Where Stories Dwell: Every Verse is a Pangram

Track 3 of 11 on Wyrdz. 3:46. Progressive rock.

A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet. A common example is "The quick brown fox has been jumping over the lazy dog". This sentence required the student to use all characters and allowed them to check that every letter appeared correctly on the paper. I repeatedly typed this sentence on an IBM Selectric typewriter during a Typing 101 class at Hibbing High School in the mid-1980s. (I don't know if any schools still offer a similar course now that everyone has a mobile device with a keyboard.)

I wanted to know if you could build a whole song using pangrams; not just a song, a song that someone might enjoy without ever noticing the trick.

The rule

Every verse & chorus has to contain all 26 letters. There are three verses, which means the full alphabet goes by at least six times before the end of the song.

I did not blindly trust this as faith. I ran each section through a short script that checks for missing letters, and all four unique sections came back clean. No single line is a pangram on its own, though the first two lines of verse one each come within one letter. The alphabet gets assembled four lines at a time.

What the hard letters do to a song

If you have never tried to write a pangram, here is what happens. The common letters take care of themselves. Then you are left holding J, Q, X, Z, V, and K, and you have to find somewhere to put them.

That is where the cast of this song comes from. Nobody sits down and decides to write about a waxy jaguar at a frozen quay. The letters pick the nouns for you:

Q gives you quick, quirky, quietly, quay, and a jaguar "quizzing the black raven."
X gives you foxes, vexed, xenon lamps, six crates, and a box of gems.
Z gives you lazy dogs, jazz, a frozen pond, and crazy jackals.
J gives you jump, jugs, jaguar, juicy figs, and jackals again.

If you combine these elements, you tend to create a fairy tale regardless of your original intent. Wizards pack jazz for a long trip. Farmers load six heavy crates of figs. A young knight draws his sword and digs. The text resembles a storybook where the illustrator and author did not coordinate, and I like it because of that disconnect. The brave hymnist who "quietly marks each new day" in the first verse is my favorite character on the album. The verse actually contains all 26 letters of the alphabet by the end of the third line. That character was not necessary for the pangram. He simply appeared in the text.

The chorus nods at the old typing drill ("Jump, quick fox - the lazy dog is watching still") and then says what the song is doing out loud: "Every letter finds its place before the final bell." That was the working title for a while. The final title comes from the last line of the chorus, where the xenon glow and the frozen quay turn out to be where stories dwell.

The sound

I wrote the lyric to be singable as mid-tempo folk, something like a sea shanty told by a narrator who believes every word. The take that made the album went somewhere else entirely: progressive rock, with some of math rock's odd corners. A lyric full of xenon lamps and quizzing jaguars turns out to be at home there.

One thing the constraint gives you for free is percussion. All those K, X, Z, and Q sounds are hard consonants, and a singer who leans into them turns the lyric into part of the rhythm section. The album take sits in a minor key and moves along briskly. I think that suits a song with a crypt and a jaguar in it.

On the record

The title track argues that the form of a word carries weight apart from what the speaker intends. This song is the most innocent demonstration of that on the album. The letters came first here and the meaning came second, and a story showed up anyway. I never decided what that story means. The alphabet wrote it.

It also has a practical job. It sits between two swaggering retro character songs, "Sesquipedalian Sam" and "I Paid for Every Letter," and keeps them from blurring into each other.

The video

I worked on a music video for this one, and it has turned into the biggest project on the album (so far).

The story is about a boy named Adam who lives in Duluth, Minnesota. In the first verse, he is twelve years old. It is shortly before Christmas, and his father puts a pack of trading cards back on a shelf at a corner store because he cannot afford them. The other children in the store notice and smirk. Adam receives a sketch pad as a gift instead, which disappoints him. During his holiday break, he sits at a window and watches foxes playing in the snow. The neighbor's golden retriever stays in its dog house and does not react to the foxes. Adam also sees the neighbor loading jazz instrument cases into a van. He begins to draw the things he sees from the window.

Second verse he is seventeen. The other boys are still trading cards. He has a sketchbook full of his own characters and a school tablet, and he starts coloring them in. A girl named Sarah is the first person who looks at the drawings and has an opinion.

Third verse he is twenty-two, at a tech college, and the characters he has been drawing since he was twelve are a video game with a pre-order poster. The boys who ignored him are now buying it. Sarah is still there. The last shot is the two of them in VR headsets, and he proposes to her inside the game, standing on a frozen quay.

The real-world footage is photo-realistic. Adam's drawings, his tablet renders, and the game itself are all in a popular, bold Minnesota screen-print style, thick black outlines and saturated flats. The two looks sit side by side so you always know which is his art and which is his life.

A few things the lyrics forced into the video. "The frozen quay where stories dwell" closes every chorus, so each chorus ends on the Duluth shoreline. In the first one it is a real ice push, which is when Lake Superior shoves broken ice up over the pier in slow motion. If you have never seen one, look it up. It is the most unreal thing that actually happens up there, and it is the thing that makes Adam open the sketch pad. In the second chorus it is his drawing of it. In the third it is the in-game version, where the proposal happens. The "xenon glow" is street lights, then a tablet screen, then a room full of monitors playing his game. The "final bell" is an alarm clock, then a school bell, then a pre-order counter.

I programatically generate timing data for every word in the song using WhisperX, so video cuts land on a syllable instead of a line. Shot list and prompts were next. I'll admit that the final results contains some AI slop. I don't have the budget to finance long-form generative video, lip syncing or multiple regenerations. I hope you enjoy this attempt to turn the randomness of the lyrics into a story.

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Quick bronze foxes jump the lazy dogs at dawn,
Vexed by quirky wizards packing jazz for the long voyage on.
Xenon lamps flicker while five dozen jugs of liquor sway,
The brave hymnist quietly marks each new day.

[Chorus]
Jump, quick fox - the lazy dog is watching still,
Vex the quiet wizard with your jazz and iron will.
Every letter finds its place before the final bell,
From the xenon glow to the frozen quay where stories dwell.

[Verse 2]
Just beyond the frozen quay, a waxy jaguar prowls the mist,
Quizzing the black raven that keeps circling the old crypt.
Vexed farmers load six heavy crates of plump juicy figs,
While the young knight quietly draws his sword and digs.

[Chorus]
Jump, quick fox - the lazy dog is watching still,
Vex the quiet wizard with your jazz and iron will.
Every letter finds its place before the final bell,
From the xenon glow to the frozen quay where stories dwell.

[Verse 3]
Crazy jackals howl beside the quiet frozen pond,
Expecting the wizard's box of rare gems and golden bonds.
Vivid plumes of smoke rise as the five boys jump and play,
Quickly scattering the lazy ducks that waddle far away.

[Chorus]
Jump, quick fox - the lazy dog is watching still,
Vex the quiet wizard with your jazz and iron will.
Every letter finds its place before the final bell,
From the xenon glow to the frozen quay where stories dwell.