Putting the pieces together
I remember my friend John told me that writing songs is like putting legos together. I agree. In that sense, it’s a lot more like building than writing. It’s never felt much like writing to me at all actually. It’s always been assembly.
You need two things for a song. You need a foundation or structure. And you need melody. You can start with either but I tend to start with the first part. The structure. Depends what you “write” on. I write three ways. First way is by playing chords on a guitar and thinking of ways to arrange them that inspire some kind of melodic overlay. Second way is on a computer building up from a beat and using the beat to inspire the melody. Third way is the melody presents itself to me at some random point in my day. I extract it using sophisticated scientific techniques and deconstruct the chord changes I like from there.
It’s not terribly complicated and, for me, not incredibly difficult. But, you see, what you’ve just done isn’t actually a song. Well, not yet at least. Because what you now have, if you have that little thing that you like, that little fragment of melody, that set of 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 chords that proceed nicely with each other. Well, that’s just one thing. And, you see, to have a song you probably need three things or four things or five things if you’re going to be annoying.
Each thing is a building block, like a Lego. And to get a standard little song in place you most often need about 3 or 4 Legos. You need the Verse Lego. You need the Chorus Lego. Sometimes you need the Bridge lego. And sometimes you might want a Pre-Chorus Lego or you might want an Outro Lego. The Legos don’t actually come with those proper names. They’re just parts. Parts you can arrange in different ways. Ways that interest you. Ways that you can tap your feet to.
How many parts you need and how they’re arranged is the art and science of song construction. As I’ve mentioned, any art form is about choices. And the way you make those choices, the way you assemble the pieces, says a lot about where you are in your development as a songwriter.
In the first stage of your development, you probably think you need a bridge in every song. And sometimes you actually will and sometimes you won’t. Slowly you realize you don’t need to arrange things as specifically as you thought and the form becomes more malleable. And that’s when something really interesting happens.
As many songwriters mature, they start to combine pieces in new and interesting ways or, sometimes just as interesting, they find the value in the repetition of one phrase and use dynamics and emphasis to create motion and momentum through the song. That’s the way Jeff Tweedy constructed ‘Handshake Drugs’, to my mind the best song on a ‘A Ghost Is Born’. Just D-G-F over and over and over with John Stirrat moving the song forward through the bass line and Nils Kline creating the dynamism and fiery intensity through his guitar work. But the same progression, all major chords, over and over.
So that’s a surprising and not insignificant result of maturing. You tend to question the need for complexity and you tend to gravitate towards the clean powerful lines of simplicity. Towards the essential.
Tags: songwriting
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