Songwriting Strategies Read online

  CHAPTER 1

  Song Seeds

  What’s the question most frequently asked of songwriters by nonsongwriters? “Do the words come first, or does the music come first?” Different songwriters give different answers to this question. My admittedly smart-aleck answer is: “Yes!” Let me explain.

  Many songwriters have one, or just a few, preferred processes for starting a song. Some songwriters always start from lyrics, others from melody or from chords. Other writers experience inspirations arriving as fragments of entire songs: bits of lyric, melody, and chords, all together. Hit songwriter Diane Warren describes how in her writing, some songs might start from an “idea,” while others begin with her just sitting at the keyboard, playing arbitrary sequences and listening for chords that sound “cool” together. 1

  Writers’ processes and preferred sources of inspiration also change over the course of their creative development. Paul Simon has written some of the most powerful and eloquent lyrics in contemporary music; yet, he has also worked on projects (many of them collaborations with musicians from varied world music genres) where the lyrics came relatively late, in a compositional process driven heavily by musical source inspirations.

  While different writers have favored starting points, and some can start different songs from multiple directions, most often a particular song has a distinct starting point, arising primarily from one modality: a lyrical phrase, a melody, a chord progression, a story or situation. So, yes—for the most part—the music comes first, or the lyrics come first.…

  It’s true that by the time we become aware of a song idea, it’s often already a mélange of lyric, melody, rhythmic phrasing, chord riffs, etc. But this is after we’ve consciously or unconsciously been “working” the initial inspiration in various ways. Only rarely does a starting idea for a song begin with strong, original material in multiple aspects—lyrical or musical—simultaneously. The next time you get an idea for a song, pay attention to the very moment, the literal split second, when you first grabbed the idea (or the idea first grabbed you!)—when the starting point came to your awareness. You’ll likely find that the stimulus or inspiration began as a small, singular idea, arising from a particular direction: a lyric phrase, a snatch of melody, or an unexpected chord move. I call this initial burst of inspiration or moment of inception a song seed.

  Song seeds arrive from an endless variety of sources and directions. A lyric starting point may be a title or hook, a great single line, an interesting phrase, or even an unusual word. A snippet of melody, an intriguing move between chords your hands have never found before, or a starting riff on the guitar might serve as a musical seed. Or your seed could be a chance phrase overheard in a café, a story a friend tells you or that you hear on the news, a sudden memory of a past experience, a curious scene that strikes you on the street, or the way light comes through your window at a certain hour of the afternoon. For a hip-hop producer, it might be a “found sound” from a classic recording or a sampled industrial sound.

  Catching Seeds

  Many experienced songwriters make a regular practice of collecting song seeds, though they may call them by different names. They’re perennially vigilant for good song seeds, even throughout their everyday activities. When interviewed, songwriters love to describe serendipitous ways ideas for songs first occurred to them. But for every idea that led to a great song, a songwriter most likely caught, and scribbled down in some way, dozens of other ideas—ideas that still sit as drafts in a journal or on a scratch recording, seeds that haven’t yet turned into songs. This is not a failure of the strategy, but an indication of its power.

  Some writers are adept at writing songs different ways, precisely by recognizing and capturing these different kinds of starting points. Studying the genesis of different Beatles songs is a tour through every imaginable kind of starting point for a song: a melody remembered from a dream (“Yesterday”), an old circus poster (“For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”), passing phrases (“A Hard Day’s Night”), a child’s description of a picture (“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), and borrowings or “judicious theft” of musical ideas from model songs (“Come Together,” inspired by a particular chord move from Smokey Robinson’s

  “I Heard It through the Grapevine”).

  We can move from observations about songwriters’ informal seed-catching practices to a more intentional strategy and creative practice, by honing our awareness of seminal seed-catching moments. This practice improves our songwriting overall, for in being alert for and catching song seeds, we’re practicing finding and recognizing great material for songs. A more disciplined approach to song seed catching also helps us learn to write songs from all directions, and in all directions.

  Seeds and Personal Voice

  Magpies are known to like to collect shiny things. Each songwriter is like a unique variety of magpie, responding to distinctive kinds of song ideas—our own private “shiny,” as it were. (Apologies to magpies and Firefly fans.) Some of us delight in downward-tumbling Dorian moans; others are always on the hunt for good double entendres. The primary aspect of any song seed is that it catches your interest, attracts your attention as a songwriter. While some titles are instantly recognizable as potential hits by almost everyone, many great lyric seeds might catch the attention of one writer, while breezing right by another. (This is why good co-writing partners often act as “song seed catchers” from each other’s casual conversation in the session.)

  Song seeds can be deliberately sought out/hunted and gathered, as well as caught serendipitously during everyday activities. But the seeds that teach us most about our own songwriter’s point of view, voice, and style are often those that we stumble on spontaneously. This requires being attentive for song seeds that leap out of the context of daily life.

