Saturday, November 13, 2010

Writing songs

With the new release (Heartland Variations) successfully out the door in April, and the reissue of my 1978 vinyl for Transatlantic (No More Range to Roam) taken care of in October, I’ve been able to turn my attention to songwriting—for popular writers a murky process if there ever was one. Here are a few meditations on various points in the process.

Inspiration
Unfamiliar as I am with classical processes, I still tend to guess that Mozart began with a melody and moved onward to orchestration—I can’t imagine him working from a couple of chords he liked or a rhythmic feel. But maybe I’m wrong…

For myself, there is no set pattern. The spark can be those guitar chords or a rhythm, which then are suggestive of a melody and evoke an emotional or topical sphere that leads to lyrics. Or it can be absolutely the other way around: a set of lyrics—often but not always a chorus first—which encapsulate something near the surface in the subconscious and then lead to conscious choices of rhythm, melody and harmonic underpinnings (chords). The more toward pop one moves, the more emphasis is placed on the “hook” or melody+lyrics+rhythm of the chorus. Of course in hip hop you can sometimes circumvent the compositional process for the chorus by licensing (hopefully) a sample of a hook that already been around once and proven its mettle. That’s not where I work, however. In spite of the fact that I have no pop pretentions whatsoever, the basic structure of the popular song is very strongly part of my DNA, so the notion of a repeating chorus which is in someway memorable is part of my process, as is some variant on the verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus song structure. The bridge, for those whom this is jargon, is just “something different” in the middle of the song, which tends to lighten the repetitive traditional structure, but is by no means universal.

For me the frosting is always something in the lyrics for which the source is unclear, but which resonates immediately. Here are two lines from “Bread & Justice” (written for my early 80s electric day band, the Regulars) as an example: “Nathan oozed good fortune / He held his life by a silver chain/ All around him, like a pool of light / The shimmer of his capital gain”. To find this sort of expression, you mostly have to be patient, or relax, or recognize what’s not that. It’s not a rational process, other than sitting down at the table or computer with enough frequency and time so that it will have a chance to happen.

I’ll detail the creative process for two very different songs to finish this exposé, one from London 1976 or so, the other one Pittsburgh 2009.

Ballerina
This tune was written as nearly in a classical process as I’ve ever come. At the time I was living in a squat in Islington (north London), eating erratically and having virtually reversed the normal day/night living patterns, as sometimes happens with musicians, so most of the work happened after midnight. The rather straightforward narrative lyrics came first, and were polished to a fine sheen before beginning the musical writing. For the latter I actually took a sheet of partition (music) paper and wrote the melody first without the guitar. I then actually wrote the guitar part note by note, a process that is almost totally foreign to most folk and rock composition (including mine). For the recording, Mick Linnard came up with a nice second guitar part, and my brother Jeffrey arranged some (in-house, literally) strings and the whole thing is pretty precious. Not surprisingly, this was my late father’s favorite song of mine. He was a Ph.D. in music theory…

Gas It Up
This one is the opposite extreme. Written as a groove tune for the Uptown Combo (it appears on the “Bloodshot Moon” CD) , it was re-recorded on Heartland Variations in an acoustic version. Here the inspiration was an A minor groove that suggested road movement, then an ode to another time (my youth) when cars were huge and gas cheap. I wrote the chorus first, then left it first so the song goes chorus/verse/chorus/verse/chorus with lots of space for instrumental improvisation and stretching out. The lyrics are minimal, but use the car metaphor in a reasonably effective way. For example: “The girls have got the top down/ stopped and laughin’ at the red light / I can feel that motor runnin’ / Underneath the hood tonight.” This one wrote itself quickly, I stopped my impulse to complicate things, and it has been popular and a fun tune for performance purposes, since I mostly have excellent musicians with me who need a little space on occasion.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.

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