Tag Archives: writing for different genres

Glitters and Heavy hitters

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As is the practice, let’s review those last posts and see to what extent they could be mistaken for the genre I’ve mentioned. Given that we have already acknowledged that attempting to ape existing works in order to get it right or seem authentic is not a good approach for us, there is only so much change the songwriter needs to make to accommodate such urges.

We could ask Alvin or Ziggy using cut up method or something more Glitter than Gary but I haven’t got time for dress-ups. The priority for the lyricist is in taking the song where it needs to go. The choice is upfront in deciding a title or seizing on some passing scrap and building from it, after that you are going to see it form its own way.

I don’t know about you but I’m not that fascinated with the one time glitter rock to spend too much time ‘getting it right’. The thing to do is conjure it all up on your music carriage service of choice.

Ever So Slightly is a tongue twister; a dash through sibilance is a challenge or else a distraction for the singer, especially if they’re also playing a musical instrument. And this is antithetic to the whole ‘Come on come on’ that plays so well with the lads.

Stop You in Your Tracks is the same. It might form the basis for a symphonic metal beast but it’s not going to play well for the hairy biker you got to sing nor the swaying crowd.

Both look, for all their other traits, like poems to read on the page. The very decision to use the homonym means it will be extraordinarily hard to convey through a microphone, especially if you’re yelling and screaming or using a vocal pitch that is accentuated over playing to subtlety in meaning.

If we accept the fact that the songs aren’t bad, the only further observation of interest is what this highlights in the genres. Allowing that they all serve some purpose, be they crass or deluded, repetitive in uninteresting ways, it’s only to note mildly that no metal, be it doom metal, death metal, hair metal, power metal, black metal, thrash metal, dark ambient metal, gothic metal                               has started out vocally with ‘The fuddling of the feat to disappear’ nor fuddling of feet for that matter. Not to be critical of the many forms of metal which are musically dexterous, the wordplay here, which might be imperative in some alternative rock, just strips the impact that a more simply worded message would have.

So what do we gain from this trawl through the genres? The need to nod to fashion for our glam and glitter and to darkness and betrayal for our more metallic tinge, drove the direction of these songs.

Rewind

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Some songs are complete at first draft, some songscraps (especially, for me, in the past) and nothing more, and some go through several drafts and/or versions. Artists have been known to revisit earlier takes as the mood takes them.

There are a couple more thoughts I had on our last effort so let’s look at that False Alarm again:

False Alarm 

The sirens resemble the things we love best
assayed and assiduous as we can attest
Deploy the lever on the Great Deceiver
had it up to here with fate believers

This wasn’t even the original edit which I did up top. The principle though, of letting that last line scan more, was there.

Truthfully, if audience and listener have not been introduced to another line you could make it ‘had it up to here with late believers’ and they would extract a meaning from that, or at least find it doesn’t jar their experience of listening to the song.

I’m using the They equivalent of the Royal We here as many musicians are listeners and writers are readers and I’m happy to be in that throng. I can’t speculate whether other lyricists and songwriters are more precious about retaining their first meaning or slant but, as long as I’ve kept a copy of earlier drafts, I’m quite ready to ditch an idea or switch perception.

You know, I couldn’t recall that earlier idea for line four but I do believe it was ‘had it up to here with fake believers’. I wasn’t thinking of the rhyme with Great Deceiver but the variations of ‘false’ which is why I didn’t glom when writing ‘fate‘ if not tempting it.

II

On another tangent, the original conception of the sirens can be realised as

False Alarm 

The sirens are sorry they sought your assistance
lighting the path to least resistance

Sung poetry

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By now you may be seeing a pattern which suggests, quite unconsciously, that songs are written to a certain requirement. According to the instruments used, the versatility of the musicians, the kind of crowd. Fidelity to a subgenre that was possibly suggested by an overheated hack in the first place, is not something to which one should adhere with any rigidity. Not if you want to be prolific.

My beginnings are in word scraps and then poetry so I absolutely identify with this. The idea of some scant accompaniment to a particulary poignant piece is something I see as desirable, all the while conscious that the audience may see it differently.

I suppose this is why, as a lyricist, I alternate between modes; sometimes more song-driven, at other times, employing the pliability of verse. There’s a certain luxury with not having to be the one to figure out how the piano or guitar can be best employed.

And my heroes are all songpoets though I do admire Iggy’s physicality and Jim Morrison’s deep Dyonisian delivery

Anything can be made into poetry. Which is not the same as saying that anything is poetry. Some things – many things – are too prosaic to make the cut.

