A New Perspective
- Barbara Sarshik & Gary Rimar
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
My friend Gary Rimar — a.k.a. the Piano Guy — has played, arranged, and produced the instrumental recordings of my song parodies for several years. This year, Gary decided to try his hand at writing a parody himself, and the result is “We Are Gone!” — a retelling of the Hebrews’ redemption from slavery, set to Elton John’s “Your Song.” I think you’ll agree that it would make a great addition to your Passover celebration.
Gary also gave us some insight into his fascinating and very systematic process:
My lyric writing method is a bit odd, in that I use Excel to put together the lyrics.
As I go through my day, phrases of the song come to mind. If I’m somewhere that I can sing, I will sing the phrase into my phone’s voice memo program. If not, I will type it out so that I don’t lose it.
When I have collected enough phrases, I create my spreadsheet with columns for the verses and choruses that say v1, v2, v3, and c1, c2, etc. Once I have the entire structure built, I can assemble the piece by pasting the various phrases into the right places, with duplicates going in subsequent columns. Then it’s just a matter of mix and match and move around until I have the best set of lyrics.
In “We Are Gone!” I used the Mi Chamocha’s first line, which left me needing to rhyme with “Adonai.” That inspired “rallying cry” in the next line, which I didn’t discover until I was trying to finish the lyrics.
Here is a sampling of the finished song:
We sang Mi chamocha ba’eilim Adonai!
As we got to the river it was — our rallying cry
The water split for us, and we ran right through
Which is why today we all are Jews
(Chorus)
And you can go tell old Pharoah that we are gone
We know that he’ll be angry since we’ve moved on
We’re sure he will mind, don’t care that he’ll mind
We are now on our way
How great our new lives will be since we left today
Check out Gary’s beautiful instrumental recording that you can use to accompany you and your Seder guests. Then go straight to the free, printable song sheet or check out our song index for a wide variety of song parodies that you can incorporate into different parts of your Seder. We have songs for every age and musical taste!
