The song I wrote today–which I wrote and recorded in about an hour–is called Leftover Love. It’s a silly offering…but, hell, I like it.
I’ve been struggling like mad to record a couple or three other songs, which are all more meaningful. Yesterday I didn’t record a song (oh, the shame), and yet I put in more time with my guitar in my lap than normal and struggled mightily on these songs. The songs I don’t record are taking up more of my time and energy than those I do. They’re not getting completed for a variety of reasons, and it’s got me thinking about the song-writing process.
The question I am always asked is: What comes first: the lyrics or the music? My answer is usually that–for me, at least–the songs come in every which way. Sometimes I write the entire lyric first, then put it to music. Sometimes it’s the other way around. More often, it’s somewhere in the middle. In fact, it’s an organic process, and here’s how it’s working for me lately.
Usually I start with an idea. As in, a subject, something I want to write about–usually a subject that is vexing me. Music has always been therapeutic for me that way. It almost makes me embarrassed to admit that I don’t always start that way anymore. Sometimes I simply start with a phrase that appeals to me rhythmically, something I read or overhear, or that spontaneously pops into my head (or so it seems). For example, the song I wrote today: Leftover Love. That phrase came to me in the shower this morning. I don’t remember the conversation I was having with myself when it appeared. But I thought it was unusual: leftover as an adjective for love. I might have been thinking about last night’s leftovers, which dovetailed into some thoughts about love. The two subjects got mashed together, and there you have it. From there, I just went with the comic potential. The narrative came out of my efforts to find puns for food/love. That simple.
So that one didn’t even begin as an idea, but with a phrase. And the story came out of the slant I took, which was humorous.
Let’s talk about another song, Dear Father. Now, that came out of a very specific idea: I would write a letter to my father, because a friend of mine–a self-described Shaman–recently suggested I try to speak to my brother and my father, both deceased. She wasn’t specific about how I should go about doing this, so I thought of writing a letter. I’m working on one for my brother as well.
I’ve actually already written a song that is a posthumous letter to my father. It’s called Someone to Blame, and it’s on the one CD I’ve recorded, Already Home. Okay, so I write to my dead father a lot.
The thing I want to describe is the process that song took once I’d decided on a subject and had a phrase to begin with. I wish I could remember when exactly the music came in, but I’m pretty sure this line came first:
Dear Father, You never told me about the things you did when you were just a messed-up kid like me.
But you see the rhythm already there. Below I show the phrase again with the stressed consonants in bold.
Dear Father, You never told me about the things you did when you were just a messed-up a kid like me.
Actually, I don’t want to take time now to break things down to that level. I just wanted to describe the organic process that takes place between lyric and music (melody and harmony). It’s almost never a case where I take a completed work and then fit it nicely into a musical frame. Even though the song may be founded on a pretty specific and thought-out idea, it’s seldom that it doesn’t get altered along the way. As a writer who’s pretty attached to his ideas, I know that sounds like my ideas get washed down. But that’s the organic aspect. A song, a good song, is the meeting of all these elements. And I guess here’s the thing: the object of the effort is to write a good song. Writing good songs is a subtractive art, not additive. Like a sculptor takes away from the stone until he releases the figure inside, I have to let go of some of the materials I use to write my song.
Different melodies–and different chordal progressions–project a mood. I wouldn’t write a serious song about my father using a bouncy rhythm. Not usually. But, again, whatever progression and rhythm I am using may work mostly for the material. So, rather than ditch the music, I’ll tweak the meaning a little to fit the music.
In the case of Dear Father, I used a Country beat, and consequently a very simple melody–which carried along with it some content criteria, in addition to mood. I’ll explain that in more deal in a future post–maybe tomorrow. But let’s say in this case I needed to make the subject a little more universal, and fit it into a more predictable frame.
I’m just scraping the surface of this topic, so I hope I have more focus and energy tomorrow to speak more about it. Tonight I must sleep.