Tag Archives: inspiration for song lyrics

C#nt re: rock

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I’ve listened to enough country rock to think I have to attempt its easy rollin’ style. It is more down the line than alt country or cowpunk but precedes them in suggesting ways to move from trad country.

One aspect of country life for me growing up was the way that the local drive-in was the place to go. This has vanished now but it doesn’t make the time any less real and plucking an event or object from the past to use for a song is legitimate.

So here’s my country rock contribution

Who was that at the Drive-in?

Valiants aod Ford thinkers
Lined up next to speakers
This was the place to have been
When God still saved the Queen

In blankets in the back seat
with no chance to repeat
deal with dialogue as it descends

Intermission meant a mission out to the canteen
with rest pause inbetween
placed behind parents with our pillows
for the following feature 

Oblivious to the blind gropings of starting couples
occuring in other cars
Not across in front behind
no reason to remind

Who was that at the drive-in
last night
Who viewed the founding of legend
under the stars and moonlight
Who was that arriving
 late
forgetting to replace on the stand

The grass is always bluer (on the other side)

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We know how to retrofit songs to genre or not as the case may be. There’s always a fall back if you do have to write a bluegrass number for instance.

  1. Rely on your knowledge of the work of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs or Bill Monroe to inform the way you construct the song
  2. Use classics to define the mood
  3. Look at the earliest songs and then note the amount of movement, if any, lyrically
  4. See the way the words fit with the song

When I was looking at what I could bring to bluegrass or take from it, I settled on two things: locale and narrative form

I live in mountains but not Appalachian Mountains so how do I navigate to that form of storytelling. Well, I grew up on a farm but I’ve always understood that to mean, at least in the Australian outback, country (or, as it used to be known at times, country & western)

The standards all have narratives but they vary between first, second and third person and ‘Oh Death‘ and ‘In the Pines‘ switch narrative voices in a kind of one-person call and response. They can be about one person in particular, such as John Henry or about the place they live and the conditions they operate under. For that reason I didn’t think this other song I was writing about Boxes had the right sentiment or style.

There isn’t a lot of metaphor in bluegrass (to the point that that’s really Death talking) so I kept returning to the childhood home. If it wasn’t about rodeos or mustering, or the lives and loves of the countryside then perhaps I could cleave closer to bluegrass than its kissin’ cousin, country

And then I thought about the verandah and that seemed underexplored enough to give fresh paint. At first I was influenced by what I was learning about existing bluegrass numbers and kept the scene literal but once I had that first draft I was able to move into a more poetic but, hopefully, still authentic recreation of a mood or feeling or impression

The Verandah

The verandah the verandah
 I'll see you out there on the verandah

 A day out in the paddock as your thoughts go round and round
 and it's you and other tractors that make the only sound
 Some solvol and a wash bowl it's time to scrub clean
 Waiting for tea and there is me finding a place to lean
 on the verandah
Cosmopolitan capers occur in cafes far away
 but out here in this red dirt is where I've said I'll stay
 With books borrowed from the library
 and a paper a week old
 Where the main instruction is
 just do what you're told
and the only place to escape
 is the verandah
 go outside and play
 on the verandah

I wrote that on the thirtieth. It wasn’t til the third of September that I wrote two more drafts; this time the song had not only loosened its style, it had made other changes that had an effect on both narrative and structure. And it had changed name

Side Verandah Blues

All day long I've been going round
Sharing sounds with my surrounds
Solvol and a wash bowl it's time to scrub clean
Waiting for tea and there's me find a place to lean
 on the verandah

Cosmopolitan capers in clubs far away
While here in the red dirt I've said I'll stay
Read the papers weak and old
The main instruction 'Do what you're told'

and the only place to escape
 is the verandah
go outside and play
 on the verandah

Side Verandah Blues (3)

All day long I've been going round
Sharing sounds with my surrounds
Solvol and a wash bowl it's time to scrub clean
Waiting for tea there's me finding a place to lean
 on the verandah

Cosmopolitan capers in clubs far away
While here in the red dirt I've said I will stay
The news is a week old, weak and old
The only instruction to do what you're told

and the one place to escape
 is the verandah
go outside and play
 on the verandah

Further drafts

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If you did get wind of that last turbine driven rockabilly number you probably found the syllable count to be the most contentious part.