Tore Out the Last Page

Trapped in tit for tat and a tat for your tit  
You've ruled in the margin but don't get this bit
As the scene unravels and flags unfurl
and we're back at the beginning of boy meets girl
Dog-eared digressions keep us amused
when the templates for confession have all been used
If you think me foreword I'll append I seize
at the shelf by themself and down on one knee

Indexed a digital dialect
jack in to direct
where once circling the circumspect
no paper caper to correct

A clot in the plot and a a thinning theme
Deus ex machina well we can dream
Characters careening corrupting their leaning

The author affirms the studied bookworms
Ideas and how they carry germs
Fixing the foxing faxing a copy 
Forming our own conclusions

Death mettle

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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

The grass is always bluer (on the other side)

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We know how to retrofit songs to genre or not as the case may be. There’s always a fall back if you do have to write a bluegrass number for instance.

  1. Rely on your knowledge of the work of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs or Bill Monroe to inform the way you construct the song
  2. Use classics to define the mood
  3. Look at the earliest songs and then note the amount of movement, if any, lyrically
  4. See the way the words fit with the song

When I was looking at what I could bring to bluegrass or take from it, I settled on two things: locale and narrative form

I live in mountains but not Appalachian Mountains so how do I navigate to that form of storytelling. Well, I grew up on a farm but I’ve always understood that to mean, at least in the Australian outback, country (or, as it used to be known at times, country & western)

The standards all have narratives but they vary between first, second and third person and ‘Oh Death‘ and ‘In the Pines‘ switch narrative voices in a kind of one-person call and response. They can be about one person in particular, such as John Henry or about the place they live and the conditions they operate under. For that reason I didn’t think this other song I was writing about Boxes had the right sentiment or style.

There isn’t a lot of metaphor in bluegrass (to the point that that’s really Death talking) so I kept returning to the childhood home. If it wasn’t about rodeos or mustering, or the lives and loves of the countryside then perhaps I could cleave closer to bluegrass than its kissin’ cousin, country

And then I thought about the verandah and that seemed underexplored enough to give fresh paint. At first I was influenced by what I was learning about existing bluegrass numbers and kept the scene literal but once I had that first draft I was able to move into a more poetic but, hopefully, still authentic recreation of a mood or feeling or impression

The Verandah

The verandah the verandah
 I'll see you out there on the verandah

 A day out in the paddock as your thoughts go round and round
 and it's you and other tractors that make the only sound
 Some solvol and a wash bowl it's time to scrub clean
 Waiting for tea and there is me finding a place to lean
 on the verandah
Cosmopolitan capers occur in cafes far away
 but out here in this red dirt is where I've said I'll stay
 With books borrowed from the library
 and a paper a week old
 Where the main instruction is
 just do what you're told
and the only place to escape
 is the verandah
 go outside and play
 on the verandah

I wrote that on the thirtieth. It wasn’t til the third of September that I wrote two more drafts; this time the song had not only loosened its style, it had made other changes that had an effect on both narrative and structure. And it had changed name

Side Verandah Blues

All day long I've been going round
Sharing sounds with my surrounds
Solvol and a wash bowl it's time to scrub clean
Waiting for tea and there's me find a place to lean
 on the verandah

Cosmopolitan capers in clubs far away
While here in the red dirt I've said I'll stay
Read the papers weak and old
The main instruction 'Do what you're told'

and the only place to escape
 is the verandah
go outside and play
 on the verandah

Side Verandah Blues (3)

All day long I've been going round
Sharing sounds with my surrounds
Solvol and a wash bowl it's time to scrub clean
Waiting for tea there's me finding a place to lean
 on the verandah

Cosmopolitan capers in clubs far away
While here in the red dirt I've said I will stay
The news is a week old, weak and old
The only instruction to do what you're told

and the one place to escape
 is the verandah
go outside and play
 on the verandah

Genreveal later

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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.

 

Bilious billy, yes

Aside

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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.

 

Further drafts

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If you did get wind of that last turbine driven rockabilly number you probably found the syllable count to be the most contentious part.

You could argue about whether a commissioner of any energy system needs to act as a metaphor for the kind of interests displayed by the billies, if I can call them that (just recently I noticed that a new rock festival coming to Katoomba will feature, among other acts, one doing horrorbilly), and I don’t think a po-faced folk rendition would have worked in the context of leather jackets and quiffs. Can anything political invade rockabilly turf? The apocalyptic end of shockabilly variations is usually cast in terms such as This is the Day the Sun Burned Down – where they are definitely not discussing solar funding.

