How I Write My Songs

Or I take a trip. Minneapolis, say, frequent flyer miles and a place to stay, how can we not go? We being my girlfriend and I. The place to stay being her sister and brother-in-law's house. They have two children, a ten-month-old and a four-year-old.

We mostly just hang around the house there--people are sick there--and I play around on the guitar some. The guitar being the travel guitar I travel with sometimes these days. My girlfriend's brother-in-law, who gets enthusiastic sometimes, says I have a beautiful voice. My girlfriend points out the strangeness of that, assures me it's not true. "I like your voice," she says. "I really do. But I'd never say it's beautiful."

On the plane back I start a geographic song, a country one. Thinking about it, I realize there are songs about many southern cities and states. West Virginia. (Almost Heaven.) Atlanta. (I remember a 70's rock song, anyway.) Georgia (On My Mind). Dallas. (A Joe Ely one.) North Carolina. (Carolina on My Mind). Memphis (Take Me Back To Memphis, an old one). On a country station I recently caught "Paint Me a Birmingham," which violates every rule of good writing that I know. So of course now it's a hit for two artists.

On the plane I struggle a while, come up with an idea for a place that may not have been used yet. I'm writing the lyrics on a personal digital assistant thingee, and before landing the flight attendant tells us to turn off electronic devices. I turn off the PDA, and by the time we're allowed to use our devices I've lost interest in the song. The next morning on the subway I play with it a bit more. It's crap so far, but it has possibilities. And isn't that what keeps all of us going, all the time--sure, things aren't so great, but maybe, right around the next corner, they will be?

This philosophizing meaning: I need sleep.

How can you not lose interest? There are, after all, jobs, bills, relationships, household duties, and just more fun things do to.

You go to the movies, for Christ's sake. How can anyone begrudge you that? It's two hours, and a half hour walk each way. On the way back you stop at the coffee place. The Asian woman who works behind the counter has long hair now. It was short the last time you noticed. Her English is still not great, though; she still doesn't laugh at your jokes. The stack of newspapers contains multiple copies of the front section of the Wall Street Journal and not one of the front section of the New York Times. You settle for the arts section of the Times. You find it as parochial as usual.

And how can you focus on revising one song when there are so many that need it? The others, you decide, have more potential anyway. The one about everyone going upscale but the protagonist: Nashville loves that kind of stuff, or you think they do anyway. (You don't actually listen to country music: too sentimental, too polically conservative.) All it needs, you decide, is some sort of melody and a thorough revision of the lyrics. When you get home you plug in the four track and pre-amp/compressor and record a guitar track. Then you re-record it. Then you re-record it again. You decide you're a lousy guitarist. And anyway, you don't have a clue what the guitar part in a country song sounds like. At best you can manage some heavily distorted power chords, and there's no way that's going to work.

And then it's late afternoon, early evening, night, and you have a beer or two, eat some leftovers, watch some sports on TV, and get bored with that and read some from a book about art. You'll do more tomorrow, you think. Or the day after that.

And for another example, that second line, "I feel bad when I'm likened to a rounder." Terrible, of course. And inaccurate, vis-a-vis me. Who came up with that?

Playing around with it, trying to keep rhyming with "flounder," remembering the current topic of the song, the topic of many of them actually--the woman leaving the man she once claimed to love--I came up with, and settled on for the time being, "I feel bad when I cannot be around her." Obvious, of course; it's the same sounds, at least the way I pronounce them: "a rounder" and "around her." And the topic relates to the last verse, which includes a line along the lines of "I feel sad watching as she packs her luggage," which came about because at the time I came up with the "I'm so glad that I don't live in a flounder" line/melody my girlfriend was packing some luggage for a long weekend trip.

Luggage currently rhyming with rubbage, as in "I'm so glad that I've taken out the rubbage." Which isn't a good word, but maybe we--yes, I said we; I am including you, my imaginary reader, in this process now--maybe we can live with it.

So it's moving along. Though one never knows if it's moving in the right direction or not, or if ultimately it will move back to where it started or somewhere so different that it will be unrecognizable, will be, say, a song about bicycling through the Cotwolds in England and seeing more sheep than people. Probably, though, it will not end up as that.

What else can I say about revising? I tend to revise for brief periods as I walk to the grocery store or ride on the subway--here in D.C. called the Metro--or sitting at my desk at work. Last night I came across "around her"--came across it in my head, I mean, "came up with it" I suppose I could say, but it feels more like coming across it like you'd come across a old bill you haven't gotten around to paying yet--I came across "around her" walking back from the grocery store. Sitting at home and trying to revise, over long periods especially, like a job, doesn't seem so appealing. Though parts of the process must be done at home, at least the way I write my songs--working out the music on the guitar, seeing if I can sing it in the key it comes out in, etc.