  You also need to be prepared to catch seeds as close as possible to the moment you notice them. The “half-life” of a song seed can be surprisingly fleeting. At the moment it comes to mind, it seems distinct and unforgettable. By the time you walk to the end of the block, it may be a vague impression. By the time you get home, you’ve likely not only forgotten the seed, but forgotten you found a seed. The remedy is to faithfully record it, in some way, literally within moments of noticing it. You may drive friends and loved ones bonkers, by pulling out your notepad in the midst of intimate conversations or suddenly pausing while discussing what restaurant to go to, with that glassy look in your eye. But that’s the price of being (or hanging with) a songwriter.

  Because of this need to catch seeds immediately, in the midst of daily life, it’s also important to catch the seed quickly, then put down the pen or turn off the recorder and move on. Don’t sit down in the hallway where the idea came to you, pull out your notebook, and try to finish the song then and there. Do this a few times, and your wiser, responsible self will simply stop your seed catching the next time an idea comes along.

  Seed vs. Filler

  Another challenge in the discipline of song seed catching is learning to catch just the seed in its most minimal, fragmentary form. Resist the temptation to quickly attach inessential material to the seed. I use the mildly pejorative term filler for such “supporting” material, which often gets in the way as we work later with the seed. Just as we can capture true song seeds in any facet, material in any facet can be filler, if it distracts from the seminal, powerful, and inspiring core of the seed idea.

  Let’s say you become aware of a potential lyric line, sung to a particular rhythm and melody. Chances are, the idea started as either a lyrical or a

  musical inspiration—that is, the initial energy came from one or the other direction. How did it get elaborated with that other material, without your conscious effort? As soon as we have the first “burst” of a song seed—sometimes even before we notice it—our songwriter minds go to work to provide scaffolding for the idea. If it’s a lyric line, we’re likely to grab a melody easy for us to access and remember. Similarly, we might start with a
melodic seed and start chanting words to fill up the musical space. Or, discovering an intriguing chord progression at our instrument, we hum filler melody or words over the progression almost immediately.

  We may generate filler just as an aid to remembering the seed—the amber in which we catch the fly of inspiration. Or we may be responding to self-imposed pressure to arrive quickly at something that feels more like a complete song, or at least a piece of one. Whatever the motivation, the problem filler presents is that we quickly lose the ability to distinguish seed from filler. Suppose we support a lyric seed with melodic filler. Since we’re using the melody to remember a fresh, unexpected lyrical idea, it’s playing a supporting role. We don’t expect or even want that melody to be as interesting as the lyric. Yet five minutes later, we’ve forgotten which came first—lyric or melody. We may never revisit the melody again; we treat the fragment as a whole. Now, we’re working not with a seed but a sapling.

  Listening back later, we could in theory discard the filler melody, peel back to the original lyrical seed, and write a stronger supporting melody. But instead, we tend to uncritically accept the lyric plus hastily thrown-together music as an inseparable chunk. If enamored of the lyric, we may decide we like, or can live with, the music, and the filler music lives on into the final song. Or, listening with more discerning ears (ours, or our publisher’s), we may hear that the filler music is clichéd and predictable, or that the piece as a whole lacks coherence. So, we reject the whole song, throwing the lyrical baby out with the musical bathwater (or vice versa). The seed is lost.

  This is how we often wind up with evocative lyrics sung to trite melodies or banal progressions, or hooky melodies set to insipid, first-draft quality lyrics. I’ve had to rescue many song seeds, sometimes long after the fact, by excavating them from surrounding filler material and starting over—after laboriously recapturing the original, fresh idea. Bad lyrics (melodies, chords) can happen to good writers as the result of a simple process misstep—made in the first few moments of working with a song seed.

  Happily, we can avoid many of these pitfalls via a simple process remedy as well, part of seed catching as a strategy: capture just the seed idea, sans filler, in stripped-down form rather than compound fragments of a bit of lyric, melody, and chords, bound together. Isolating seed material from the encumbrances of hastily generated filler frees you later, working the seed, to find supporting material that truly matches the seed, for the greater integrity of the song.

  To be clear, I’m talking here about filler generated just after the moment the seed first catches your ear—material that you’re likely to record with the seed. When working on the song in earnest, making associative connections to related material is part of the natural way we write. That’s why it feels natural and right to generate filler as quickly as we can. But if we can practice capturing the seed in its original ragged, fragmentary, unadulterated state, it’s actually much easier later to recognize and recapture the “juice” or essence of the seed, without first needing to extricate it from filler. Learning to separate the song seed “wheat” from the filler “chaff” leaves us with more workable material for our songs. It’s also great training for working independently with material in the different facets.

  Don’t assume a seed idea is filler, though, just because it sounds simple. As you learn to catch seeds, you get used to hearing lyrics, melodies, and chord progressions in a “seed state”—naked, brave, nothing distracting. You may at first want to dismiss some of these ideas—especially melodic ideas, for some reason—as silly, trite, or derivative. Yet they may be strong ideas that will become mighty, anthemic choruses. Learning to strip away the inessentials becomes an act of trust in the power of the seed idea on its own.

