Six teas

Posted on 17/12/2016 by admin

I don’t know about the people of my parents’ generation, now in their eighties, but I can’t sympathetically go back earlier than as a child mis-singing “Hey Buffalo Bill, what did you kill”. I doubt I’d have heard of bungalows at that stage but news of Mister Cody had traveled far.

In discussion on communication of any kind, we should never forget there was a time when radio, television and newspapers were mediated and parents and their circle of friends and associates were of a mind to impart some things more than others. Yet still we had this treasure trove of lore.

This applies as much to the song lyric as any other mode of communication; whether you subscribe to the opinion that the true intent or feeling doesn’t become apparent until you hear it sung or you think that songpoetry will be apparent on the page. If the latter, there is still the more easily parodied second stringers who tried their hardest with a seemingly cosmic sweep but end saying little.

This is common to every era, just as there is fine music being created and performed. It’s useful to those interested in the craft, as another string in their bow. I remember reading this in a totally unrelated paper on writing (as opposed to writing on paper),

Now I say this as a person who has had a man crush on The Stranglers and adored The Fall and worshipped Elvis Costello. Someone who enjoys the heck out of Ray Davies without writing like him. And of course likes and appreciates the differences in all the great and successful songwriters such as Paul Simon (I know, it’s slim picking for Aryans) and so on and so on and doobie doobie doobie

My Olympus is populated by such legendary writers and performers as Willie Dixon. Both Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits. I like The Doors so much more than I should. And regardless of all this, the passing of one true master of the song lyric as art, as poetry, is monumental to me as someone working in that field (or even if I’d only ever listened while writing assignments or during my break). And twilight recognition to a writer who, at his best, was both universal and transmuted. Even if he couldn’t sing. A couple of people have come out and said that it should have been Cohen, not Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Was Dylan the sympathetic favourite because he’d had the bigger impact, or because of Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited? For me, I saw them both live in thoroughly enjoyable concerts and my record collection is bristling, even our bookshelves have the stray work.

Despite all this, I don’t take my main cues from either, other than to give service to the power of the words to project or convey meaning once they are assembled (and this applies to knights in white satin and climbing the stairway to heaven as it does to more or less esoteric work).

Folk: us

Posted on 16/01/2016 by admin

Folk music exists around the world and maintains its currency regardless of changes in musical fashion. That is, the whole globe continues to produce musical outfits that could reasonably be described as folk-oriented.

But there is no point in attempting to learn the entire cultural backdrop and different instruments when folk has at its base lived experience. We write about a place we traverse with people we recognise. Only historical reconstructions put the lie to that. And folk music is big on celebrating and documenting the past.

But, right, there is something that ‘clicks’ (in Australia’s case, shears 🙂 )

We’ve just looked at skiffle and that’s a kind of folk music. Then, for we colonials, there are Irish, Scots and Welsh folk songs aplenty. Let’s write one of those songs that is not going to satisfy any of these categories – even if accidentally

Lived Experience

I've felled forests fallowed fields 
I've worked like a jerk for minimum yield
Breaking my back and stretching my neck out
Design in my spine is there til I check out
this lived experience

The best that we can be
is the test as you can see
we make the most of mystery
it's a lived experience

A force that courses through
when they cancelled that taboo
choose who she chews
chews who she choose
set as lived experience

I've moved mountains measured mounds
I've sorted my surrounds
Bracing my shoulders facing my foes
Yes it's keeping me on my toes
such a lived experience

Alt who goes there

Posted on 31/10/2015 by admin

I Can’t Be Scene 2 could be alt-country because it uses familiar heartbreak territory from traditional country and blends it with imagery a little wilder and at turns whimsical.

Alt-rock is exemplified in It’s Your Loss

See if you agree

I Can’t Be Scene 2

I can be the opening shot
on some as yet empty lot
I can draw you out or I can draw you in
beg something big for the chance to begin

But I can't be scene 2
fall apart
I can't be scene 2
 return to start

I can advance the plot
 be something that I'm not
Emerge unscathed with this demiurge 
the hour is now a powers purge 

[Chorus]
I can stem the tide I can stop the rot
  and more besides what have you got
Place the case inside the zone
 A catalyst to call my own

[Chorus]

It’s Your Loss

If you'd led with your head
What you've said given cred
But now you're stuck with this instead
    It's your loss
 
If you pulled apart the stop and start
 The dearth of earth as sudden art
 Certain that was the pertinent part
   Well it's your loss 

In describing the bribing of those still subscribing
 to the pitch of the rich how they're arriving
  at first in best served survival
     there's always a cost
        and it's your loss

As those you love have moved above
The ebb and flow the push and shove
Foot in mouth goes hand in glove
           your loss
              it's

Genreveal later

Posted on 15/08/2015 by admin

I believe songwriting is less about authenticity than it is fidelity to the song. While you can play games that you know beforehand are not going to come off, the preponderance of time spent in serious purpose, as it were, is on working up a song rather than working out a song or shoehorning a song.