II

I have been writing in the exercise book again and finding that ideas tend to come out in a more scattered order. This elaborates on some of the experiences I was recounting in earlier posts but there is a tangent at play when the handwritten lyrics move from nine, say, drafts of whole songs to lyrics delivered out of order and not immediately working despite an expectation that, by fitting and being in context, it should.

The first two pieces came about from the news that a work experience kid had discovered an exoplanet. Considering how recently we were ooh-ing and aah-ing about the first ones to be visible in the new telescopes, this trajectory reminds me of climbing Everest or breaking the four minute mile. It starts as this amazing thing and then is absorbed; at least enough for the bright and talented to pick up and pass on.

None of this ends up in the draft as I am in too much of a reverie about the space in general that the exoplanet planned for the chorus.

[Shockabilly draft]

EXOPLANET
Now that our vision extends beyond the reach
A yearning for learning but what will it teach
Worlds inconceivable light years away
A vaccuum to a void disperse and display
Exoplanet

The telescope tells of hope
Think outside the envelope
Stars adrift in a cosmic shift
The odds of gods being Man’s greatest gift
Exoplanet

One’s elusive now exclusive
The astronomical pay purview
A dearth on the earth we are but few
No offer up to this effusive
Exoplanet

In the past till the last we looked up to the sky
Wondered where what was there we asked why
As all our fronteirs are receding
Process the progress still proceeding
Exoplanet

I wrote this on 25th of June so my thoughts about it have changed but, at the time, I decided the following day to try again. This time not looking at the first version but using one particularly strong line ‘The odds of gods being Man’s greatest gift’

The vastness of the cosmos impresses me no end
As we all turn in circles in these eternal circles
Fade into the shade where life begins again

The burnt out stars that we still see
Their dead state serves as company
Switching on each witching hour
Wishing on a meteor shower

Light years away we like to stray
Where time determines night meets day
Space in place across divides
The odds that gods alone decide

Beyond every notion that we ever had
A guide to the good, a bid for the bad
Averaging out each moment of doubt

The vastness of the cosmos impresses me no end
As we turn in circles in these eternal circles
Ignite in the light life begins again

I wrote it but realised that it, too, had not stayed on exoplanets or, indeed, had much to say about them at all. It would require its own title. This doesn’t commonly happen as I tend to write from titles but, yes, I settled on IN THE SPACE PROVIDED

I let it rest there and went off and wrote a piece called REINVENTION as that was something foremost in my life, about to be offered a package.

Anyway, that was fine

I then returned to the space theme although I didn’t planet and really the two snatches there are more pissing around than anything.

And still I don’t have an exoplanet song.

 

 

 

Dicks see land

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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

Narrative drive

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Gospel and soul demonstrate devotion to the Lord and a loved one respectively. South Park satirised this to some extent when Cartman replaces sweetheart references in popular songs with that of Jesus and then sells to Christian radio listeners.

A narrative that serves both at once is the sublime ‘I Say a Little Prayer‘. A simple song that recounts little moments grabbed throughout the day shows such love for the paramour but still manages to include God.

To see the role of narrative, let’s start a song from a narrative: ‘Leading conservatives forecast a short war in Iraq, now, without irony are considering returning to a battlefield they’ve withdrawn from’. Forget the wording here and focus on the intent. It’s not so much about living in a Red Zone as talking about the former Kingdom and how it’s fallen.

What’s happened here? You have the narrative as described and two further narrative elaborations. You don’t need to think any of these out loud when you’re writing songs. Retain a brief sideways glance at what’s arising but don’t let it stop you from getting down that draft.

So our song’s called Iraq the place and now immediately, if your creative juices are flowing, you’ve got lines for your song as well ‘Don’t drive too fast towards a checkpoint/Don’t fire your guns in the air’. The lines carry the same rhythm and emphasis. The only thing is, that these lyrics are “instructions” to locals. Occupying troops aren’t the ones doing this, they’re the ones shooting Iraqis who do.
But the title suggests both a travelogue or mapping and the mimetic ‘I rock the place’. My cultural studies training kicks in and I can recall the lecturer recounting how it was interlopers who sat up on sacred mounds that locals merely walk past pursuing their trades. Clearly you could make a meal of mashing these two narrative constructs together but not by failing to mark when a different character is talking.

The lines carry more meaning than the title or theme. If they contradict either then they will compel the recipient to choose sides. Are we talking about rocking the place or being in the place like a rock? The threat imposed from outside is what these lines convey and any theme or title has to fit that.