Thinking about Songwriting

Lixarto · August 2014

I’m not sure there’s much to be gained from this thread (bearing in mind Goldman’s famous quote[1]), but I was working late last night so it was well after midnight when I settled down to unwind with a pint and, mindful of the time, an unplugged Telecaster.

I looked through a recent notebook and found some lyrics written in January. If I have a lyrical idea with no immediately associated tune I just file it away, hoping that a tune will eventually come.

It did. Only the verse parts as yet, but a nicely alternating chord structure and a pleasant melody. The lyrics have already begun to evolve, as is the nature of things, and I am unhappy with the provisional title written back then: “No Apologies” sounds deeply shit and must be changed. I have a tendency to use disassociated titles, so I might call it “Aside”.

So. The beginnings of a song and how this one came to be. They’re all different aren’t they?

dafuzz · August 2014

Nice one

I love going through old sketches of songs, I have a massive file of them. Some is just a few lyrics written on the back of a receipt when an idea hit me on the bus, some are hand written tab for complete solo guitar pieces written on graph paper from when I was a student with nothing but a shit acoustic. I have a couple of ideas for songs that are just me describing roughly what the lyrics are about and the style of music it should be.

It's amazing how time changes my perception of them. Some of them have proven prophetic since writing them as a teenager, and I'm often amazed how my problems really haven't changed that much. Others that I remember thinking were really good at the time just seem cheesy and naive now. Like that bit from Ginsberg's Howl "...who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish".

I was more pretentious then (seriously!), I tried to squeeze as many clever ideas as I could into a song. Now I try to keep things as simple as possible, which is actually much harder.

Lixarto · August 2014

Ha

Yes, it is a lot harder keeping things simple, both musically and lyrically. But it's important - it is, after all the reason why the Stooges are so much better than Dream Theatre.

[1] "Nobody knows anything". I've spoken to some songwriters who have had hit records, and they're in agreement. While you can choose to sit down and write a song, there's obviously no guarantee of the ensuing quality. If they don't know how they do it, what chance have we?

PolarityMan · August 2014

I think the difficulty with keeping it simple isn't really in producing something *good* it's more about producing something original, and especially non-clichéd. With more complicated music you have the opposite problem where it is very easy to come up with something original but harder to come up with something good.

I like a balance of complexity when I write, it's about giving different parts the focus they need. So for example I prefer simpler choruses where the vocals do all the work but in instrumental sections I like to let more (especially rhythmic) complexity creep in.

Lyrically on the other hand I love a particular type of complexity which is lyrics with ambiguous or multiple interpretations, it's very easy to become a bit pretentious with this kind of thing though or just veer off into semi-nonsense lyrics so it has to be done with taste. The words and melodies themselves can be simple but I do like a bit of depth in the content matter.

Cirrus · August 2014

I also like to have lots of ideas just floating around waiting for the moment when they seem relevant to me. I'm quite a believer in the power of the subconscious so I rarely sit down and say "right, time to write a song" but sometimes an idea from a year ago will just come to me along with another idea out of the blue, like a bit of my brain I don't control was beavering away without my knowledge.

For me the songs I'm proud of have a kind of clarity, in that once I get going with a verse or whatever comes first it's obvious how the chorus should go, whether or not it needs a bridge, what intro would set it up nicely. It's probably because the songs I'm most proud of set up a feeling and tell a story (even if only in the abstract), so when I'm really feeling that feeling and believe in the story then it's kind of obvious how best to go about supporting those things. The frustrating songs are the ones with what I think will be incredible hooks but I've got no idea how to turn it from a 10 second clip into a full song. So those ideas just get filed away for the time they suddenly make sense.

An example - I had been messing around with a couple of chord sequences and melodic phrasing in 7/8 before going on holiday last year, and had this vague idea that it was about the romance of being on the "silver screen" in decades past. Fucking daft idea for a song but I wrote some verses I wasn't too amazed by and left it. While on that holiday we went to Terezin concentration camp in the Czech Republic. They had a room there with the names of children who came through the camp - thousands of them, with birth and death dates. I decided I would write a song about one of the names, and this idea I'd been kicking around a few weeks ago all fell into place with just a few changes. It was going nowhere until it had personal meaning to me.

daveyh · August 2014

PolarityMan said:

I think the difficulty with keeping it simple isn't really in producing something *good* it's more about producing something original, and especially non-clichéd.

There are a great deal of massively successful songwriters, artists etc who really don't have that problem (as in their work is neither original nor non-cliched).

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