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.

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.

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.

I remember standing there with the lights turned off in the living room and she said “you should have a song about me” and she jokingly repeated her name over the chords and it actually worked and that became my biggest seller on iTunes. Weird.

I also remember having this picture of the desert and of these Bedouin people peering at the sea from over a cliff and that was where the song ‘The Dead Sea’ came from. Somehow I knew that it needed to be this pounding rocking thing — like the hot sun and the salt water and a water skin.

As I think about the next album (meaning the one after the one I’m not even done yet), I’ve got similar notions bubbling around in my head. Trying to figure out where they’ll lead me. I shall document them here, for posterity and to protect my intellectual property, even somewhat informally.

I have an image of a rumpled bed, a black and white image. Like the cover of the great ‘Dry Dreams’ by Jim Carroll. And it says “Bedroom” in red on the cover. And that’s the record. And it’s this soft-rock LA thing that has a Fleetwood Mac/Steely Dan vibe and Lindsey Buckingham should produce it and we’d get lots of mandolin and it would feature the song ‘Dear Hal Ashby’ that I wrote about the director Hal Ashby who has made some of the world’s greatest films, most notably ‘Shampoo’. And yes, I’m putting ‘Shampoo’ ahead of ‘Harold and Maude’ and ‘Being There’. It’s a very special under-appreciated film and Warren Beatty’s finest moment. It transcends.

So that’s where that starts. And now I need to write a bunch more songs like that. Things that fit into that concept and that idea and the theme will guide me like a mission statement and one day it may be done.

I also like the word “Trouble”. That should probably be a record. Not a cover of the Cat Stevens song but that would be the inspiration. Trouble is ominous. Trouble is grey and acoustic with noise and dissonance under the covers like the thunder clouds rolling in, waiting for the rain to start. Trouble is the open plains. Here it comes. Like the song ‘Radio Cure’ off of ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’.

Always backwards from the concept first. Kind of strange I suppose but that’s my deal.

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.

This is the same group of people that were all in the studio together back in March. We’ve played together before.  And the New York music world is surprisingly small so the other guys play together fairly regulalry.  Rob and Matt just did a session for another songwriter that Paul is currently producing.  Rob and Pete play together live in the Catapult.  Etc.  I suppose you could expect that same level of chemistry and camraderie would exist based on those shared experiences.  But I really don’t think you could expect an authentic and distinctive sound to emerge from this group of people.  It felt like something coherent and unique to me.  An actual way that we, as a band, sounded.

I have used the word ‘landscape pop’ to describe what I thought the record sounded like and that has turned out to be a well-suited descriptor.  Also maybe ‘desert pop’.  Lots of open spaces.  Minimalism.  Strong but subtle tension.  Lots of beauty.  Some sadness.

It starts with Bill Dobrow on drums.  He’s played with a many famous and noted individuals and his talent is obvious.  An ability to conjure atmosphere and use dynamics  to create momentum.  Rob Jost (bass) and Bill play really well together and Robby is always working across the fret board to create low-end motion.  During the show he’ll also have an upright bass which he’ll bow on occasion.  Plus he plays the ukulele.  Plus he plays the french horn.  Plus he’s just a nice guy.

Pete and Matt drive a lot of the desert melody.  I didn’t play much guitar last night and really only picked it up to help work through the right changes on a specific tune.  So Pete and Matt create the surface music and the absence of another guitar player allows for the development of (sometimes vast) open spaces in the music that manifests itself in this gorgeous landscape quality.  The stars on a cold night, mountains slunk low against the penumbra.  Maybe it sounds a little like Low.  Or The National? I don’t know.  It just sounds really really good. When we’re sitting there together and I can focus on singing and and have this music underneath that is authentic and textured and haunting.

The highlight of the night (for me) was our rendition of ‘All my friends’.  I wrote about the fact that we were going to cover it but last night was the first time we actually did cover it.  It’s a simple song without a traditional verse chorus structure.  Just goes from A to D as long as you want it to.  We interpreted.  Changed it into a rolling minimalist thing and just built up over the course of the song with Pete and Matt using lots of delay to create texture and bubbles and stronger punctuation when necessary.  When you’re in that spot, when you’re participating in creating that kind of thing, that’s what it means to be alive.  Like being in love.  Rubbing your hands against your wife’s skin.  Alive.  Really good.

We play live at Rockwood Music Hall on Monday, September 1st.  Come check it out.  It’s gonna be a thing.  A good thing.

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.

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.

Nevertheless, I think I still want to do it.  First reason is that even when Cale did his version, nobody can seem to resist the obvious bass/snare drum track ripping in at some point in the song.  This feels like a pretty literal interpretation of Murphy’s idea and one that he already did better.  So even though the song has been covered I don’t think anyone has really taken it to an entirely different place.  Actually, there’s one guy that I found on YouTube that did a folkish version but his tempo was too slow.  The trick is maintaining the right propulsion in the song without resorting to bombasticity and heavy handed tom and snare hits.  I think we can do it slightly more delicate and get Bill to do more of a rolling/syncopated thing that creates more texture in the drumming, has a groove, but isn’t obviously a dance song.  I also think that nobody so far has had a really good piano player in their arrangement.  My guess is that Matt could do something really striking and lyrical but use his jazz background to play with the melody a little bit.  Point #1 is that I think there is still some room for the perfect interpretation here and I think it’s something we could do pretty well.

Point #2.  I believe there’s some merit to this ‘new standard’ idea that certain songs enter the vernacular and become intepreted by dozens and dozens of people in new and interesting ways.  And that new interpretation becomes something that’s interesting about the folklore of that song.  Kind of like how jazz musicians treat ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ and all the other standards that they run through.  Or how folk singer treat Dylan.  Amber does a really nice version of ‘just like a woman’ for example.

The counterpoint is that a good cover is supposed to expose people to a new artist.  To get you to go to the internet and look up something and find out something new about an unheralded musician.  So far I’ve taken a different approach and tried to present songs everyone knows in new or different ways.  It definitely took a lot of people by surprise that we covered an Eagles song on our first record given the level of appreciation (or lack thereof) that the Eagles are afforded in hipsterdom.  But the changes in ‘Lyin Eyes’ are really pretty and they are good songs.  People might have a problem with the arrangements but the songs themselves seem non-controversially good in my opinion.

We’ll give it a shot.