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.

Be sure to check out the PBS site for more on The Music Instinct.

I’ve done something that I’ve wanted to try for a long time. Taking my Christmas gift certificate to Long and McQuade, I bought a violin bow to use on my guitar. Let me tell you, it is not easy to just pick up a bow and start playing. First thing I noticed was that the notes I was hearing were not the notes I was playing. That is to say that there must have been some weird harmonic thing going on because, depending on where I stroked the bow on the string, I could make a whole range of pitches occur. I finally found that it sounds best when I bow right over the bridge pickup. I’ll have to investigate this further, but if pressed for a reason, I’d say it was because the bow sets up a fixed node and I’m hearing artificial fundamentals whose pitch corresponds to where the bow is on the string and either the fretted note or the bridge. This explanation could be entirely bullshit, I don’t know. I did try bowing open strings over the 12th fret, which is a fixed node in the string’s vibration. The results of this were unsatisfactory.

It is a good thing I had strung my guitar with flatwounds some time back, as it is much kinder on the bow. Flat or roundwound, either way you end up with a lot of tacky rosin on your strings … and your guitar. Be sure to wipe up after you’re done.

As the fretboard on the guitar is not arched like stringed instruments that are meant to be played with the bow, single note lines are restricted to the E string (your choice of which). If you want to increase the availability of strings for playing single notes you’ll have to either get a modified bridge or a specially made guitar. The later you can get from TogaMan. Currently I’m liking the sounds of the low E and A string drawing out long growly power chords, I suppose I could open tune the guitar to make use of all the strings. I wonder what it would sound like if I did that and used my slide?

I also found I had to wear my guitar lower. This made the action of bowing easier to do. Holding the bow is a bit odd too. So far the best grip I found, that gives me the most control is to hold it like I’m holding a pencil with the frog (see here) underneath my thumb, and my middle finger pressing on the back of the hairs. Not having my right arm to push back against the body of the guitar, I find it taxing to keep the guitar from swinging when I move my fretting hand.

Some alternatives exist if you want a bowed sound without the bow. The Piranha Guitar Bow is a device that shrinks a bow into a hand-held package. If you want to get even further down the technology path you could always pick up an E-bow from here.

Learning to play with a bow is challenging but yields great rewards in the range of expression you can coax out of your strings. If you’re looking to tackle a new technique to add to your repetoire I would highly suggest picking up a bow from your local music shop and spend some time making beautiful music.

I understand the need for people to compartmentalise as a shortcut to making sense of their world, but this need is at odds with our need to be understood. Sure we could rattle off the closest genre, jazz, hip-hop, punk, world beat, though we’ll be left with the unsettling feeling that the questioner doesn’t have the full story. We’ll often add, “… but I have a lot of Rockabilly influences” or “… with a Latin twist.” or “but with a lot of Frank Zappa mixed in.” As for myself, I was raised on Folk music, taught Classical on the piano, and Blues on the guitar. I got caught up in the Grunge and Alternative movement during my teens, and later turned more to Worldbeat, Garage Revival, and Anti-folk. Yet this still doesn’t include everything that has contributed to my musical being, and frankly I still don’t know what to call the music I produce. Rock may be a catch-all but as I mentioned above, it’s not quite the full picture.

A list of known genres is huge and splintered, as encompassing descriptions are riven and riven again to describe a style with ever increasing accuracy. Let’s say that you produce electronica music. Now what kind? Synthpop, Glitch, Chiptune? Something else? How about Metal? Black, Speed, Doom? It soon becomes an exercise in distinguishing subtle taxonomic shifts in tempo, or lyrical content, or any other characteristic. Sometimes the variants are so finely divided that only those thoroughly steeped in the subculture would be aware of the differences. There’s the sticking point. By giving an name to the thing we allow ourselves to form community. The music now has a stable identification that can be defined, related to, discussed, altered, and displayed. It becomes a banner that unites a ragtag group of fans and musicians signifying their belonging. Such a growth can be seen in the example of Filk music.

When someone asks what music do you play they hope to gain a better understanding of what flag you fly. Which really speaks to how much we use music as an identity signpost. Not to sound obvious but music is a form of expression. What you express and how you express it tells the world about you as a person. Music is a well understood and recognised shorthand for categorising types of people in this modern social landscape. Which may be why I don’t like answering the question. I don’t want to give someone the Coles notes version of me. I’m afraid something will be lost or misunderstood in the transaction. As musicians we all have that need to express ourselves. We try to do this fully yet succinctly in the brief time that a song lasts. I’m not surprised that we’d rather not a label be stuck to what we do so that we can be summed up in even less time, thought, and accuracy.

There is no easy answer to the question. No one is ever as simple as the box you put them in, and everyone is resistant to being boxed. When pressed to answer the query “What kind of music do you play?” the best answer I can give is “My own.”