A personal note: I have a headache. I'm going to go lie down, maybe nap if the pain subsides, maybe listen to some Prokofiev--his second string quartet, maybe, or a violin sonata on the my new CD with Gil Shaham on violin and his sister on piano. But given the way my head feels that may not work, and I may switch over to something more familiar-sounding, say a Mozart or Haydn string quartet. This wouldn't be background music, mind you, it would be music I'd attempt to listen to carefully, perhaps even following along with the score of the Mozart or Haydn. Having background music teaches you not to listen, which is a dangerous habit I think.

Which is, if you find that sort of thing fun, the fun part.

Less fun, for most of us, but no less necessary, for most of us, is revising: figuring out what it means or what it's supposed to mean or what it might mean, and then going over every word and every note seeing how it relates to what it means or is supposed to mean or might mean. Then doing it again. And again.

For example, "Well I haven't slept a wink since the last time that I slept/And I haven't had a drink since the last time that I drink" doesn't rhyme. It might be nice, though, if it did. It sort of wants to rhyme, I think. Line endings generally, I think, want to rhyme. But perfect rhymes are hard to come by. Slept and...wept? "And I haven't cried a tear since the last time that I wept"? I don't think so.

And anyway, perfect rhymes are overused, I think. Near rhymes, more-or-less rhymes, are better, maybe, at least in part, because they're less showy, less pretentious. So, after attempt after attempt--changing the first line, changing the second line, changing both lines, going back to the original two lines--I settled on "Well I haven't slept a wink since the last time that I slept/And I haven't had a drink because I haven't started yet."

Which to me means he's getting ready to start drinking ON THAT NIGHT (not that he hasn't had a drink ever). Probably he's getting ready to start drinking because he's getting ready to start being sad, or to start wallowing in how sad he is. Which means to me that, if the song is going to make any sort of overall sense, the verses need to establish, or at least suggest, why he's getting ready to start being sad or to start wallowing in his sadness.

And so on.

Writers sometimes say that they know something is finished if they spend all morning on it and end up only putting in a single comma, and then they spend all afternoon on it and end up only taking out that comma. Which is, sadly, about right.

Taking out the garbage it occurred to me to write a song with the line "I'm so glad that I don't live in a flounder." A flounder being an old, narrow building with windows only on one side, and with a roof that slopes up to the windowless side. At least that's what they call those buildings, or parts of buildings that jut out behind the main building, in my area and, I understand, in Philadelphia. And when I say "old . . . building" I mean from 1800 or so. I don't live in a flounder, but one juts out behind the building I live in, and I walk past the flounder on the way to, and on the way back from, the alley where I leave the garbage to be picked up.

When I got back to the apartment I played around with the flounder line, singing it to my girlfriend, who asked what song I was singing. (It came into my head with a tune, but I won't bother trying to write it out here.) That she thought it was a song seemed like a good sign to me. I decided to try to make it into one.

I like repetition: not only repeated choruses, but repeated lines or phrases. So I thought, why not "I'm so glad that I don't live in a flounder, that I don't live in a flounder I feel glad"? And rhymes can lead to ideas that you'd never have otherwise. Instead of "I'm so glad" why not "I get mad"? And instead of "that I don't live in a flounder" why not "when I'm likened to a rounder"? Rounder not only rhymes, but it's also, like flounder, a word that not everyone would know. (I only know it from folk songs.) And "likened to" also sounds old. With the repetition, the line became "I get mad when I'm likened to a rounder, when I'm likened to a rounder I get mad."

Choruses allow you to take the song somewhere else entirely if you want. What occurred to me as a first line for the chorus, probably because it was time to get ready for bed, was "Well I haven't slept a wink since the last time that I slept." Then, probably because of the internal rhyme, and because I frequently write about drinks and drinking, I came up with "And I haven't had a drink since the last time that I drank."

Then, to tie it all together, I put in another "I'm so glad that I don't live in a flounder/That I don't live in a flounder I feel glad."

While I played around with these lines I got my guitar and picked out the melody in my head and figured out what chords would fit with it, modifying the melody slightly in the process.

And so I had verse one, with an internal chorus that I could use in the other verses if I wanted. And I was on my way to writing a new song!

The first thing I do is get an idea. Sometimes I simply steal them from others. Donald Barthelme, for example, wrote a short story called "How I Write My Songs." Or I believe he did. I could look it up, but that would require standing up and going over to the bookshelves, or doing an internet search, and who has the time?

The second thing I do is play around with the idea until I grow tired of it . . . .