Doc you meant

Posted on 18/10/2014 by admin

I haven’t tied vignettes to one meaning so won’t attempt any discussion – other than to remark how similar one is to a song that stays around the one incident or object.

A song is a snapshot of attitudes and understandings just as a well written journalistic piece is. It may not set out with the same intention but we get the impression from speech patterns and idioms, from changing preoccupations, what era the song belongs.

A song is a document but it can’t be sealed shut or eaten by moths. It is pervading and absent by turn. Some songs are masterworks of propreitary shutdown while others are long in the public domain. There are derivative numbers and entirely ecclectic tunes; often now nestled side by side. Sorting out what makes a good song is a tortuous process. Not so, song generally. More and more songs are amalgams of beats devoid of a creative spark or they are synthesised to a state resembling gloop.

The fact that artistry exists in genres that are otherwise lacking only makes the critic’s job harder and while we aren’t tasked with the same brush as the song critic, we do well to observe the structural and stylistic notes they take.

There’s a mean adage about ‘those who can’t do, teach‘ and there are people involved in the music industry whose talents don’t run to composition. There are musos who can come up with a few scraps of the necessary to plug into their style. The degree to which this affects your own endeavours is up to you, but I’m of the firm belief that you don’t temper your own skillset because that’s where you are most fulfilled and producing work of a quality.

Another problematic aspect to this is that, like all skills, they are sharpened over time. While you may have flukes that possess all the features of a mature work, you’ll know you’re still learning if you can’t churn another one out straight after. I was writing poems every day but there are diamonds in the dirt is the best you could say.

I don’t think it’s an evolution entirely as some works that I produced that have stood the ravages of time are of a type I could only have written with that mindset and that raw energy. If you don’t expect your progress to be linear then you won’t be concerned.

It’s whether you let critics as amateur or fledgling as you are at your chosen vocation, get to you or not that is a measure of your ability to persevere.

If your experience is anything like mine, you will have that moment when your ability to write effortlessly within an ouevre is there. An endless cascade of thoughts and ideas and concatenations.

Being able to document the times you’re living through is a good ability to have. Regardless of how much impact other eras may have, there is value in being able to peek in.

Why did I repeat ‘ability’ three times instead of choosing metaphors or similes? Because I think there is sufficient difference between a skill and an ability; between a talent and an ability, as to be unable to replace the word. Developing a skill enables to you to present the nuts and bolts. You are asked to write a western swing number about marauding mountebanks and so you do. It has the right tempo, the mood fits the subject matter or the treatment you’re being asked to give it and so you present a facsimile of whatever it is that is pretty much pulled from a hat.

A talent is like an ability but it’s wild and unpredictable; mercurial. There are talented souls who don’t know the source of their inspiration or understand the forces they control. Talents will do something that is amusing and makes one go ah but they don’t extend beyond that, at least not in their act.

An ability is seemless. It’s being able to do something well, repeatedly. It may be unique or shared by your group but it basically means that if you sharpen a stick then it’s going to be plenty pointy before you’re finished.

III

You could potentially cycle through all three during your career or even have aspects of one operating alongside the other. Talent can capture the zeitgeist or find the right words to lead into that big band explosion. Skill can fit the crooner’s tenor and tone. Ability can furnish a writer’s room.

Sure it’s story

Posted on 06/10/2014 by admin

I think you can see that, while there are songs that simply don’t translate, there are others where at least the broad narrative is intact. You can see the short story possibility in the events detailed in Ode to Billie Joe and imagine rendering An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge into song. They would lose the advantage the first has of repeated mention of the bridge in the chorus or of the shock denouement of the second if a mistimed turn of tune were to occur.

If writing a song called ‘Co-payment‘ you might want a different focus than a short story on the same subject. The song can cover more ground by doubling up on its meaning; a short story attempting this risks confusion. While short stories don’t need a big cast – I saw one consisting of a desperate text scribbled on a torn strip of wallpaper by a kidnap victim, so one first person narrative – there needs to be a protagonist and an account of what happens to them (or an allusion to same). Whereas a song on co-payments or the co-payment may expand on what it is, what effect it has, a short story will want an agent effecting co-payments or being affected by them.

