Death mettle

Posted on 17/10/2015 by admin

When it comes to murder, there’s a number of genres and subgenres that find it as fascinating as the producers of film and television. Just as there is detective mystery and horror that deal with violent death in pulp novels, the Goths and emo kids signaled a desire to hear about the darker side of life and the death metal crowd wanted to feed the interest and morbid outlook.

It’s not something I have any great interest in and I’m known for dodging murder mysteries, cop shows and forensic series. If I see homicide as part of a story then I have no objection but tales that are built round it are just so plentiful.

Since the last entry, I have two songs Slew and Pitch that are being edited close together, three drafts of Bad Day at the Office, a rather dubious piece called Power to the Peephole, three or four other poems and just writing I Can’t Be Scene #2

Slew came about with the sudden realisation that there are the two meanings: past tense of slay and a big conglomeration of things. Pitch followed because of the quite clear multiplicity of meaning. It just so happens that Slew, because of its subject matter, has a few potential audiences.

Slew

A batch of butchers bitched and botched the act
Dumb down the damage peer through the cracks
The array have been arrested
displayed waylaid time tested
           Slew
            a slew
           Slew
The colour of killers collected
The squalor of skills selected
 For as you say slay
  is still in play

Knives drawn
see what's sawn
Gruesome how some grew
           Slew
            there's a slew

More do murder
scene and heard

Am I late annihilate
Ex tempo exterminate
Sassy mates assassinate
             the slew
            Slew

Bilious billy, yes

Aside

Before considering whether it’s worth cycling through psychobilly, I don’t even see much need to analyse whether those last pieces are in the right vein.

What I do want to mention is the reason why I think the Windfarm Commissioner works: it’s in first person. There may not the hubris or identification of ‘I’m a tiger’ ‘I’m the goo goo mup’ or ‘I’m a rockabilly rebel [from head to toe]’

I doubt you could go to town on this and have ‘I’m a Sellout Liar with a Flag stuck up my Arse’. There has to be a sense in which the singer is proud of their prowess.

While there’s an underlying futility to the position and the concept behind it, it travels along. Just because the subject is unpalatable doesn’t mean that the song can’t be entertaining.

Putting this in context of other energy sources both moves it away from being a rant (which doesn’t belong to this music form unless there’s now an ‘arguabilly’) and introduces humour, which is an underlying feature of the genre; tongue in cheek though it may be at times.

Dicks see land

Posted on 03/05/2015 by admin

For those pupils who are inclined to the view that this is not Dixieland; that it is, in fact, the style of writing I employ on a regular basis, I plead guilty.

This ain’t no Jazz Era number. Let’s keep going. My father was into Swing before he migrated to Australia took to the bush and embraced country. I’m sure I can make a hash of swing just as easily.

Now we don’t want to leaden proceedings by referring to things topical and sombre so let’s think of words worthy of accompanying all those instruments blasting off.

Hitherto I haven’t touched on the discard pile. This is often a scrap of thoughts or partial phrase that sounds promising until you see the blind corner and veer to something different.

Here is one I just experienced:

I move in the circles with Angela Merkel

The idea was to meet the prime requirements of remembering you have people out there on the dancefloor and inject a bit of wayward humour by playing on diplomatic circles and social circles and dance moves into the bargain. But what do I want to say about the German chancellor? She’s a strong sensible leader whom I’ve no wish to mock and she doesn’t have the traits that lend themselves to a metaphoric whirl.

Nor is it necessary to point out to the dance crowd that they are dancing. This happens throughout all styles and eras but it’s not what dominates Swing. It’s more about taking you out and being part of the hip and happenin’ times. There’s a lightness and joviality but you need that in wartime. Screamo is of a later age.

I think, if you are going to light on a clause or phrase that makes good material – still the way I proceed with many poems and songs – then just bear in mind the genre you’re in. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Out of Town

I could tell straight away
You were from out of town

Too neat to compete for our streets
far too fey for our gay cafes
Too beautiful too dutiful 
too dashing too smashing
Too altogether  taboo
from our point of view

You must be from out of town

Apart from how artful  you are
we have a fear of those from afar
We're just a sample of the simple way
Still stand strong for those who stay

But you're from out of town

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

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.

Top to tale

Posted on 31/05/2014 by admin

Just as I don’t recommend particular focus on your song’s end, any more than I do for any other feature (as my emphasis has been all along on the song, with some qualifications, writing itself), I don’t imagine there’s a reason why you’d want to use a method where the songwriting student nuts out an opening line and a climax, and then finds the filling.

But, as with those other facets that I’ve downplayed, From the Sound of It is going to examine this as a strategy and see what develops.

As with devising just a beginning or fashioning only a finish, you can either do this with an overall title and theme in mind, or you can play with this as a creative writing exercise. Just be warned that the latter approach is harder, especially if you’re not paying any regard to whether those two lines have commonality.

Fear for our Reef

Another icon is listing

To score an Abbott Point

I’ve played fair and made sure that the lines are relatable to the subject matter in a clear and recognisable way. The first line deals with the Great Barrier Reef as one of Australia’s most important features; as being integral to our identity and the thing tourists are driven to see. The last line conflates the dredging and dumping activity and its architect or facilitator. A happy accident like the name Abbott Point is too good for any lyricist to pass up.

