Where has the time gone? Between work, family, and outside projects I’m afraid I’ve neglected to post. Well it’s time to remedy this. The past two months have been quite busy for me. I’ve been writing up a storm of songs, though few are complete. There are missing lyrics here, unfinished arrangements there, and now I’m left with a pile of half-songs. If I were to make a resolution this year, it would be to bone up on my stick-with-it-ness. If you don’t have a job writing music then you end up eeking out time wherever you can. I often end up working on melodies on my drive to work and back. It is a great time when you don’t have any distractions (other than driving), and no one to hear you fumble while you try things out. The only trouble is remembering what I came up with. I usually just end up repeating a catchy melodic phrase in my head until it is burned in there, or I get home and can disappear to the music room for a few minutes.
Frankly it often takes me months to finish a song. There are few exceptions when something came together in a few days, but that is a rarity. I have pieces of songs that have been put on hiatus for years, only to be dragged out again when I’ve discovered a missing piece that I can now incorporate. For me, this lengthy writing process happens because I think that songs have a certain way that they want to be. No, I don’t think that a song is cognizant of itself, or has a self-image, or is like some fully formed spirit that is ready to be born. This is just metaphor. To clarify: I think that there is a way in which a good song is put together that is right for that particular song. I feel that in the writing process you need to work with that, and respect that in order to have a solid flow.
Say you’ve come up with this great riff, and you want to expand it into a full tune. That riff will have a personality. It will have a tone, and poise. It will suggest to you where it wants to go, melodically speaking. If you do not listen to that suggestion, if you try to make that riff into something it is not, or fit it into other structures that it does not get along with, then that song is destined to languish in some notebook. The imaginary, future song that you were going to write from this seed, had a form it was going to take. Your job as a songwriter is to discover that form.
I see this happen in my own writing. I’ll write out some lyrics, sit on them for awhile, then try to fit a melody around them. Sometimes the style I had in mind at the time the lyrics were written is completely not the style that ends up working. The words have a certain rhythm, and natural intonation that suggest one type of melody over another. When the lyrics were first written, those forms weren’t apparent as I was not focusing on constructing melody at that time. If I were to try to stick with the original vision, the song may sound awkward. I would not have respected the way the melody wants to be.
Never throw anything out. I have notes, binders, and scraps of paper going back to almost the time I started songwriting. The reason for this is that, snatches of tunes, a neat chord progression, a couple of lines that you wrote years ago may find their way into the song that you are writing today. Mine your failures for gold. Often you will find that the songs that didn’t work, failed because part of them wanted to be something else.
For example a song that I’m working on now, the refrain comes from a song that I wrote about 10 years ago. The refrain I had always liked and it was pretty much complete, with the exception of one line that needed tweaking. The verses that I had originally wrote to go with this refrain didn’t make the grade. There was no cohesion and lyrically it was a mess. So that song stayed in the notebook. The new verses come from a song that I had written a few years earlier. That song I deemed a failure for the same reasons as the first. It did have one thing going for it: musically the verses were quite strong. It wasn’t until recently that I was going through my notes revisiting old tunes when I saw that these pieces could be combined and work well. I had discovered parts of songs that wanted to be together, but I didn’t know it at the time. Now the only thing left is to write new lyrics for the verse.
If you ever find that a song just isn’t working for you, don’t trash it. Tear it apart, save all the pieces, and rebuild it, working in the direction that the song is taking you, because you built it wrong in the first place going in the direction that you wanted. I guarantee you will end up with better songs for it.
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