How To Write A Song

I enjoyed this article and it inspired me to share my own experience with songwriting. 

Firstly the article's headline is a bit of a lie, like most headlines, and any mention of "top songwriting" and "taylor swift" is, swiftly, given the boot after the first paragraph. This not about hit-making. This is about the very Guardian-esque act of trying to learn how to write a song via the medium of going on a retreat. In Wales. Because you can't go on a retreat in, say, Amersham. It's gotta be Wales. They go on walks, they get pissed as farts, they discuss being open and fearless, and then they put pen to paper and write the most god-awful shit you've ever heard.

That's not entirely fair. The resulting song is actually, when the aim is considered as part of the final product, totally fine. If PJ Harvey did an album of dark folk standards about the Lincolnshire Fens and this thing was on it, it'd get five stars in, well, the Guardian. It goes on about mothers and brothers and fathers and sisters and probably draws a line from the roots of human frailty to the blood of trees and sap or something. It's pretty good, but it's also fucking horrible. 

What stood out to me from this article though is the total grift at the moment for masterclasses. No one wants to pay for music anymore but they'll pay to be a hobbyist, playing at music themselves, and so you've got Maestro and Masterclass and all manner of shit coming down the pipe. Like anything, there will be some small nuggets of usefulness from any of these classes, and if you have the money they're probably not a bad thing to do. They certainly won't set you backwards. But I don't think you should pay for it, because it's fucking songwriting. so I'm going to give it to you here, for free.

So. Here's some shit:

One. You don't need a retreat. Obviously they are a lovely experience and if you get the opportunity to go, you probably should. Why not? No work, Wales, making music in a little cabin thing, presumably pissed off your face -- just do it. But if you don't have access to that, then don't fret. You don't need it. You can write your song on the toilet. 

Two. It's easier to write ten songs than one song. That one song has to carry the weight of ten ideas but those ten can be one idea a piece. Sometimes not even that. Make a song with one chord and one word. Done. Move on. 

Three. Get happy. You cannot play your instrument (and you, your own voice, might be your instrument) if you're depressed, sad. If you're sad you can't even get out of bed, never mind wield the harmonic power of a guitar or the full range of your voice. So get happy. Go for a run or a walk. Do some morning pages. Write down a list of ten pigeons who wronged you. 

Four. Songs about love are always assumed as based on fact but no one ever asked Bernie Taupin if he went to space. This is the fallacy, the bullshattery, of Authenticity. Men are perceived as inherently more authentic than women. Notice that no one questions any of Ed Sheeran's totally stupid fucking songs but Taylor Swift gets pulled to bits -- "from Brixton, to Shoreditch, and back to Highgate. These are undoubtedly places that exist in London, but to visit them in the order that Swift describes is frankly farcical, not to mention time-consuming".* My advice here is to fuck it all into the wind. Who gives a shit. Eric Clapton grew up in a house with a garden in Surrey but is somehow regarded as an authentic bluesman, in a lineage with Robert Johnson. It's all nonsense. If you say you are, you are. Do whatever you want. 

Five. Related to Four -- imagine you're someone else. Nothing more authentic than that. For some reason Tom Petty is a potent character for me. Imaging his voice as I try out a melody, imagining the way he in his early stuff really focuses on just slamming a big suspended chord or doing the descending bass thing. Just bam. 

Six. A song can be anything and that can overwhelm you. So you need to set barriers and walls to box it in. Make it so it's only three chords, max, or that it's going to be 1 minute long. 3 chords, one minute, all the lyrics are about a man trying to find his keys. Go. This will be the easiest and stupidest song you've ever written but you'll finish it. This is stolen from the White Stripes. Jack White set strict parameters for the band -- we're going to limit ourselves to guitar, drums, voice -- right down to the three colours. From there you can strain and push against the walls you've put up. Without walls, you can fling off into the sky and never finish anything.

Seven. Go for a walk if you get stuck. That's stolen from Ray Davies. It'll work itself out. It's not "if it's meant to be" it's just.. the process. Sometimes staring at it no longer works and you need to get away from it. There's no other way and it's just a step towards finishing it. 

Eight. Completely rip someone off. Chances are in your beginner state you will end up something so different no one will ever be able to tell. 

Nine. If you can dance to it (and "dance" is a very broad term), your song is by default ten times better than one that you can't dance to. To write a good song with a non-danceable beat takes immense skill -- you're appealing to the listener's sense of melody, emotion, lyrics, because they're going to be paying more attention. If you do a load of 8th notes like the most basic Joy Division rip-off you're halfway there. I highly recommend you make every song like this. Completely copy the beat of "Just Like Heaven". "I Will Follow". "Disorder". Do ten songs like that, all the same, doesn't matter. You now have a live setlist. Writing good songs like Oasis, the majority of which have a loping hip-hop beat, is almost impossible. You will make something bland and plodding -- I know, because I wrote loads of those. They rely on exceptional melody, exceptional vocals, and exceptional amounts of compression on the recordings.

Ten. You are allowed to do this. You are more than whatever you thought you were.

And that's it. I hope you read this advice and give it a go. If you don't think I'm qualified you might be right. But here's my stuff. These are, by any definition, completed songs. Melody. Lyrics. Production. You might think they're crap but they're finished. That's the only bar we're looking at here - completed work. 

Have fun.

*Also this is a totally fine counter-clockwise trip around London. You can leave Brixton via the nearby Overground and take it up to Shoreditch, and then get on the Northern up to Highgate. It would be perfectly fine to do this. The only reason to claim it is not fine is because you're writing about Taylor Swift and you have to be a dickhead for some reason.

 

Opting out

I used to like the idea of an online profile. Not one that people knew about in the modern sense, but a different one per forum, or, later, a different one per platform. 

