Tag Archives: songwriting

The Rules of Country

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What about genre? Let’s not get caught up in the clanging of metal or flitting of folk. There are as many genres and subgenres as to have lost count. There are song types that are labelled but the fad finishes so fast that it falls into disuse. But for all its susceptibility genre has a useful purpose in subconsciously delineating its defining features.

Country music is earthy and celebrates life on the land. It talks about the trails and tribulations of life, love, companionship, home. There is glitter and rhinestones, don’t get me wrong, but the lyrical content has a modesty of intent. Later artists started getting increasingly gimmicky to keep the appeal of plowing the same field, with one behatted guitar-slinger declare he was “Lookin’ for Tics”. No music should, however, be judged by its most facile aspects.

Every permutation of love and heartbreak is attended somewhere along the line. These are popular subjects in many genres. Country music adopts a more courtly approach; Merle Haggard “We don’t make a party out of lovin’/We like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo”. The menfolk are as likely to get a serve, perhaps even more so. From being admonished to ‘Not come home a’drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind’ to being accused en masse “Two hoots and a holler/The men ain’t worth a damn/Two hoots and a holler/They’re the lowest thing around”
Even when a partner is found to be cheating, there’s a bitter remorse at it “happening” like in the beautiful Tennessee Waltz where ‘my friend stole my sweetheart away‘ or coming off the poorer from a table with “Three cigarettes in the ashtray” rather than an excuse to cuss. It’s ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ not ‘You’re a Cheatin’ Harlot’

If you’re a national treasure you can write songs about different towns and then tour them. You’re guaranteed of good crowd reaction for at least one song.

The first artist I would have seen live was Buddy Williams, an odd honour for him to possess given the array of singers and musicians I’ve watched since. But live entertainment was very much appreciated that far out in the country and there’s a real sense in which artists in this genre are writing to, for, and with the people living in remote rural communities.
One of his was ‘Way Out Where the White-face Cattle Roam’ but that was on a later recording so not sure why that one stuck. Early Slim Dusty takes its inspiration from the bush balladeers of the nineteenth century and also sings about pubs and mates. Country music isn’t given to too much trickery. Wordplay has to let the listener in on the joke. But it’s glorious when it does this well “If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me” “All my exes live in Texas, that’s why I live in Tennessee”
Chad Morgan’s stock in trade is humorous songs about country weddings, country nutjobs, country hicks. Nothing’s sacred.

While country lyrics take a genteel approach to lovemaking – witness Charlie Rich suggesting what will go on once they get Behind Closed Doors or listen to Travis Tritt hearing his lover’s heart beating faster – death tends to be dealt with more bluntly, and there’s no sanction on singing of revenge and murder.

Occasionally country will stray into politics but usually only if the situation is extreme such as Hank Williams warning off Joe McCarthy in ‘No Joe’. Even then we wonder whether he’s not more of a folk performer when he addresses such topics. Topical events like The Pill or The Streak get a run and we can’t forget (much as we might like to) the conservative admonitions often as not culminating in boneheaded attempts at rousing patriotic sentiment for the agenda of the government of the day.

II

I don’t intend to look at features of all genres that closely as I feel that the songwriting process absorbs much of this understanding from a lifetime of listening (even half-listening) but I don’t think it hurts to see how genre operates.

Does this mean that you tailor your words to the expectations of what a country song is? Or what an alt country or Americana tune is? I remain consistent in my advice that you need to build songs up from the needs of the song and let things like genre take care of themselves. This wouldn’t work so well if you were thinking of writing ‘You Can’t Have a Hoedown Without Hoes’ but if you stay away from the cliche you’ll be better off anyway.

III

‘Towing Back’, ‘Tow It Back’ sound too topical to past muster, especially when the subject strays a little into the opposite camp. Even when my whimsy touched down on ‘Towin’ Back Your Heart’, I thought of the tangential ‘You Can’t Take It Back’ but, even as I was assembling the first lines in my head, I had an overwhelming sense that this would be more of a gritty R&B. Let’s see

You Can’t Take It Back

You give out hurt and hate galore
The darkest corners to explore
You surrender planned splendour
Release a real ease of movement
The impact that sells improvement

But you can’t take it back

You give away the things you say
Watching it all come into play
You abandon the cause you stand on
Throw the game of second chance
While circling round a circumstance

No you can’t take it back

IV

I don’t think it fits either genre. It’s more my choppy style laden with different readings. You may encounter other stylistic tics that take you away from the country. This is only a problem if you’ve taken on the wording for a hoedown or been given the task of pitching some lyrics for a country & western song. As for alt-country, for the purposes of this exercise, I want to stick to a more traditional form even among more contemporary songwriters.

I’d thus suggest an approach more along the lines of:

You Can’t Take It Back

You gave me years of turns at tears
You gave me an escape
You surrendered your pretended
coy ploys and attack
You can’t take it back

You lent me rent me circumvent me
You turned me inside and out
You pawed me and ignored me
at the first prospect you lack
You can’t take it back

What you offered and you proffered
Off colour and profane
You slid across the chrome embossed
dream all dressed in black
You can’t take it back

Song’s tough with songstuff

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Following on from the last post, let’s stay with songstuff. You may be wondering how a title and an undeveloped couplet comprise ‘songstuff’. Don’t you need to have the whole song fleshed out before you can talk about content?

No, because you won’t be writing the song that way. Even if you share the stage of being able to write effortlessly to order, you will find yourself assembling the pieces. Every writer is probably different, but they can still only put the song together using its components. Theirs are the many happy accidents that can happen once the idea comes together.

There isn’t anything in the news I want to touch so lets stay off topical currency and look at how songs announce themselves. We’ve been looking at the part narrative plays; albeit in its offshoots and aspects, and I do see a central role, if not a defining one, in the songwriter’s armoury. Even if, paradoxically, writing a song as if you were writing a story is limiting and fraught, if that’s what you feel obligated to do.

If you are going for the story song, consider ‘Hurricane’ by Bob Dylan. It starts off “Here comes the story of Hurricane/the man the authorities came to blame/for something that he never done”. Whether Reuben Carter was falsely tried, the intent of the song; its meaning, is right there. So put away your Dylanology essay sheets for now.

“Here comes the story” instead of “This is the story” helps to roar into that story but that’s just a bonus coming from the master.

You achieve a similar effect with “Let me tell you ’bout the birds and the bees/and the flowers and the trees/And a thing called love” except there it’s the captive audience without the promise of a story. I’m just going to tell you about a whole bunch of stuff, in song.
Another way of declaring that you’re telling the listener a bunch of stuff in song is in the chorus of ‘Gypsy Queen’ by Adam Harvey, “Well I’m singing for the dark and lonely highways/I’m singing for the rivers and the seas/I’m singing for the country roads and byways” What’s instructive in that song is not that it returns to a familiar patina about who will sing for [the narrator], but that it launches into an explanation of what he or she is doing. Singing about the fact you are singing, but doing it artfully and so it fits in the song.

The statement of intent is not a feature that makes a song more honest, even if that is what it aspires to be. A formless song that documents loss is going to have a resonance beyond its technical limitations, while a dexterous work that has no feeling is less successful.

Songs that aren’t telling you any more than you want to hear are an essential part in the industry that keeps music making a viable option. They allow songs that don’t flinch from telling it like it is to be published and performed.

There’s no need to introduce yourself at all. A song doesn’t have to announce its presence or revel in its construct. Nor does its writer.

The me

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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.