You could argue about whether a commissioner of any energy system needs to act as a metaphor for the kind of interests displayed by the billies, if I can call them that (just recently I noticed that a new rock festival coming to Katoomba will feature, among other acts, one doing horrorbilly), and I don’t think a po-faced folk rendition would have worked in the context of leather jackets and quiffs. Can anything political invade rockabilly turf? The apocalyptic end of shockabilly variations is usually cast in terms such as This is the Day the Sun Burned Down – where they are definitely not discussing solar funding.

II

I have been writing in the exercise book again and finding that ideas tend to come out in a more scattered order. This elaborates on some of the experiences I was recounting in earlier posts but there is a tangent at play when the handwritten lyrics move from nine, say, drafts of whole songs to lyrics delivered out of order and not immediately working despite an expectation that, by fitting and being in context, it should.

The first two pieces came about from the news that a work experience kid had discovered an exoplanet. Considering how recently we were ooh-ing and aah-ing about the first ones to be visible in the new telescopes, this trajectory reminds me of climbing Everest or breaking the four minute mile. It starts as this amazing thing and then is absorbed; at least enough for the bright and talented to pick up and pass on.

None of this ends up in the draft as I am in too much of a reverie about the space in general that the exoplanet planned for the chorus.

[Shockabilly draft]

EXOPLANET
Now that our vision extends beyond the reach
A yearning for learning but what will it teach
Worlds inconceivable light years away
A vaccuum to a void disperse and display
Exoplanet

The telescope tells of hope
Think outside the envelope
Stars adrift in a cosmic shift
The odds of gods being Man’s greatest gift
Exoplanet

One’s elusive now exclusive
The astronomical pay purview
A dearth on the earth we are but few
No offer up to this effusive
Exoplanet

In the past till the last we looked up to the sky
Wondered where what was there we asked why
As all our fronteirs are receding
Process the progress still proceeding
Exoplanet

I wrote this on 25th of June so my thoughts about it have changed but, at the time, I decided the following day to try again. This time not looking at the first version but using one particularly strong line ‘The odds of gods being Man’s greatest gift’

The vastness of the cosmos impresses me no end
As we all turn in circles in these eternal circles
Fade into the shade where life begins again

The burnt out stars that we still see
Their dead state serves as company
Switching on each witching hour
Wishing on a meteor shower

Light years away we like to stray
Where time determines night meets day
Space in place across divides
The odds that gods alone decide

Beyond every notion that we ever had
A guide to the good, a bid for the bad
Averaging out each moment of doubt

The vastness of the cosmos impresses me no end
As we turn in circles in these eternal circles
Ignite in the light life begins again

I wrote it but realised that it, too, had not stayed on exoplanets or, indeed, had much to say about them at all. It would require its own title. This doesn’t commonly happen as I tend to write from titles but, yes, I settled on IN THE SPACE PROVIDED

I let it rest there and went off and wrote a piece called REINVENTION as that was something foremost in my life, about to be offered a package.

Anyway, that was fine

I then returned to the space theme although I didn’t planet and really the two snatches there are more pissing around than anything.

And still I don’t have an exoplanet song.

 

 

 

Jazz o’ sighs

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Before there was the phenomena of rock’n’roll there were various shapes of jazz encompassing full narratives and freeform instrumentals. Not to mention scats.

Sitting in a barber while then oldtime music was playing and I couldn’t help but notice how long the lead in was before Frank Sinatra starts singing. No attempt to barge in and startle the listener.

Lyricists have a licence to work with the structure of jazz in their own manner.