I pay twice for good advice/For every prick is worth the price/Though sickened by this circumstance/It seems I have another chance

It appears there is enough here to start drawing character but, while that may be so, the sly double entendre of the second line is going to be hard to spell out in prose.

Novel impression

Posted on 04/10/2014 by admin

So what’s your next move? Take the piece straight to your band or songwriting partner. No messing about.

What not to do? Attempt to turn it into a novel. Or novella. Or prose fragment of any kind.

In Carbon Dating the language moves the story along and any analysis can only come afterwards. There are layers of meaning produced by this format that are impossible to replicate or equivocate and they’re all on show here.

You don’t have a protagonist. You might think you have but the cycle through first, second and third person narrative isn’t enough to assign names; singing in the shower, I got as far as Roslyn the paleontologist, Lyn the archaelogist and Max the biologist.

Tools are used matter-of-factly rather than in any way that could see them used outside scientific endeavour. Artistic licence precludes any need to know whether a chisel or ‘pickaxe’ is used on digs. What is here in the narrative is nothing like Maxwell’s Silver Hammer or the ax (or is it a croquet mallet?) in The Shining.

When I was writing it, I was staying focused on the tools and activities used in carbon dating and let the rest develop from that. I get a buzz when the song turns out to have these other things going on. Regardless of authorial intent, they’re an intrinsic part of the song.

There’s a literal reading and there’s a listener’s ability to see the great song metaphor of love running a parallel narrative. Whatever your experience, it stays firmly in the song construct.

It’s a very descriptive song when outlaying the sediment and the remnants found thereon. It does a fine job of expanding on carbon dating processes; at least as understood by the layman. Description is used only for place setting and immersion in a novel; it needs movement – character development, action – that is absent from the song.

The verses are all doing different things – perhaps describing different scenes – but not in a way that translates to a prose depiction.

Novel to song

Posted on 27/09/2014 by admin

As we’ve mentioned, there’s interplay between media and so we have novels that have been given many treatments. Just one popular method is a film adapted from the novel which then spins off into a graphic novel and inspires songs that appear on some dustbowl compilation.

Each format, though, has its own features that will ipso facto be missing from other work transferred to other entertainment forms and audience.

The world of novels, Ghost of Tom Joad notwithstanding, is not the main territory of song. Both capture snatches of reality and highlight the cosmic absurd. They build impressions the more we read/listen. Yet even the rambling song won’t cover all the elements of a dense work of fiction. Neither will the novel encapsulate so much within such a condensed form or utilise aids to convey its impressions.

The novel on Kindle is no closer to song just because it there’s a shared screen. To move between The Turtles and Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers is a shift and not just because of subject matter or tone.

If I ever decide to write a novel, it won’t be to illustrate the difference to song but we can pretend. Let’s call it Money Trail and outline the concept of the novel as being following the money trail on where some of our millions and billions are going. You could divide the segments into chapters or parts so we can see the weaponry and surveillance equipment and where it ends up, what the sellers do with our money after the transaction has taken place, what the consequences are in each scenario.

In the same way, you could divide up song verses to illustrate the various expenditure and you could even punctuate these with a chorus about money trails. Why is this different? In the simpler plot-driven novel there may not be that much difference. Most novels tend to dwell on inner thoughts or describe in lavish details the objects and surrounds while songs provide richness in a singular image that allows the listener to imagine further.

This distinction is complicated by an awareness that the novel is perfectly capable of containing passages that allow the reader to fill in the blanks.

III

And writing a novel from a song? I don’t see why you couldn’t. While a song may be a statement that stays where it is, a novel has to progress, even if with a introverted eyebrow raise. Whether it’s one person’s journey or the resolution of some sci-fi concept about what would happen if amphibians dominated, the novel draws the reader in and keeps them turning the page. A song doesn’t have to have that durability in the immediate because it can loop its intent. Otherwise why relisten? So this suggests that you’d either pad the tale when converting to novel or choose a song that is already rich in story.

