Well, so much for having a ME day. From the time I got up I've been working on our problem song. First having a very long conversation with the lyricist about why I feel it doesn't work. We talked it through thoroughly then she asked to take another pass at it. I went and had a patty melt and some fries, then came home. I read her new lyric was was much better - suddenly the song had some storytelling rather than being a presentation of facts - it's now song by the Dahlia herself (post-death, looking back) and that immediately draws you in. But it went on way too long past its expiry point but I wanted to first make sure I felt it would work with the kind of music I'd first envisioned, so I sat down at the piano and came up with a feel and chords I liked and as I did that the whole thing just sort of came to me and I wrote the music. It was suddenly very noir and moody - the tango just wasn't right for it - it does present a new problem sort of, in that the tango in terms of its tempo kind of suited that slot - now I'll have two ballads in a row, but there's a monologue before the next one starts and the next one is the gay sequence and it's so different than anything else in the show that I think we'll get away with it. If not I can always try to swap out the Dahlia with something perkier, but I'll rehearse it this way and we'll see. I sent Adryan (the lyricist) the tune and she really liked it, and then we discussed the length and how to shorten it, and I also made some suggestions for lyric changes that weren't scanning properly, all of which she used. So, we're still figuring out the final verse - I just sent her my idea - I wrote one line of it and cobbled the other lines from about twelve lines she'd written - I think it works.