Posts Tagged ‘songwriting’
Upcoming things
Here are some upcoming things.
On Monday, I’ll put out an experiment in authenticity titled ‘the hi-lo country’ and featuring two songs a week for three weeks of demos and semi-formed phrases, experiments and gestures. This is through the email list. Reasons and explanations to follow but, again, the idea is an experiment in raw authenticity. Also, how-to since I include the chord progressions at the beginning of each song so you can play along at home and maybe write your own song because that is what the good people of the world are doing these days.
Also, next Friday, Paul, me and Joe are mastering the record. So that is exciting.
And also, there is a show coming up four weeks from last Wednesday or three weeks from this coming Wendesday or, alternativey, 26 days from now. The show is Rockwood and will feature good songs from the new record. Although, truthfully, they’re all good.
Tags: Add new tag, playing live, songwriting
Song lyrics, poems, fragments and phrases
I have some friends that are really good writers. We get to talking every once in awhile — maybe about writing some songs together. Often times when we get down to brass tacks and try to put something together I might defer to them when it comes to lyrics.
The problem arises when we take a look at some lyrics that they’ve written down. It’s not that they’re bad. They’re typically great, actually. It’s just that they don’t seem designed for a song, per se. They actually most often seem like longer form poetry. Words meant to be written down. And read.
But songs aren’t read. They’re heard. And if you’re interested in writing song lyrics my advice to you is to start from the opposite end of the spectrum. Build up from a word or a phrase. You see a phrase might not mean anything when it lies flat on a page. But that’s not what words in songs do.
Songs have this nice little thing we like to call music. It plays in the background. It conveys emotion and feeling. You can say less with this thing called music. And sometimes mean more.
It’s phrases that resonate with a song. Little glimpses of things. Incomplete pictures filled out by notes and melody and your imagination and the vocal performance of the singer.
At the end of “Perfect Day”, Lou Reed says “You’re going to reap just what you sow.” He says it over and over. And it rises up and is mysterious and beautiful and he leaves it like that.
On “Summerteeth”, Jeff Tweedy says “Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm. Something in my veins. Bloodier than blood.”
That’s all. No long and winding stanzas (unless you’re Dylan). No complicated meter. Enough syllables that you can stretch into the song form but not so many that you have to impossibly squeeze 30 words into eight bars.
Focus on a word. Focus on a phrase. You’re not going to be reading it. You’re going to be listening to it.
Tags: songwriting
Backwards induction
For me, it always starts with a concept. An idea. That’s actually what creates the sound. What creates the song. It’s like this hazy signpost hanging in the air and it’s baked full of its own special qualities and those qualities guide me in the lyrics, the melody, the tempo. Sometimes the concept drives not just the creation of a song but a whole suite of songs.
I was standing in the living room of my old apartment and E and I were about to head out to dinner and this is most often when these little bursts of epiphany tend to reveal themselves. As she’s putting on her makeup and putting things in her clutch and picking out the right pair of earrings (all of which she designed and hand crafted) I strap on the guitar and proceed to follow her around the apartment, strumming random chords, yelling out lyrical non-sequiturs and generally being a bit of a pain in the ass.
Tags: songwriting
Now that was fun
We had our first rehearsal last night as a ‘band’. It was a pretty special experience. In the world of New York singer/songwriters, the concept of a band is a malleable thing. Everyone at rehearsal last night had other projects and other gigs that were ongoing. Pete’s main project just got signed to Verve.
So when you have a bunch of people in a room that have other interests and other projects you never know how it’s going to turn out. On the one hand, everything can feel mechanical, impersonal, rote, leaden. People going through the motions, wishing they were someplace else. But on this specific hand something different happened. Everything just clicked.
Tags: cover songs, playing live, songwriting
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.
Tags: songwriting
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.
Tags: songwriting
