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.

Tags: Creativity, Lyrics, Music Theory, Musical Styles, Songwriting, Writer's Block

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.