Tag Archives: lyrics

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

Rockin’ Role

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Does this draft conform to rock’n’roll? Or does it have the spirit of rock’n’roll? I’m going to say no to both: yes, it’s got a car and a girl, it deals directly with a relationship that’s taking place right now in the narrative. But it’s not simple; it tries to sneak too many things in and once you start getting layers you’ve moved on from old time rock’n’roll.

With both sexes behind the wheel as evinced by the Beatles’ Baby You Can Drive My Car and Big Black Cadillac with its memorable “she said Balls to you big daddy I ai’n’t never coming back”

There is quirk aplenty in rock’n’roll but you’ll find every novelty number stays assiduously with its premise, be it Monster Mash or Pommy Jackaroo. It’s more of a New Wave (i.e. the stuff that was around at the same time as punk rock) tactic to draw the listener down two different paths, never mind retain a radical indeterminacy. We’re used to these appearing in several of the rock genres but, if the thought had crossed those songwriters’ minds, they would have dismissed this as a distraction, a needless complication.

I’m passing a whole significant history here but it’s because I think the esoteric flights of fancy that rock took in the early seventies were short on the kind of things that occur to The Cars or occur in cars. By the time there were groups called Eddie and the Hot Rods and Racing Cars, the idea of returning to short sharp bursts of song had returned with a vengeance and fast things – like motor vehicles – were good easy topics to write on to fit the frenetic pace.

 

The Rock’n’Roll Ethos

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We all know that rock’n’roll has its roots in a slang word for sexual congress and originates with so-called race records. What became interesting is the way that this began to be hinted at in a more demure time. The music of rebellion was toe-ing the line.

So Susie’s frantic date tells her to wake up; they’ve fallen asleep at the movies and now their ‘reputation is shot’

Rock’n’roll is simple and lends itself to formula. Neil Sedaka with Calendar Girl springs to mind. Run through the months of the year finding nice things to say about the woman of your affection and you have your song.

The use of proper nouns provides for considerable leeway as you can say what you like about Margaret or Donna or Peggy Sue as long as you keep your story straight.

Rock’n’roll is self-referential; good time music that wants to draw your attention to the fact that you’re dancing, enjoying the performance and the music; you’re getting off on it. For the same reason, there’s numerous references to the dances and dance halls, the clothes everyone was wearing. There’s a fair percentage of songs about cars and girls.

To this day, major rock bands like AC/DC base a part of their large catalogue on rock’n’roll mythologising. But they now span forty years themselves.

Rock’n’roll is a music conceived as youthful differentiation, a celebration of teens from sixty years ago.

There’s little in the way of subterfuge. the Big Bopper tells us he likes Chantilly Lace and explains why. It’s her physical attributes and her movement.

There’s early sledging, like Bo Diddley’s Say Man  and speed is celebrated as is action.

She Drove Me

She planted her foot on the accelerator

She said as she led so I’ll see you later

She drove me she drove me drove me

round the bend Where will it end?

                                                                                                                                                  She drove me up the wall

Waiting for a way to recall

If I’d ever been this way before

A map of the traps to explore

She drove me she drove me

to distraction gaining traction

From the perspective of the directive

we rode that road so well

that’s the cursive kiss’n’tell

A pocketful of Poesy

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As you can see from the last post, what I have been saying about different forms holds true: it’s possible to use lines of poetry in song and lines of song for poetry; both examples show that. Why did I cut off down a different path for each then? Well in this case, the poem is concise and doesn’t need embellishment of either further words or of musical backing, while the song has a musicality in its lines that suggests how it might go – it doesn’t sound like something you’d just read out.

As imprecise as this all is, you only need to know what to do to write something that works. If you are going to present something ‘undernourished’, I suggest turning up with some ideas for how the song might go. Otherwise your sketch might be overlooked for something more ‘song-like’

Doc you meant

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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.

II

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

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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

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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.

The song in its place

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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.

II

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

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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.

II

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.

Quicken the deed

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I heard your ears prick up when I mentioned a quick and dirty method, as it were, to dashing out a song on demand. Not to corral your efforts on this theme but if you were given a brief by a hard pressed mate who was busily constructing chords, to pen words to a country song called ‘You Can’t Take It Back’ for that gig in Yerecoin. You’ve never been to Yerecoin and have no idea what sort of music they like or what sentiments they’ll find entertaining. Or you’re busking on the street in Tamworth.

The trick is to outline what this angle will bring: stick with the premise – what kinds of things can’t you bring back? Then take four such items and place them in verses down the page. Now add a chorus, perhaps.

‘Your Danielle Steel novels’ is too narrow (even if they are bestsellers) and doesn’t resonate.

No time to be fancy; you’re playing at a mate’s keg party and you don’t have enough material. Or you’ve heard Colin speak disparagingly of Neil Diamond just as you’d perfected Kentucky Woman. Whatever your pressing need to bash out a number, simple is best as it lends itself to the tried and true techniques. So there’s nothing wrong with reaching for the most predictable things one might talk of taking back or having taken back

‘You gave me your heart
For when we are apart
Now you can’t take it back’

‘You gave me your love
and it fit like a glove
Now you can’t take it back’

‘You gave me your soul
A wind-up painted doll
Now you can’t take it back’

‘You gave me your dreams
to pull at the seams
Now you can’t take them back’

Spot the odd one out. That whole soul thing is creepy, get rid of it. Either substitute it with another verse or drop it out altogether. And, no, soul and control has been played out in the Motels. You can’t use that.

II

So, anyhow, that’s the bones of the song and it didn’t take long. You might not want to write to this level all the time. Use times off the road to construct something more substantial that will leave a legacy. For now, know how to deal with all songwriting situations.