Let’s see what could be done from this song, called “Carbon Dating”

Carbon Dating

I copy your moves as my mood improves
The solutions salves and somehow sooths
Pickaxe the outline of ancient design
Yours are the shores to mine

We’re carbon dating

Rocks rendered with open ended analysis
A sting that brings paralysis
A feel for the feelers flailing on land
Evaluating evolution just as planned

Carbon dating

The scrapes she shapes in tiny lines
Confounded in the coarse confines
Of bended bone and jagged tooth
Chiselled grooves of further proof

We’re carbon dating

The song in its place

Posted on 20/09/2014 by admin

Having canvassed the narrative so that we have a full understanding of its importance and place in the song, it’s probably safe to peer out at how the approach to narrative differs from that employed in other media.

Let’s consider the ‘horror budget’ in general. If we were writing a mini-series and wanted it to be current and up-to-date then a good approach would be to take some of the things particular to things as they are in 2014. My pitch would include a father, Geoff, who is an assembly line worker at Holden; his wife, Sheryn, is a pragmatic climate change sceptic. She doesn’t pretend to know the science or have a reason to refute it on an empirical level but she is concerned about the rising energy costs and believed the promise that scrapping the “carbon tax” would bring down power bills and costs passed on by affected companies in a range of fields. They have a son, Marcus, who hates his boss but is worried about the six months waiting period if he quits and is aghast at the prospect of writing forty job applications a month and being thrown onto a ‘work for the dole’ scheme. There is interaction with a neighbour, Phat Lam, who was given a temporary humanitarian visa due to his involvement with the Tianemen Square protests and was allowed to stay.

Now, as you can see, apart from delineating characters who will exemplify certain key dramatic aspects of contemporary Australian life, the approach is built on the use of characters. This is because we want the audience to identify with them and be interested in following them. It means that actors will sign on, knowing that there is substance to their roles where their appearance in a more plot-driven vehicle may be more fleeting.

In a movie you would probably want more of a blend in of some story situation or development. The focus may shift to a smaller cast engaged in greater activity and less exposition.

A short story would typically want to centre on one activity or sharp burst; there could be a dramatic event at the car manufacturers, a sudden a-ha moment in the realisation that prices weren’t really going to go down, or an altercation involving Marcus. The aspects of other characters might be touched on lightly if at all.

Can a song not take the same approach as other media in developing a narrative? It can actually. Just as plays are made into films and novels are made into musicals, it is possible to tell a story in a different medium, acknowledging and accepting the changes. The styles that spring from Springsteen prove songs can tell dramatic stories about a small cast of characters and place us in a setting. Whether you’d use this for Geoff, Sheryn and Marcus (toying with adding a daughter, Nola, who is a swotty year 12 with an enthusiasm for microbiology but concerned about what it would cost with no caps on fees) is another matter. I’d maintain that even when we’re speaking of Lightning’s Child, Farmer John, the Son of a Preacher Man, Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp, the Eyes of Lucy Jordan… there’s a narrowing of focus in much the same way as there can be in poetry and vignettes. There are songwriters who can work a crowded room but there’s some skill involved and it does dictate the structure and possibly the genre. So songs in the same cast as a mini-series are going to be less our focus.

III

How would songs based on the horror budget more naturally evolve?

Auto manufacture


We used to make it up as we go along

Revelling in the rivetting although the hours were long

Automanufacture
We plumped the seats

Engaged in feats that the world would watch

Designing the body weilding the welding torch

Automanufacture

It was our roads that drove us on Where we could get to and how we belong Take the we'll always remember Automanufacture factoring in

Great Big New Attacks

Threats and debts of our design
The fears this year cannot confine
The hiving off of heave and ho
The skiving and the to and fro

There’s great big new attacks
great big new attacks

The lies disguise what we despise
A reckoning we can recognise
A tut tut for reverse tracks
What it was we ever lacked

