Songwriting (ob-la-di, ob-la-da)

Although I was an English major in college, I never took any creative writing classes.  If there were songwriting classes, I missed-out on those too.  I just took the classes that allowed you read lots of books and poems and then sit around thinking and talking about what was up with Transcendentalism or The Romantic Poets or why William Faulkner seemed unable to win a wrestling match with any sentence he ever encountered.   Still, coming and going from the same building where all the creative types thought creative thoughts was bound to have some spillover effect.  But instead of some immortal teaching from a favorite professor serendipitously overheard in the hallway, the only creative directive I acquired was the mundane and oft-repeated "write what you know."

The partial retardation referenced in the previous post on this blog has precluded me from knowing as many things as I ought to, but one of the things I do know is this:  I love the sun.  I also know that my toenails look better clipped short and painted a dark color, but the sun seemed like a better place to start from a songwriting perspective.  My love of the sun (more specifically its facility for heat and light) is well-known in the circles I run in (and I run in circles a lot).  Indeed, my daughters have concluded that I am actually a lizard, badly lost and dislocated in Minnesota.

Lizard or not, I had made the mistake of mentioning, in what I thought was an off-handed way, to Jim and Andy that I might have written some song-type things and that I might be able to write some more of them if we formed a band.  By "songs," I mean a grouping of words organized in short lines on a page without any melody or musical framework of any kind but which, in my mind, I imagined to be the kinds of words that one could sing to some music, if one wanted to.  I had done this well before the "let's form a band" e-mail.  It wasn't art so much as necessity that made me do it.  Frankly, the unexpected and panicked run of loose thoughts across the backyard of my brain had gotten annoying over the years.  A turn-of-phrase or poorly formed idea would get startled out of a crease and dart into the daylight because I hadn't realized it was there as I ambled along, preoccupied with my "what should we have for dinner tonight" concerns.  Then it would just sit there, in the middle of the lawn, desperate for cover, but of course only drawing more attention to itself.  Capturing them seemed like the only appropriate thing to do.  

Of course, once you put a few rabbit-thoughts together in a pen, you know what happens.  Cottontails everywhere eating the hydrangeas and really messing with your garden.  This is why animal husbandry is best left to the professionals.  I happen to be a professional, but I don't do anything useful.  I'm a lawyer.

But back to the songwriting.  Having recently solicited others to form a band and invested time, energy and most of my self esteem in learning to sing other people's songs, the next thing to do was what bands are known for the world over: create original music.  This was Jim's point when he decreed that "we should work on original stuff next."  Having practically volunteered by my earlier disclosure, Jim and Andy looked to me to come up with the word part of some songs.  (Jim proffered some lyrics about the hollow feeling inside that happens when you discover the box of Wheat Thins is empty, but we're saving that for our second album, which is to be themed around dry goods with maybe a few ditties about perishables, too.)

So, how does one go about writing a song?  What is involved and where does the creative spark come from?  Honestly, I have no idea.  I can only tell you what has occurred in the particular set of circumstances that I am familiar with.  In my case, we had the initial "things I know" decision point -- sun versus toenails.  I think we're all glad that the sun won out there.  Then, there's the need for some words and possibly, though not necessarily, some rhyming.  This requires a pen or pencil, some paper and a little bit of time.  In this instance, I rounded-up a sunny day, my notebook, and a pencil and plunked myself down in the backyard one afternoon last summer, where I observed and enjoyed the sun and waited for the rabbits to start running.  A few fistfuls of fur later, I ended-up with the following:

     Streaming down from above
     Raining bright, clean love
     Golden delicious
     California ambition
     There is nothing more real
     Than the electrifying feel
     Of solar fingers white and hot
     Give me everything you've got

     Sun, give me sun
     Set me down
     Light me up
     Give me sun

     Illumination, sensation
     Blissful radiation
     Seeping down into my core
     Filling me up, wanting more
     Untie my nerves
     Unwind my mind
     Ease me out of
     This world's bind

     Sun, give me sun
     Set me down
     Light me up
     Give me sun

Now, the thing about song lyrics all by themselves is that they seem silly all by themselves.  A finished song, as we all know, includes both words and melody.  This is how we usually first encounter them, hearing both together.  With music there is a symbiotic relationship between the parts with each complementing and supporting the other.  So, for example, when you see the words, "ob-la-di, ob-la-da," your brain simultaneously plays the music in your head (and you probably continue, unprompted: "life goes on, bra, la, la la, la, life goes on.")  You don't know it any other way.  If, however, you had never heard that song and I handed you a piece of paper with those lyrics on it and told you it was a song, you would be very underwhelmed.  You would probably also double-check to make sure that you weren't relying on me for anything really important.   But putting aside the "how-many-rock-gods-can-jam-on-the-head-of-a-pin" theorization for the moment, this is really just a long and ineffective way of saying, "don't harsh on the lyrics until you've heard the music."  After that, you are free to conclude that the whole thing sucks.  I'm just asking you to hold-off on reaching that conclusion until the appropriate time.

So, the "Sun" lyrics took their place in my folder and we practiced more or less weekly for a while.  Then, one day, Andy sends an e-mail with a few MP3 files attached.  The e-mail says something about how they're just snippets, not fully formed, likely not any good, but he's passing them along in case we find anything we like in them.  One of them, titled "Test#1" sounded like this:



This particular snippet really stuck with me.  I listened to the guitar line a few times and thought about what the melody wanted to say.  I assumed I would need to write some new lyrics to go with it and wasn't quite sure how that would work as I've never had any music in mind, let alone presented to me, when chasing rabbits before.  Then, the words to "Sun" started attaching themselves to the melody and I began to see how the two could work together.   I e-mailed Jim and Andy that I thought I had some lyrics that would work with Andy's melody  in "Test #1" and that I was eager to get their reactions.  Jim replied that he was eager to react.  At our next practice, we tried it out a few times and then recorded the following rough take to preserve how the song was coming together so we wouldn't forget it in between practices:



It should be noted that this version of the song is still very rough.  We hadn't yet figured out the tempo,  the drums, the bass line or whether three entirely different people should be brought in and directed to start from scratch.  We have developed a universal disclaimer that we use amongst the three of us to deal with these issues whenever we are exchanging melodies, vocal renditions, lyrics or other ideas and it seems we would be well-advised to employ it here.  The purpose of the disclaimer, of course, is to shield each individual from the inevitable harsh and unrelenting judgment,  criticism and disgust that would usher forth without it.  The disclaimer goes something like this, "I apologize for the lack of rhythm, timing, accuracy, in-tune-ness, and overall musical skill.  I was/am, drunk, hungover, my computer had a virus, my computer was drunk/hungover, my metronome broke and/or I had a head cold when I did this so I couldn't really hear it at all and you might just want to ignore it altogether.  I'm sorry I've wasted your time."

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "O.k.  Now I've read the lyrics, heard the guitar melody, heard the two of them more or less together and been provided with a very comprehensive disclaimer.  Surely now must be the appropriate time to reach that conclusion about suckiness that I was chastised about earlier."   But you would be wrong.  You have to wait for one more version and then we will have reached judgment day.  That, my friends, is the final, Garage-Band assisted, Sonic Goat Productions version . . . which will be revealed in a future post.