That said, you have to know what you’re treading lightly around before you can do so successfully. The folk musics of Macedonia or Malta or Madagascar or Mali or Mexico are bound to have exerted their influence at some point in history and we have learnt from our own traditions as much as we have ignored, say, ritual music or rural music found nowhere else. It’s true that the blues and other regional music forms do make their presence felt in far off approximations. Regardless of what you think of the Bluesbreakers or Blues Influence or other variously identified by the music they play, bands. No matter what opinion you hold on the Yardbirds or any white group that did a blues cover ever.

One can readily say the same for jazz and rock’n’roll. Not to mention disco, funk, rhythm’n’blues, soul, gospel, rap,

Two things to bear in mind:

in the early pre-recording days of field music, songs were passed on from one musician to the next, often with embellisments or swapped lines;
nobody preaches authenticity to the makers of Moog sythesizer recordings nor trouble to argue the origin or adherence of someone with an emulator under their arm

I’m going to do something foolhardy and argue with the viewpoint of a black female singer and touring band leader, and say that I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as saying that it’s rock music when some white band plays it and then R & B when the black guy does it. Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley are in all likelihood the premier rock’n’roll singer-songwriters. What Buddy Holly wrote and Bill Haley didn’t write are essential part of the canon but they don’t have either the number of classics nor the resonance. There are enough covers of Who Do You Love? out there to sink a rockin’ battleship.

Bluesed and bettered

Posted on 31/07/2015 by admin

As with the other significant genres, blues has many variations: jump blues, country blues, folk blues, Chicago blues. I have delved as far as I care to in the appropriated form (and I know that all the great genres and offshoots are appropriated)

I think some of the language in death cafe is a little dense for the blues, which comes right out and says it. Or, at least, provides a colourful metaphor that gives us the full nudge and wink.

The humour is earthy not esoteric. The drama is in real life depiction of what the songwriter experiences. Stories are about the protagonist in situations. There’s a lot of first person: I’m a back door man, I’m a hoochie coochie man, I’m the seventh son

You know and I know that that is the same man. One Willie Dixon. In my opinion the greatest blues songwriter.

The blues has such diversity that these observations can’t cover all of the genre all the time. But they’re a good field guide.

The me

Posted on 24/12/2012 by admin

Should we be thinking about the theme when we’re writing a song? I wouldn’t recommend it; only because my experience has been that the theme will form of its own accord. It’s more the job of the reviewer or academic to decide whether there’s a theme and, if so, how well the song develops that theme, or works within it.

The composer has a broken heart, has lost his/her job, is missing someone; these are the emotions that drive composition. But so is necessity, desire for glory, a nice turn of phrase. It’s not possible to dismiss any of these factors when they are so much in display in their respective corner.

This is a separate concern than that found in the ideal theme for a set of lyrics; one organically grown as a consequence of exploring the implications of the scenario presented in the song. This means, despite the fact you might be writing nationalist ditties for Skrewdriver or California ditties of either the Beach Boys or Dead Kennedys variety, your fidelity to the song is what drives it, not your projection as to its place in the charts, or the fine words spent in that Mojo review praising the finished product.

If you call your song ‘Kill the Poor’ or ‘Wouldn’t it be Nice’ either way a theme begins to emerge. This is then quailfied by the lyrics as we progress through the song. And when I say “qualified” I mean not just that it explores every facet of that main notion, but that it alters our sense of what is meant.

This is not a critical exercise, so I don’t want to explore in too much depth what Jane Fonda being on the screen does to perception of what this act (killing the poor) would entail, but it does colour the content of the song; the lyrics going in slightly different direction than the audience at first expects from the title or opening lines.

From the Sound of It

Tag Archives: song lyrics