What’s yours we’ll mine
You’ll get your share sure
philistine

Not while there’s great big new
Attacks

Narrative spin

Posted on 12/09/2014 by admin

At the risk of boring the fledgling scribbler with too much distraction, there is something to note from our conclusions on narrative dictates. How did we end up privileging the content over the intent?
There is a reasonable argument to be made that, after stating that the narrative is ‘ ‘Leading conservatives forecast a short war in Iraq, now, without irony are considering returning to a battlefield they’ve withdrawn from’’, we are in no position to use words or lines – however good – that aren’t in accordance with this clause. You can produce a song that looks at the calamitously poor assessment skills of [one set of narrative characters in this definition], their inability to appreciate or recognise irony, the battlefield in their terms, the fact that they are prepared to revisit their folly. Does this mean we can’t highlight the other characters caught up in this drama? Certainly, stating the case for the Iraqi people is useful, as is lighting on the cultural misunderstandings and resultant tragedy, so perhaps the answer is to work on it until the varying narrative viewpoints can be reconciled.

Narrative drive

Posted on 29/08/2014 by admin

Gospel and soul demonstrate devotion to the Lord and a loved one respectively. South Park satirised this to some extent when Cartman replaces sweetheart references in popular songs with that of Jesus and then sells to Christian radio listeners.

A narrative that serves both at once is the sublime ‘I Say a Little Prayer‘. A simple song that recounts little moments grabbed throughout the day shows such love for the paramour but still manages to include God.

To see the role of narrative, let’s start a song from a narrative: ‘Leading conservatives forecast a short war in Iraq, now, without irony are considering returning to a battlefield they’ve withdrawn from’. Forget the wording here and focus on the intent. It’s not so much about living in a Red Zone as talking about the former Kingdom and how it’s fallen.

What’s happened here? You have the narrative as described and two further narrative elaborations. You don’t need to think any of these out loud when you’re writing songs. Retain a brief sideways glance at what’s arising but don’t let it stop you from getting down that draft.

So our song’s called Iraq the place and now immediately, if your creative juices are flowing, you’ve got lines for your song as well ‘Don’t drive too fast towards a checkpoint/Don’t fire your guns in the air’. The lines carry the same rhythm and emphasis. The only thing is, that these lyrics are “instructions” to locals. Occupying troops aren’t the ones doing this, they’re the ones shooting Iraqis who do.
But the title suggests both a travelogue or mapping and the mimetic ‘I rock the place’. My cultural studies training kicks in and I can recall the lecturer recounting how it was interlopers who sat up on sacred mounds that locals merely walk past pursuing their trades. Clearly you could make a meal of mashing these two narrative constructs together but not by failing to mark when a different character is talking.

The lines carry more meaning than the title or theme. If they contradict either then they will compel the recipient to choose sides. Are we talking about rocking the place or being in the place like a rock? The threat imposed from outside is what these lines convey and any theme or title has to fit that.

Simple sans sample sins

Posted on 18/08/2014 by admin

For someone who likes adventuring in undiscovered domains, I’m not denying that songwriters aplenty are discovering and recovering in covers leastwise covert and rhymers have set timers on the reams they pervert.

I won’t show you samples because I don’t use them in my own songs. I’m strictly a lyricist.

I want to move on to another important feature of songs and songwriting: narrative. You’ve seen me refer to this more than once in the course of this course. I’ve said that you don’t need to write from narrative and I hold to that. You can write something so laden with other tricks and tracks that listener loses all hope – perhaps desire – for narrative.

At the same time, the appeal of a well written song that tells a story or sketches a character, is unbounded. Folk in the country with jazz hands and the soul of gospel and blues all tell stories, sometimes their own.

A narrative that is riveting crosses genres. “Old Dogs and Children and Watermelon Wine” by Tom T Hall is a case of a song that is distinctly a country song yet has an engaging narrative. ‘Only three damn things worth a solitary dime’

Folk songs, what do we mean when we speak of folk songs; Estonian folk songs? There’s a presumption or set of presumptions when examining just one genre for its narrative conventions and that seems a natural enough one to pick.
Let’s just note what folk we’re part of first. Folk songs can speak of place and of displacement, of loving and living and leaving. But the ones I can speak of often document natural disaster or social disruption; there’s a lot of raw bone recounting of events. Interspersed will be the Girl With The Black Velvet Band.

