Songwriting

Enough of the business already.  I can get caught up in "building a career" pretty easily, which always sends me on a downward spiral mentally.

Writing and performing music is what I do all this for, and I think it's important now to talk about how I do it.

Every song is different, but I've always thought of writing a song more along the lines of building a cabinet than waiting for something to fall out of the sky ready to go.  While I've had those moments, they're very few and far between.

Songwriting is a craft.  It's more a skill that needs to be honed than a talent that can be picked up naturally.  I'm not saying natural talent doesn't play a role, but it's much less than people think.


The typical way I've been writing songs for this band usually starts with a riff.  It can be something as shorts as 3 or 4 seconds, or as long as a 10 minute jam, which Matt and I usually come up with together.  I bought a 4 track recorder with two condenser mics on it that has been the best investment I think I've ever made.  We'll record the riff or jam so we don't forget it (which happens pretty quickly, sometimes even in the middle of playing it).  When we get motivated for new material, we listen back to it, then start building a basic structure.

That may be as simple as I think this should be the verse, do that a couple times, then come into the chorus, la de da, then I'll do that cool thing over that cool think you do.

When we get something resembling a song, we'll record it again in its entirety and we'll both take it and listen back.

I'll sit there with this crappy recording for days thinking about vocal melodies.   When I have an idea of what that'll be, I'll start putting random words together to see how it would sound.  Then, the writing begins.

I'll usually write the entire song; chorus, verses, bridge.  Then, I'll throw most of it away and start again.  I don't know why this works, but it does. I may keep a line I like, or use a word as an inspiration, but the second time around I try and write something completely different than the first time around.  I'll write the official "first draft" and bring it in to practice to see if I can play on top of the words or if it's going to sound good live.

If it works, I'll usually do a few tweeks to certain phrases or words, then we practice the thing over and over.  And over and over.

Sometimes this goes pretty smoothly, but for the most part, it tedious, boring, and frustrating.  The end product is usually something I can stand by for a long time though.


My main point is writing a song is work.  Like a piece of wood, a song needs to be chopped down, cut apart, measured, cut again, sanded and worked down without destroying the final product.  Some beginning carpenters leave their work too rough, others you can tell are too worked.

However it ends up relies entirely on the carpenter's skill and eye for detail.  I'm a horrible carpenter, and I'm not the best songwriter in the world.  I am getting, though.  I'm at a point that I know what works and what doesn't.  I think I can write a song with more meaning the the typical pop song, but still have a melody.  Those finer skills, though, I'll be sharpening for the rest of my life.


By the way, sorry for the length of this post.  Ah, screw it.  Who's reading this anyway?  Oh, you are.  Well, thank you for reading.