Choosing
Yeah, it's "that" month again
Yesterday, I linked to a brief article on Songtown.com that I found interesting and thought provoking. Only to an extent, though, because the article was really brief, and raised a number of interesting questions, but without a lot of answers. I get it and this is not criticism in a pejorative sense. Songtown, after all is a business, and sells subscriptions and offers songwriting courses and such. The article was written by Mr. Clay Mills, who by any measure is a very successful songwriter. So at the outset, let me say I am in no way criticizing Mr. Mills, nor am I in any way comparing my own thoughts to Mr. Mills’. In fact, I kinda think the article had it’s intended effect very…..effectively. So I say “thought provoking” because I spent a lot of time thinking about what wasn’t in the article, which was mostly answers to the questions I raised to myself. And I am willing to admit the result, intended or not, made me examine my own songwriting process and habits. I had planned on a future post about it, but it kind of stayed with me all day after I posted it, and I decided to put at least some of my thoughts into today’s post and maybe return to the themes in the future as well.
To begin, here’s the link to the article: Some Thoughts On Songwriting
I’m not going to reproduce it here, but I will take some excerpts and talk about the things it led me to examine in my own approach. Your mileage will vary of course, and this may be a good time to stop and read (or reread) the article and answer questions for yourself in relation to your own songwriting process. Go ahead, I’ll wait…
So first I note this: “…no song can be written without making choices.” Absolutely spot on true. The most basic choice is the decision to write at all. Once past that hurdle, if the choice is to write, for me at least, it’s then “music first?” or “lyrics first?”. I’m almost always in “lyrics first” mode. Due to the benefits of some previous educational and career choices, I’m much more comfortable with writing lyrics than an initial chord progression that I then find lyrics to fit. The only song I’ve written to music was almost by accident. I may have told this story before, but when I was taking an online course to learn Logic Pro X, the DAW I record in, at the end of one (prerecorded, not live) lesson, the instructor said to pause for a bit and just record something, anything (we’d progressed past the basics of setup by then and it was possible, if amateurish, to actually go “hands on” with recording). So I did. I was mostly fingerpicking at that point rather than strumming or flatpicking, so I just played random chords, mostly in C Major, but jumping around with nondiatonic chords a bit as well. I returned to the course material after listening to a muddy track of myself and didn’t revisit it until we reached a point in the course where we were processing the basic stems via plugins. Upon using those techniques to clean up the mud and add compression and normalize volume and such, I realized I sorta liked the track after all, but I had no idea of the chord progressions I had actually played, just that it was more or less in C Major. After listening to it over and over, I picked out a reasonably interesting progression and ended up writing some wistful lyrics about some guy who stops by a bar and sees his former lover with someone else and reflects on things before heading out. Hardly an original concept, but most songs are really just endless variations on universal themes. I will say the music in my sample recording guided the lyrics, and by the way, the imagined theme is not self referential in any way, the minor chords just suggested the mental image of a darkened, somewhat smoky room and went from there. I did later find several images by fantastic artist Fabian Perez (Argentine Artist Fabian Perez) that sort of captured the mood I was visualizing, this image “Man Lighting a Cigarette II” being the most evocative - please do check out his work at Fabian Perez, Artist website, it’s extraordinary at capturing moments of humanity.
So, continuing with reference to the Songtown article, there’s this: “Many writers approach writing by intuition without making conscious decisions”. Sorta guilty, sorta not on that one. I tend to write from or “around” a “hook” - that one line that more or less encapsulates the theme of the song and is most often the repetitious last line of the chorus. Inspiration for the hook can come from just about anywhere, and I keep a collection of brief lines that might be worthy of becoming a hook in a note on my phone (I’m old enough to appreciate with more than a little humor the nonsense that would have been to 16 year old me - an image pops up of my mom asking why there were little pieces of paper taped to our old rotary dial phone). But Mr. Mills expands on that idea by referencing the concept of “diary entry” songs, as he says: “They make the writer feel better, but won’t mean much to anyone else”, that is, they are so personal to the writer that they hold little connection to the listener (looking at you on that one, TayTay, though it’s pretty hard to argue with that much success….). A counter-example of a great sort of “diary entry” type of song might be Janis Ian’s fabulous “At Seventeen”, though the song was actually inspired by a newspaper article (Janis Ian - At Seventeen).
There’s enough packed into Mr. Mills’ seemingly brief article that I think I’ll stop there for today and delve into some of the more technical and less conceptual/philosophical themes next Friday.
Bonus Round: The roses died.
Cheers and keep playing!!
Michael Acoustic