Songwriting tips: Writer’s block? Get unstuck.
Following on from my last post on songwriting, I wanted to share another more songwriting tips that have really hit home over the summer:
“Write about anything, whether nothing or nonsense”
…Say what?
When I got to a certain stage in my songwriting, I always wrote about *something*. It always had meaning, no matter how trivial. The songs and their imagery always made sense, it always had a preconceived concept at the core of it. I would write lyrics like prose devoid of music to convey what I wanted to say.
My songs were… OK. So-so.
Throw away your preconceptions
A little while ago I was at a singing teacher’s training event, and I was out for dinner with other teachers. We were chatting about songwriting, sharing songwriting tips, and one of them who is an accomplished writer with many songwriting tips of their own asked us:
“Have you ever written a song where you have no idea what it’s about?”
I was shocked by this question and the idea behind – write a song? without knowing EXACTLY what it’s meant to be about? They then proceeded to offend my preconceptions (and ego) by saying:
“Some of my best songs are songs where I’ve just written whatever comes to mind, sometimes they are about nothing, and sometimes they are complete nonsense”
I have to admit, I was pretty hammered by this. I just could not get my head around writing a song where I literally have no idea what’s it about – i.e. tantamount to nonsense. It tooks weeks, months even, to even pluck up the courage to try doing this – I mean, after all, how can you write something if you don’t know what it’s about?
I’ve now tried it, and I’m totally sold on it. It really gets the creative juices flowing. In combination with a ruthless desire just to get a song written rather than right, you can get some pretty epic songs done or 90% of the way there in record time.
Here’s an example…
I mentioned Matt Blick (@realmattblick on Twitter – www.mattblick.com online) in an earlier post on songwriting. He runs a songwriting group that meets once a month. The only condition of attendance is you have to have written and prepared a new song for that group. The frequency means you can’t spend months agonizing over a song, but it also means you can run out of seedling ideas very quickly – or at least seedling ideas you hold in high regard.
So armed with the knowledge I acquired after my First Songwriting Lesson, I started to write a song that came 100% from this idea of writing down whatever came to mind – almost stream of consciousness style.
I’d recently been inspired by Jimi Hendrix’ Little Wing so I was experimenting with some similar and interesting chord structures, when the words ‘Contentment’ and ‘strolling’ popped into my head. I thought around these words for a while, and the FIRST thing that came to mind was this phrase ‘Contentment strolling hand-in-hand with ecstasy’. It makes no sense. But rather than search for something else, I ran with it.
While the phrase didn’t make sense in itself, it conjured up all sorts of neat little ideas. A song about emotions. Maybe the emotions were labels for real people that we see. Maybe the emotions weren’t real but imaginary. Maybe it was all in someone’s head. Maybe it was all of these things…I liked the possible ideas so I ran with it.
And within half an hour I had two verses 90% complete. Another half-hour yielded the final version lyrics with a chord structure. Another half hour gave me the final arrangement. Here are the lyrics:
‘Contentment strolling hand in hand with ecstasy
From across the street we see hope arm in arm with glee
From a vacant chair comfort calls to wish them well
But what could that mean who could tell
From the side resentment’s staring at them coldly
And malice, likewise, from his front door
Hidden in the back, deep depression lying still
But what lies on his mind who could tell
For it’s all in your mind’
My entire thought process was ‘seeded’ by and grew from that first line. The image I liked most strongly was people strolling down a high/main street holding hands, so I wanted to mirror that with other positive emotions arm-in-arm across the street. I thought comfort was an interesting emotion or state, and that an empty (or vacant!) chair was really intriguing imagery to capture that idea. At that stage I thought it might be interesting to draw attention to the strangeness of the song by asking the listener ‘what could that mean? meh, who could tell?’.
At that point I decided that as the first verse had been filled with positive emotions, it might be nice to have a second verse referring to negative emotions. And while I’m at it, lets have the negative emotions acting on the first – i.e. resentment of the happy ‘couples’, malice as well… and deep depression which is so self-focused it is ignorant of these tensions. And again, it leaves space for a beautiful re-use of that phrase ‘who could tell?’. I particularly like that we have depression lying still, but then the question has to be asked ‘what is lying on his mind?’.
What did I learn?
While this is a song about nothing in particular, and each line in isolation is total nonsense, together they create a world that makes sense in itself and is very intriguing to read or hear about. It is by far one of the best songs I’ve written both musically and lyrically. What I think is most remarkable about this song is that the focus is always the same and the song is very cohesive, but it isn’t immediately apparent what it’s about, which draws the listener in and makes them wonder ‘what could THAT mean?’. Whereas often when we write songs we want the meaning to be 100% clear.
Perhaps having clarity or a deeply thought out concept isn’t as necessary as we think it is, and as long as we ‘seed’ a song with an idea, no matter how nonsensical or abstract, we can create a song borne wholly out of that idea, but in a far more interesting way than could be achieved through careful planning.
I definitely plan to write more songs where I write songs that I have no idea what they are about, nonsense or not, and I would encourage you to do the same.