. The moment my friend Alice told me that Mack the Knife is her mother's favorite song, I was off to the races. When I'm going to be performing a song parody myself, a key factor in the song selection is whether I can actually PLAY it on the piano or the guitar, or whether there is a karaoke version available that could provide the accompaniment. Alice and her husband are both professional musicians and their daughters are both singers, so I knew there wouldn't be any performance issues. Alice sent me a YouTube link to the accompaniment they were planning to sing the song to, which was very helpful because, if you are using karaoke accompaniment you have to get the number of verses exactly right. If I'm playing a song on the guitar I can add verses all day long and it doesn't matter. I just play and sing until I'm done. Then she sent me a list of trivia about her mother, including her full name, what people call her, and what she likes to do: play bridge, Scrabble, Bingo, card games, tennis, knitting, ballroom dancing. The fact that she had taken dance lessons with a guy named "Pedro" REALLY piqued my interest.
Below you can see the Mack the Knife lyrics on the left and my lyrics on the right. I highlighted the parts that are identical or nearly identical in both songs. It is often a good thing to keep some of the words the same to make the final song sound more "authentic." That first line of Mack the Knife is so memorable, "Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear." Everybody knows that line and sings along with it. But after that they tend to know the lyrics less and less and just throw in the few words they do know, fake hum-singing in between. You've heard it before: "Oh Miss hunna nuhn nuhn an ole LUCY BROWN. Oh nuhn line forms hunna hunh babe." So that first line was a great opportunity to sink the hook in; get them excited. I had to keep the word, teeth and, with a 90 year old the choice of what to do with it is blatantly obvious. I also try to follow the rhyme scheme as closely as possible but sometimes you just can't do it exactly and still make sense. The first stanza of Mack the Knife is ABCBCDCD and mine is actually ABCBCDXD, because the Ginger Rogers line really matters and, frankly, I think the Bobby Darin version really over uses the "babe" business.
When I was done I sang the new lyrics with the YouTube karaoke a few times to tweak them and make sure everything fit, then sent them to Alice. She came back with some edits to the bridge-playing verses because I don't play bridge and hadn't gotten the terminology quite right. And that was that. So next time you go to someone's birthday party, find a karaoke tune for a song they like and write your own parody. It will really make them feel loved. And if you just can't do it, contact me and I'll try to help you out. But it'll cost ya.