Folk aren’t on the dancefloor to hear about songs set on the dancefloor. There’s a message to impart; even if that’s “Don’t forget this one brave person and what they did”

III

A narrative is any account of a connection of events. This may be why you see it more in oral tradition and the kind of songs that spring from that. The repetition of words to effect, unless it coincides with a portrait or mini-story, is doing something else. That’s not to say that even the cut-up method doesn’t produce lyrics that look for all the world like narrative.

It does explain why so many conventional songs have the verse chorus verse structure. It’s a good template for narrative. You can have small part of the tale, dwelling upon a single feature, glimpsing just a certain facet in a verse then round on the general relevance in the chorus and move on to the next description of events.

I grow weary of theory
I’m past postulating for the nonce
It’s all academic

This note is the beginning of a song about a disenchanted professor [insert own interpretation] describing all the parts of his job he’s had enough of. Where you have a narrator, you have a narrative. It’s subtle since this may be a whinge fest where he or she does nothing but tell you why they hate their job. You knew that’s what they were doing when they started singing so what’s changed?
All the things are different. The layman may not know to ‘assay an essay’ ‘bring an assignment to refinement’ or ‘reap a retort from the returned report’ but the lecturer/tutor knows and they’re the one telling the story.

Is the whole of ‘Wish You Were Here‘ a narrative? Some concept albums and musicals are prone to presenting a linear narrative where we are introduced to a character and eventually watch their triumph or demise. Concepts differing in kind to any need for narrative (one thinks of the plentiful supply of abstract concepts), I prefer to stick to the song level. Does narrative equate to song in its totality? Well it can and is often constructed that way. A fine exception is American Pie by Don McLean. There are two layers of narrative in this song. It’s ostensibly equating the event of the plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper with ‘the day the music died’. More specifically, it speaks predominantly of Buddy Holly. But then there are a series of enigmatic verses that manage to both stay on point and engage in reverie.
Such an intriguing work must have engaged critics without pause. Let me jump past the narrator’s relationship with those three Men and move onto ‘and while the King was looking down/the Jester stole his thorny crown’. This is generally understood to be Elvis and Dylan; the latter taking the role of jester through his line about the joker and the thief, and from his rambling tall tales in song. This is fine but then the ‘thorny crown’ suggests another King. Surely the song isn’t asking us to bring Jesus into it? Too late, as he’s one those three men we skipped earlier.

Simple Sample

Posted on 26/07/2014 by admin

I can’t leave you with the reassurance that whimsy and passion will get you through so we’re not done with the rough n ready just yet. I’ve kind of avoided telling you some tips as they’re what you’d expect in a more basic primer. If you don’t think you could come up with that couplet in Public Broadcasting – and have it work – then at least use this as a reassurance that it is possible to use an ambiguous title or first line and turn out something good in ready time.

So, let’s stick with that first title: ‘Public Broadcaster’
Here, you’ve got the broadcaster’s public status to consider and the fact that this is them in the act of broadcasting, rather than say production or promotion. If those other elements creep in because of the way they otherwise fit then so be it. But that’s your mental brief: this is a song about a public entity that projects a certain image and provides a given service. Whether you want to sit under the speaker or the electronic ‘ticker tape’ when you write it is up to you.

What you want is a few key phrases or objects associated with being a public broadcaster or looking across at a public broadcaster. Whether you see any benefit in censoring your collection (I don’t) is up to you and your writing style, but stick with things that have a ready association either alone or combined, with the subject matter.
‘Free’ ‘access’ ‘control’ ‘independent’ ‘variety’ ‘obscure’ ‘service of introducing new music or breaking new bands’ ‘giving actors and production staff work’ ‘training ground for Hollywood/Broadway/Roxy artists and their career’
I’m sure you can think of more. Go ahead and name names: ‘The Bill’ ‘Play School’ ‘Doctor Who’. If you can place these in the narrative of the song, either through sly wink or spoken allusion, then this is very likely to work.