Apart from having heard the jazz standards at some point in my life, I can’t say it’s a field of expertise. To do a faux jazz piece, I’d be inclined to go with a tale that tinges sadness with drama and humour without wasting too many words.

Boom Crash Opera got in decades first with Onion Skin so we’ll have to set out sights elsewhere for subject matter. It doesn’t matter that I have several songs that suit a jazz treatment, we have to practice. I’m not qualified to tackle dixieland with any authority so I’d probably want to ape Miss Otis Regrets or something in that vein.

And no amount of mope eighties Melbourne bands can quell the flow.

Living Large in Liberland

Has your flag started to flag

Have the daze start to drag

You could be living large in Liberland

yeah

A chance to start anew

where the population’s few

and you’ll always have your view

in Liberland

You’re living large in Liberland

Liberland ho

Liberland show

You’re only six k’s long

Yet you’ve got your own song

and nobody else wants that strip

the leader was heard to quip

somehow living large

I tell you living large

in Liberland

All together now

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So, in sum, while the songs we are writing may take their inspiration or construction from one aspect or another, there are no hard and fast rules to what a song MUST contain. You can work from a title as I do, or build from a line or couplet. You can decide that you have a subject or theme, and you want to explore that, thank you very much.
As an expert, my only role is to point out the pitfalls and illustrate the elements.

Let’s write a song – or, at least, a large part of one – and note what features are present and whether they were in consideration when it is being written.

Shall we settle with a further news item. Apart from taking us out of our obsessions, the act of capturing a point in time that will pass and lose its currency makes good practice; if it quickly dates, we still have the evidence of the process we underwent.

So let’s to the past president of Channel Nine, president of the Collingwood Football Club, commentator and game show host, and his repetition of what was seen widely as a racial slur. Now I don’t want to touch that event or express an opinion (you’d have to read Facebook pages for that) but it reminds me of an older, less politically correct, time, when the expression “you big ape” was bereft of any cultural context and was solely one of rough affection.

You Big Ape

You great big lug with your ugly mug
You’re a beast at your best
Beating your chest
You big ape

Guess what? I worked from the title. I told you I do that. Just don’t let that prevent you from using a different method.

The theme revives an almost archaic expression through the conduit of it appearing in a different context. I stay assiduously with the approach, once I have determined what it is. And I do this without much conscious thought. It comes as a result of other work I’m doing.

If you have your thinking caps on, you should be able to make something of this now. You want a song where a chanteuse is singing to her rough-hewn partner. The first verse has led with the lug comparison and the ugliness and mentioned the wider status of apes and the types of actions they are associated with, finishing with the term itself.

A girl gets the giggles at this gorilla
The man drill has shed inhibition
A monkey flinging shit in false affection
It’s simple to see he is a chimpanzee

This is different. It doesn’t follow from that first verse but you might rescue something from the scraps. It hardly sits well in its current incarnation.

Never forget that it’s not a competition to see how often you can reach a quality draft straight away. Take as long as you like or as long as the song needs.

I don’t think ape analogies need to name check every simian so perhaps we should have stopped with the order to which apes belong rather than ones that belong to it. You don’t need to be this scientific in correcting your approach but at least know aesthetically which bits work.

Ape behaviour is another matter. It’s here the flinging shit carries the most promise. It’s not there yet, but that may be because monkeys fling shit in derision or agitation, not because they like someone or appreciate their actions. And our Aussie vernacular cries for “slinging shit in [] affection” and I’m not sure you can quite pull off the two different activities and motivations.
(but I would definitely put the line in a leadlined box)

Anyway this second “verse” is more for mining ideas to carry the song forward. Normally you won’t see it.

You’ll want to carry on from the light-hearted affection of the first verse as this sets the right tone.
The best lines are ‘You’re a beast at your best/Beating your chest/You big ape’. If you do want to work from parts, this would be the part. You can either keep this rhythm in the language or the playfulness of ape-llation.