I used to write songs like essays. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and I was going to get it all in there, by golly. I labored unnecessarily to fit every last word into the song. I bent the chords, twisted the melody, and mashed all those words in there. In the end, what I had was crap.
A song is not an essay. It’s a poem that is either crafted to fit the musical setting, or it already contains the right rhythm and phrasing to fit the music. (Robert Burn’s poems don’t have to be crafted to fit a piece of music, because they were crafted so well in the first place: their internal rhythm is perfect. Find a melody with the right syllables per line, and voila you have a song.)
I often write the music first, though I usually begin writing with a topic in mind. Sometimes I have a lyric of sorts, something scribbled down. Often I know exactly what I want to say. But I don’t like to spend too much time with the lyric at this point, because I know that I will have to mess around with it quite a bit to make it fit whatever musical setting I write for it.
I resisted this method at first because I was attached to the exact message I wanted to convey and/or the precise wording of the lyric/poem. Perhaps I end up sacrificing some of the content for the sake of context–which seems counter-intuitive–but I have to remind myself I’m not writing an essay; I’m not writing prose. Not that I’m in any way an expert on the subject, but seems to me rules are different for poetry. I’m not saying the medium is the message, but experience has shown me stubbornness on this issue will get you nowhere.
Well, I have to qualify. Sometimes it will get you somewhere. I have birthed a few decent songs, where I stubbornly hewed and squeezed the music and words together, with few alterations to either the words or meaning of an already-finished poem. And I’m quite proud of them, really. But more often the good songs emerge out of a process of less effort and more letting go. Letting go of preconceptions, even of intent. But what emerges sometimes expresses my purpose better than I ever could have in prose. When the elements come together in the right way, a song will take on a life of its own.
I don’t quite know how this works. And I don’t want to get mystical about it but really the only criteria I have for this process is a certain rightness of the results–not: does it say exactly what I wanted to say at the beginning? Rather: does it sound right? does it feel right?
Finally, I’ll make one more point about poetry not being an essay: don’t try to wrap everything up in the end, like we were taught to write a conclusion to an essay in school. Don’t try to say too much; leave conclusions to the listeners. Let them supply the meaning to your words. A poem, it seems to me, should be left open. It’s supposed to mean different things to different people.