  Varieties of song Seeds

  Let’s turn now to an examination of different types of seeds we can catch as songwriters. We’ll first discuss catching seeds in the form of ideas or concepts, prior to embodiment as material in facets. We’ll then look at distinctive aspects of seeds from lyric and musical sources. Learning to isolate song seeds in terms of individual facets, with precision, will depend on more detailed exploration we’ll do in the chapters on each respective facet that follow.

  Concept Seeds

  A song can begin from a concept or idea, a theme, a character, a situation, or a visual or other sensory image. In casual English usage, “concept” implies something fairly abstract. A song seed can be something more tangible: an image, an emotion triggered by a situation, a memory of a specific person or an imagined character, or a photograph that suggests a story to you. Seeds can thus range from the abstract or “conceptual” to the highly sensory—senses here including sound inspirations, like samples, particular timbres of instruments, etc.

  As a simple placeholder or “umbrella term” I’ll call all these kinds of materials concept seeds. This is because, from the standpoint of how we need to handle such seeds in the 360° approach, the process is similar even though the seed material may be of radically differing types or qualities, and degrees of clarity around what the real working “concept” for the seed is going to be. The key is that concept seeds are any seeds not yet embodied as specific material in a facet. Rather, they are reminders or prompts you’ll use later to generate material in the facets. This distinction is key to the 360° songwriting approach. If we’re writing from all directions, in all directions, then, when working from a concept seed, our next step needn’t be searching for a lyric; we might work directly from concept to a melody or chord progression, for example.

  This does present a practical problem in distinguishing concept seeds vs. lyric seeds in particular. We jot down lyric seeds in words. When our starting point is a concept seed, not yet set in compelling lyric form, we use words to jot down the idea as well. Yet, it’s important to distinguish a lyric seed from a textual reminder of a concept seed. A common pitfall is mistaking the concept reminder for a lyric seed later.

  Here’s an example. I see an old woman get on the bus. She has too many bags to carry and fumbles with her pocketbook while trying to get out her bus card. Something about this scene strikes my fancy. I pull out my song seed notebook and jot down: “Old woman on the 71 bus, too many bags to carry.” What kind of seed is this, and how will I work with it? 2 Suppose two days later, I find this phrase and treat it as a lyric seed:

  Old woman on the Seventy-One Bus

  Too many bags to carry

  Not a bad lyric: there’s internal slant rhyme of “on/One,” alliteration of “bus/bags” etc. But these sonic aspects aren’t what captured my interest initially; the seed was the image, the scene. Also: do I need the real-life detail of the “71” bus—part of the original context? Especially since it crowds the line? Or I might have jotted down:

  Old woman on the bus

  Carrying way too many shopping bags

  Hear the second line’s “prose-y” rhythm? This suggests that this is a concept seed, one I want to be careful not to force-fit too hastily into a lyric. When we uncritically accept a concept seed description, jotted down as a reminder of an image or story, as an actual lyric line, we can wind up with sonically or rhythmically awkward lyrics. Later, in revision, we may need to painfully wrestle that idea into an actual line, having already built musical phrasing, rhyme scheme, and form around it. Poor old woman; hasn’t she had it hard enough already?

  An extreme example of this error is when we mistake a concept seed for

  a song title or hook. Such a leap to lyric material can preemptively force decisions about overall song form, theme, and focus that can hamper us later in developing the song. It can also lead to those too on-the-nose titles that “tell” vs. “show”—flaws that creative writing (and lyric writing) teachers love to pounce on. A songwriter’s career might pivot on the difference between: “If you don’t love me, I can’t make you…” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me (If You Don’t)…”

  By all means, capture interesting concept seeds when they strik
e you. Simply recognize them as such. Of course, you won’t always immediately know which kind of seed you have at the time you catch it. Don’t dither deciding which song seed list to add your seed to. But remember to be alert for concept seeds as such, and be willing to write them down as is—even if the line doesn’t sound right yet, or doesn’t rhyme. Don’t pass it by; but also, don’t try to wrestle it into suitable lyric form on the spot, before you write it down.

  Let’s go back to our old gal. Wanting to feel like a quick and clever songwriter, I reach for and write down this rhymed couplet:

  Old woman on the train

  Stumbles in out of the rain

  Writing this instead of a simple description and reminder for the starting image, I’ve made two mistakes. The rhymed couplet is not the seed, but an off-the-cuff response. Neither the lone line “old woman on the train,” nor the rhymed couplet on its own, without the triggering image, would have caught my attention. Worse, in getting distracted by the rhymed couplet, I’ve lost my original idea (besides moving the poor woman from bus to train): the irony of her having too many bags to carry—with all that implies. That was the essence of my original observation—the important thing to capture and to work with later. Having lost this, I’ll wind up with a weaker, less focused song. Or I may look at the couplet later and say, “Why did I think that was worth writing down?” Use your time to capture the why; don’t always try to rhyme on the fly.

  By recognizing and recording concept seeds as such, and not conflating them with lyric seeds, we’re more likely later to take the time to experiment with varied lyrical expressions for the concept before settling. Distinguishing concept from lyric seeds will also expand your openness to lyric seeds that don’t immediately suggest a concept: lines that intrigue because you don’t (yet!) know what they mean.