Given though, that coral bleaching and the Crown of Thorns starfish also threaten the reef, there is plenty of opportunity to make this more about the region and the reef itself than a further screed against the Government. I think doing this and making only the last couplet or so about Minister Hunt and co would make for a stronger piece (unless you’re deadset on writing a protest song that inflames opposition).

What happens when you don’t relate the first and last line? It’s been my experience that the brain’s ability to draw connections is near infinite so, if you want something more abstract you’ll probably need a non descript title and watch where the rest of the piece drifts.

‘Terminal avatars have set belief’

‘The gardenias have taken their place’

The last line, so capable of a literal reading and nice adjoining image, is a letdown for the first, which burst with potential in all directions: ‘What are terminal avatars; are they stand-ins that stand round stations, are they memes with a shelflife, or are they something else entirely?’ ‘Do they have rigid and doctrinaire belief systems or are they the instigators of an idealogy and drivers of perception?’
The last line may mean that there was some other flower or plant in the garden bed before, it may mean that the gardenias have assumed their position.. There is room for ludic play aplenty. But the fact that it is so different stylistically – though matching in length – makes it hard work for the novice to see the connection and work from it. I wouldn’t be surprised, if a work does emerge, that the title is decided once the piece is written because the task of joining up such a song requires all your concentration.

The most likely approach is to add to the lines in a way that makes sense for both the pitch and flow of the song. It may be harder for some to work backwards, and there’s no guarantee that, by observing the fidelity of couplets, start and finish will meet and make sense.

‘While shadows have met with grief’

‘Seedlings and saplings falter’

Terminal avatars have set belief
While shadows have come to grief
Our spirits were dashed
Where the waves once crashed
Wraiths wrapped in car wreck confession

Strident symbiotes have open reign
Slipshod silhouettes say can’t complain
The market forces sway statues
Golems as solemn as virtue
Tear ducts for tragic betrayal

Simian similarities in sample case
We can’t let these things go to waste
Proteus as prototype
Grip now, mustn’t gripe
Time spent in timeless fashion

III

We have a draft that doesn’t lead to gardenias but, I’d venture to say, the work on this piece is fully attendant on what is there, not grafting on bits that don’t belong.

See how you go writing a separate song from ‘Seedlings and saplings falter/The gardenias have taken their place’

Tall shoots and deep roots

strikes me as a possibility for a preceding line.

Wit will wilt

Posted on 09/09/2012 by admin

Wordplay and a combination of aphorism and wry aside is a feature of memorable songwriting. It has been a device, or combination of, from all the great songwriters from Gilbert and Sullivan to Elvis Costello. Along the way, it hasn’t hurt performers like Joe Jackson to get their message across or release a record that makes it into the charts.

Of course “she’s got eyes like saucers/oh you think she’s a dish” lessens the seriousness even as it brings attention to itself so even the masters can overegg.

To really get across the point though, and to drag in that other favourite lyrical ingredient, the nudge and wink: consider two similarly-titled songs: “If You Seek Kay” by the blues performer Memphis Slim, and “If You Seek Amy” by the pop chanteuse Britney Spears.
It is hedging your bets writing suggestive lyrics that play with meaning just as they tickle your fancy. ‘Rock me baby with that steady roll’ is serviceable in capturing ribald imagery but these resonate more. While it’s true that both fifties blues and nineties pop find all manner of uses for sexual connotation, the difference is apparent. Even Memphis Slim’s own output includes the standard bonking metaphors about churning and grinding; useful when it comes to the censoring of bare descriptiveness (not so necessary in today’s sexualised success meter), but not a patch on spelling it out without spelling it out, as “If You See Kay” does.

The pianist, born Peter Chatman, is able to extend the metaphor cleverly throughout the song by pretending that he is really asking after some girl named Kay. Had Britney’s writer on “If You Seek Amy” done the same, it might have worked. But the task was harder because, while it pursues the same vein at a literal level as it does at a hidden level, the writer is unable to maintain the tension of the dual meaning and it ends up not making a lot of sense. So there’s the surprise at decoding but it’s not sustained by the song itself.

Cleverness is only useful in some contexts, even when it’s working. Dancefloor numbers rely on putting one into a trance groove, not startling them out of it with a line like Jim Steinman’s “We were barely seventeen and we were barely dressed” (the milder of his verbal jousts). Folk music relies on a straight telling of an important narrative or a pronouncement that can be embraced universally. Since we don’t all think of smart lines or ripping ripostes, it places the performer at one remove from their audience, when the idea is to get them to join in. In many of the more extreme music forms, the words are going to be drowned out in the general mayhem so, unless you’re expecting your fans to pick up on the little extras in double meaning by reading the lyric sheet, it’s largely wasted on the generic pummeling the sound provides.

So you can avoid lyrical flair and be excused, but it’s a good quality to cultivate, as you never know when that extra zest in your bag of tricks will come in handy.