5 songs completely written or near so:

No Cowgirl: Annie Oakley's song about learning to shoot and meeting Frank.

Maintenance: Uptempo, fingerstyle instrumental.

Strange Mosaic: A vaguely Spanish-guitar-style, atmospheric thing, featuring our archetypal lovers wandering on foot through West Texas.

Trail's End: Simple old-time ballad structure. The words are adapted right from Bonnie's own poem about how she saw herself and Clyde and the trajectory of their lives.

Women Drinking Whiskey: A countryish confessional. The gals sit around and compare notes on the choices they've made.

This weekend's work is pulling together the next five, which exist in concept form only, if at all. Frank will get a song, and I'm interested to work on that one since there's so little source material on him. One has to assume that he was the second best trick shot of all time, yet after he became Annie's manager, his career was totally eclipsed by her activites. I can't help but wonder how that was for him.

Clyde needs a song too, which I'm not so much looking forward to. He was a pretty unsavory dude from one end to the other, already a low-down rat by sixth grade. The word "rattlesnake" comes up a lot in reference to him. I may also explore the time right around Bonnie and Clyde's meeting; she was a fomer honor student at Cement City School, working as a truck-stop cafe waitress while her husband, childhood sweetheart Roy Thornton, began a 99-year murder sentence in the state pen. Here's a quote from one of Bonnie's diaries from around that time:

"Dear Diary,
Before opening this year's diary I wish to tell you that I have a roaming husband with a roaming mind... I love him very much and miss him terribly. But I intend doing my duty. I am not going to take him back. I am running around with Rosa Mary Judy and she is somewhat a consolation to me. We have resolved this New Year's to take no men or nothing seriously. Let all men go to hell! But we are not going to sit back and let the world sweep by us."

I guess not, indeed, but so much for that New Year's resolution.

 And finally, there should probably be a couple of summing-up type songs that take the long view on both pairs. Stay tuned.v