Save us this service
Never leave us nervous

Here you’ve got a bit of alliteration and a neat folded couplet and you haven’t had to wrack your brains to arrive at it. Don’t cling onto it at all costs if you find the ‘caravan has moved on’ but do note it somewhere. There’ll be other services to save potentially.
As neat as it is in some way, this couplet is not strong enough in stand un-surrounded. So, here already, through the dictates of structure and flow, you’re finding some of the decisions being made for you. If you’ve jotted down a few thoughts then so much the better for striking when the iron is hot and developing more verses and parts of the song. You can use as much of this as you want in the finished product.

An excess of access they argue
An insight into oversight that is out of sight

Writing down scraps like this is good because it breaks from expected pattern. As long as you can make it work by sending the musicians into other time signatures and they’re OK with that, you’re onto something. The effect that elongated rhythms has is a consideration but not for you the lyricist.

You’ll notice I’m still free forming. The second line follows from the first but not with any strong conviction to do so in the way one might in conversation. This veering from the path paradoxically leads one back deeper into the text. And helps the savvy listener to appreciate how it works in the medium it’s in. It’s even mimetic when you see the way that the radical doubt mirrors the line length and word pattern; as if there is a sudden gallop in the discussion because of the emotions involved.

There are many choices in which lines to use, what couplets complement, and what puts the verve in the verses and a crush on the chorus, you can only try out different things and see which works. The fact that a seasoned professional might complete their piece a lot faster, or use phrases or concepts that you’d kill for, is not to deprive you of being that novice – learn the skills, admire the audacity. One day it will be your turn. But only if there is a supply of those willing to be acolytes. Now and then.

Reliable method

Posted on 25/07/2014 by admin

I don’t want to encourage lax behaviour in any writer but I thought while on the subject of bashing out songs to order we’d pause a while on the best way to ensure a song that sticks to a formula without sounding hackneyed. Or you don’t notice because of the beat.

So we’ll deal with this in this post before moving on.

There are so many titles lying around that allow you to expand. You could picture ‘No Cuts‘ as a protest song, a polemic cast in anything from folk to punk and the hyphen inbetween.

And all you have to do is list out a different cut that won’t occur and you have your song.

Is it necessary to choose leading titles that tell the prospective listener what to expect? This is, after all, the flipside of taking a cavalier approach to writing the piece in the first place.

It’s perfectly possible to churn out six or seven songs this way. It’s whether you should, or whether this is not the best use of your creative streak.

It’s not necessary to choose titles that telegraph their whole approach by listing things that you can’t take back or won’t cut, for example. Early rock’n’roll made good use of this but that was sixty years ago.

No, you can reliably write a song without this crutch. You want to be able to write a song with a girl’s (or boy’s) name, giving no clues away. You want the listener to carry The Weight.

This may seem ambitious, the more so when given time constraints or a fickle intending audience, but you can invest artistry where before there was formulaic.

You may not need a prompt or a prop to sell each verse but a solid approach is to make each complete. It covers one aspect or facet of what it is that that the song is about; whether the narrative moves or remains static. I don’t think this always means “sneaky listing” either. The verse can capture something fleeting or ethereal that doesn’t give the game away completely.

There’s nothing wrong with observing this element of verse in more serious work.

Public Broadcaster

We care for neither cruise nor craze
We fare with either fuse or phase

Here what you’re doing is letting the lines play off each other. Notice how this method or approach automatically has a more intriguing take than an attempt to explain ever could. Now I’m not saying you’ll mint this dexterity straight out of the gate, but it’s a noble device.

Silence and Science

Here there’s a whole narrative about laws that silence dissent and the parallels or coincidence of science being also on the outer. You won’t need to stop and list so much as vent. Then there’s the fact that the official version is at odds with what is happening; that finely tuned protest and breakthrough discoveries continue unabated.

These two examples: a whimsical take on a perpetually threatened entity and an emphatic line in articulating currency, may seem like so much of what we’ve gone through in other posts but the point is that whimsy and passion work equally well.

From the Sound of It

Author Archives: admin