Lordy, an old song came to my mind tonight.  I wrote about '79 or '80 for my soon to be mother-in-law.  I remember having the first verse and thinking it was kinda' cute. My Anne told her mom I was writing it and suddenly she wanted to hear it.  I had to come up with second short verse right away.  That's as far as I ever went with it. 

Writing Into the Sun: Part 2

Okay, so the second verse came as I was driving to work.  I have  a twenty-five minute commute and I often use it to reactivate whatever was on my musical mind the night before.  I find it is a pretty productive time to come up with lyrics or melody ideas.  If I don’t feel like working on a song I listen to my favorite radio station WTMD at Towson State University.  This isn’t just an unsolicited pat on the back.  I actually hear a lot of good and inspiring new music on this station.   Much better than listening to the classic rock or country stations. Good music there as well, but I hunger for fresh musical meat, you know.   I keep a small digital voice recorder with me at all times.  It is invaluable as a songwriter’s tool.  I didn’t have it with me today for some reason so I just had to write the words down as soon as I got to work.  Fortunately I already had the chord structure and melody from the first verse and the chorus.  The words to the chorus came right before I recorded this.  I just decided I had to have something more to record so when I sat down to record the second verse I told myself to pull something out.  Sometimes that impatience and focus works, and sometimes you just have to consider the failed struggle a “seeding” time.  This time I guess there were already some seeds sprouting.

So there we have the first verse and chorus.  That, as usual is the easy part.  In a way, I’ve said everything I wanted to say.  The task now is to either say it again in a second verse,  and maybe a bridge, but in a completely different way.  That, or realize there’s really something else to say, which is a great deal more satisfying.   I don’t know about this young fella’ yet.  There’s nothing jumping out at me, but sitting on it for a couple of days with the understanding that my mind should be running it in the background should hopefully lead to some lovely nugget.  I’ll let you know how many days it takes.   In the meantime I’ll try to post a couple of other things or maybe even start another song.  Nitey-nite.

Writing "Into the Sun" part 1

So, since I haven’t been exactly prolific lately, as a songwriter that is, I decided that today I would begin writing a song and post it’s progress to the blog.  I think maybe I’ll just post everything I write to the blog as I write it.   This one is written specifically to post here however. Each time I add to the song I will post that part and discuss where it came from and how I wrote it.  Maybe it won’t be interesting at all.  The experiment could completely suck.  But maybe not.  Maybe to another songwriter it might be interesting. 

Anyway, here’s the first section of the song and how I wrote it.  So I go down to the basement, pick up my guitar and start playing random chords to see if anything jumps out at me.  The first two chords I play catch my attention.  I don’t know what the chords are and don’t care.  They just sound good and lead me somewhere.  Even later I won’t care what the chords are.  I’m pretty musically illiterate that way and therefore unable to navigate myself to another part of a song based on theory.  In this case the guitar gives me a foundation to develop lyrics.  Another time I may, without the guitar devise a melody and lyric at the same time while driving down the road and then have to figure out the guitar parts to support it.  But I like this method.  Get lost in a guitar part for a while and then once it’s in my head carry it with me and ask my mind to build a lyric.  No muse comes visiting and makes a lyric delivery.  I ask my mind to work.  Editing comes later and can range from the brutal to subtle tense changes or the like.  Here we go.

Okay, so the music, pretty basic I admit, was there immediately.  The first set of words came later the same afternoon as I sat on my deck.  I realized from the start that music sounded summery and poppy, so I decided on a song about the beginning of summer having just switched over to daylight savings time and put away the fireplace tools for the summer.  Now, I have the rest of the first verse to come up with.  Since I already know where I want the chorus to go musically, maybe if I’m lucky I can go right into the chorus.  We’ll find out.

