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.