A bridge too far
Art is about choices. I wrote this song called ‘Don’t Look Away’. I took the chords from ‘Honey Eyes’ and started strumming them in a different way and starting singing along and there it was. Like in the Bible, when you push aside the flowers and the reeds. Hello, little baby!
And I had another kind of part which is either a pre-chorus or a chorus depending on your point-of-view. And that was a nice thing as well. And then I started thinking about whether I needed the different part.
The different part is the Bridge.
You kind of get to the point in a song when you’re working your way through it and you think to yourself, “Maybe something different here?”. If you so choose, that different part is what people call the Bridge and what John and Paul (and I think the music community generally) called ‘the middle eight’.
It’s the thing that creates the space and the tension that makes you miss the original thing. Makes you want to find your way back, wander through all the minor chords to get to your sweet release, the major. The 1. Back at home. Snug as a bug in a rug. When you first start writing songs that’s the piece that, you think, tells you that you’re a songwriter. That you’ve just made something. You had this one hummable flowing little ripple of a melody and you added on an ‘other’ and the other was good and fit like a puzzle piece but was still different and strange, like a middle child, and then you came back to the original and it tasted even better. Huzzah.
Do that for awhile.
I was demo’ing these tunes with Paul last year and I was playing him ‘Don’t Look Away’ and we got to that part in the song where previously I had asked ‘Maybe something different here’ and I had answered it with a stirring little passage that jumped to an E minor. I really loved it. That Em thing got me to a concluding section that became a knowing and wistful coda. A haunting sarcastic refrain that was an inside joke to me and something that I thought people could sing along to.
Only the problem was that we got to that part and I shifted into it. You always know, you see, when you’ve got to the bridge. Because that’s what it is – a shift. If it works, it’s punctuation. It’s an open chord strummed like a god. And if it doesn’t it’s like a hard right turn in the car and your pop spills over the side of the cup and oh shit you got some on your leg.
Paul said, “I’m not sure if the song really needs that part”. Notwithstanding the improbability that the song was alive and that it drew sustenance from the logic of its composition. That it was sentient enough to ‘need’ anything, per se. (My own notwithstanding notwithstanding, this actually may just be debatable.) What he obviously meant was “I don’t like that part.” And that’s what producers do. They help you make (sometimes painful) choices. They take out their scalpels and cut. Like surgeons. Hopefully good ones and not ones that leave your spouse in debilitating pain every day.
That hurt to hear but is probably // may jut be true. That’s the trick with writing a bridge. That’s the second level of songwriting. Knowing when not to write one. Being confident enough to not do something different because you’ve been trained and feel obligated to be. Besides meaning “I don’t like it” that’s the other part of what he meant. We must serve the a larger purpose than just uniqueness or difference. You must serve an even more demanding deity. You must try to be Good. Good values simplicity. Good values being concise and saying just what you mean. And meaning just what you say.
Sometimes you say too much. That’s the drively flipside of The Bridge. He can be longwinded.
We’ve got to get back to the essence.
In the case of this particular little anecdote, I ended up cutting Mr. Bridge. To serve the greater purpose of Good (and maybe the whims of the person I was working on the song with). But I still miss him and think about him and try to think about whether he was longwinded and too different or just different enough to belong.
Tags: songwriting
August 21st, 2008 at 11:36 am
I find this fascinating. I can do expository writing til the cows come home, but I’ve never been creative enough to write poems or stories or songs. Just not the way my brain works.
And Sammy, you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t equate your songwriting process with finding Moses. Love you. xoxo.
September 19th, 2008 at 4:58 am
[...] stand back from a more objective place and focus on the meat and the essence. The essentialness. As when I wrote that PB helped me reshape a few songs and cut out some fat in the [...]