Okay, so when I was a kid my dad introduced me to the sound of the Hammond B3 organ via the late great Jimmy Smith.  Take a look at this video, one of many Barbara Dennerlein videos on youtube, and witness how she uses her entire body to create her incredible music.  This is just a soundcheck for a concert and the cameraman focuses on her feet when she takes off playing a bass line with them.  At around 1:20 she realizes he's filming her and she takes off.  Her improvisational creativity  is unsurpassed and is at the forefront even in this soundcheck.
http://youtu.be/ZqSBKZzCrM0

This is my humble work station in my basement.  It's where I write songs and record very basic tracks.  It ain't much compared to the setups I have seen others use, but I'm a poor boy baby.  Just a little Alesis recorder plugged into an ancient HP computer that isn't used for anything else. No internet connection, no printer hooked up, nuthin'.  Coupla' Samson mics that for sure aren't the best but they were on sale and do a decent job with basic stuff.  I record in Cubase which is what you see on the screen.   There's a little hand-held voice recorder on the table too.  I take it everywhere and record any words or melody ideas that might come to me.  Right now it has like 85 short recordings on it.  Some are just stuff that sneak up on me in the car or ideas I have while I'm practicing guitar and come up with something I think I could lay some words over.  I use it too if I am working on a specific song for several days in a row and I might come up with something anywhere I am.

Another thing I'm working on down here is the harmony vocals for my next CD.  I have recorded all the guitar and lead vocal tracks in a legit studio, brought them home on a disk, loaded it into Cubase and am designing the way I want the harmonies to sound.  I am soooooo slow at this.  But I want them to be different, almost a signature, so it's nice to come down here, turn the computer on, put on the headphones and design away.  It's kind of like making a rough draft or a study .   When I have what I want, I'll go back in the studio and be able to put them together much faster (cheaper).

Okay, there are so many good, no great songwriters around the world that few Americans ever get to hear.  I stumbled on this website largely about Finnish pop music but which also reviews music from other locales.  A lot of the Swedish pop band The Merrymakers which in some ways sound pretty derivative, but don't we all in some ways.Reminds me somewhat of the Finn brothers (Crowded House etc.) with some Beatles creeping in.   Check out the other postings at One Chord to Another if you're looking for something off the beaten track.


http://www.onechord.net/2012/02/28/power-pop-15-the-merrymakers/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tavZ7E-MetQ

I suppose the reason I have never spent a great deal of time thinking  about song meanings is that I like to think I have at least a vague understanding of what goes on in the songwriting process.  Some songs are so direct and subject driven that the meaning is universally understood or at least identified.  Who has to question the meaning of  “You Are So Beautiful” or “Happy Birthday”.   Still some listeners may tend to wonder who the song was written about or what particular event it is describing.  We tend to ask that question particularly if the writer is also the performer and so we imagine he or she is singing about his own experience.  I recall many years ago reading an interview with Dan Fogelberg (and I am paraphrasing here, drawing from the deep recesses of my memory) in which he said he was amazed at the tendency of his audience to assume that his songs undoubtedly were kind of a recorded diary.  Fogelberg’s songs were often inspired or colored by the observed lives of others or completely imagined out of thin air.  That’s not to say that he didn’t have his autobiographical moments.  “Leader of the Band” was of course about his father and their relationship.  But overall , he was making the point that he , as well as most songwriters I imagine, create most of their work from bits and pieces of a known reality at best.   There have always been those songwriters who worked only from their own experience.  Some view it as a sort of cathartic therapy and will only write when a particular experience has moved them to do so.  They await their muse.  Others sit down on a regular basis and muse-be-damned they are wrestling with words and combining them with a melody whether the song is written from their own view or completely imagined.  I would venture to say that three-quarters of my own songs are pulled entirely out of thin air and have no identifiable inspiration or personal connection whatsoever. 

In the end I don’t think it matters much what the songwriter was trying to say. More important is what the listener hears.  Michael Stipe of REM said: “The songwriters interpretation of his own words is the least important.  The listeners is the most important.  ….To me the strength of a good song is the images it creates in your own mind, in the listeners mind.  When you start locking images into a song you start reducing the imagination of the listener.”

People are always wondering what Michael Stipe was singing about  in “Losing My Religion”.  Although the video contains religious imagery and there was a lot of talk about it being about turning away from religion, etc.  Stipe says the song, written without the notion of a video, was really about obsession and unrequited love.  “Losing my religion” is an old southern phrase referring how someone feels when something is going so bad that they are losing control.   I think it’s interesting how Stipe’s original intent escaped most listeners who assumed that he was saying something about religious belief that just had to be deep and meaningful.