On skateboarding forums I'd pick whatever avatar represented my tastes at that time and write my replies in the same considered style. This sounds idiotic, but it's true. And then I'd move into music forums and do the same. Maybe I'd be lower case posts, maybe proper grammar and spelling. It was fun to present a style to other users. 

And then it moved into social media. A chosen Facebook photo that's both casual (because whoever cares too much is weird) but considered, and only posts that are the same. An Instagram feed of nice photos, nothing too wordy, nothing too emotional, presenting a digital life that looks fun. 

Don't get me wrong here. I'm not talking about presenting a "false" life, or only sharing the good things in life in order to inspire jealously in others. It's different, but hard to explain. You want people to look at your profile and think "cool". They'll look at the avatar or profile pic (at one point it was pretty sharp if you had a photo of a photo, like a passport pic, as your profile), and think this a nicely curated selection of stuff. 

And over time that curation gets more and more selective, in a Spinal Tap kind of way, and soon you're not posting at all. It's like millenials and ring tones. We turned them off. I didn't realise this was a thing until I read it -- we all, as a generation, have our phones on silent. Not even vibrate. And so too, our social media presence is mostly on mute, as we simply opt out of whatever is going on. I just don't care anymore. Like this blog. I realised I like writing but I don't want comments, or even views. If you read it, great, I don't want to know about it. Go away. Comments are turned off. Forever. 

This is not the same as a digital-detox, or grounding, or some other way of replacing what having a Facebook profile once gave you. It has no replacement -- it just disappears. There's no joining clubs (IRL), learning a new skill (and then writing articles about it), or pouring yourself into some other social media platform. There is simply no longer any desire to reach into the world and see what resonates, whatsoever. The thing about the internet is that you can find your tribe -- we found them -- and then we lost interest.

There is only the further and furthering pruning of an online life until the online-you doesn't exist at all. 

What I learned.

I've spent the last week in a bedroom hiding away from my family with COVID. I'm the one with covid. Not them. Which is why I was hiding away. It's not that complicated, is it?

Anyway. At first I thought I'd use this time for something productive. In hindsight I'm not sure if I let myself off immediately from this. I thought of the cartoon of the bloke in a rowboat in a raging sea and how he's thinking to himself that he should use this time wisely. And I obviously thought of fucking Shakespeare and his fucking plague and his fucking writing hamlet. The prick. 

But then I realised that was his job. He just worked from home. He wrote plays all day every day. This was no different. For me, it was a massive shift from my daily routine, which I was now trying to use as some sort of creative retreat. Cue the bloke in the rowboat. 

But, eventually, I did use the time. And I learnt, or relearnt, a few things about myself and my creative process. 

1. Writing an outline is very hard, especially when you try to use Tom hanks "blowing through an 11 page treatment" of that thing you do "in a week". Was it even a week? Anyway. He clearly had a clear idea clearly in his clear head about that film and the treatment was just getting it on paper for someone else to read. Me, my treatments are more like a screaming brainstorm as I try to get the idea to stand up straight. The only way out of that situation is to type and try and work it out. Pick out the bits you can see and try to link them up. Colour around and outside the lines until the inside is clear. I went from an idea full of holes to a structure that allowed me to pour lampshades into the holes. Which is good enough for me. 

2. You can't write without the outline or the treatment. Or at least you can't get very far. Having a rough set of words to follow when tapping it into a script allows you to speed ahead and not get caught up in not knowing. 

3. You need an ending first. It might change later on, but you need an ending that feels good enough to work towards.

So. What would I take from this going forward? The lack of fear. The outline, the document of nonsense, is key. You start with that. Trying to pants a screenplay is insane and self defeating. Trying to pants an outline is how an outline should be written. I had a series of beats for the start of the story and then realised they were impossible to write unless I had the latter half sorted out already to some degree. So I wrote the latter half. And once that was done it was a lot easier to slot the start on. And now the start is done I can go through and fill in the holes, add little callbacks, link things up. 

What would I do for my next script? I'm excited. Because the biggest barrier has always been not having any fucking scripts. And now I feel I've figured out ho to write them. I feel like I can churn them out now, as long as I have the outline and the ending. And the fear of doing the outline ... well. I guess we'll see how that goes. I'm not sure how I got over the fear of the outline this time. I think I just wrote my fears of the holes in the story and eventually a coherent piece appeared from all the crap. I specifically remember typing a lot of freaked out shit about having no clear idea what I was doing and how much pressure I was putting on my self over it, until suddenly it was there. I think breaking things down into manageable beats, and then even more manageable beats, if it's not manageable, make it even smaller, over and over, until you can handle it. 

So. Let's try this with our next thing. It's going to be the phantom manor. We're going to make an outline. Break the bits down until we can handle them. We have the opening, with the handshake deal. And we have the Marie Celeste house scene. And we have Ethel skeletons coming out of the soil. And we have dad getting sucked into the Earth. And meeting the other kid. And then they go to the house for some reason. Something leads them there. Who tells them about it? I guess they know. Maybe they dig a hole to try find dad. Anyway. The ending. He reveals he sacrificed himself for his children unlike his idiot parents and this sacrifice is more than the phantom can handle (because he made a deal with the oil Earth to save himself but end we up sacrificing his own family) which breaks the curse. A nice logical ending. No boys, it was meant to be this way. And do they get him back? Maybe. Who knows. So I've got the beginning and the end and the dad is a fun buffoon character who actually has a heart of gold and love for his child. That's beginning and end and a tiny bit of the middle. So we're off. Let's fill that middle in.  

Oh I forgot the one other thing I learned. I learned I actually do like this. I like the act of writing. I like it. It's fun. What I don't like is hesitating and staring at the blank page. So as long as I fill it up, I think we're good. Get that outline, get that ending. 

I should clarify that the outline starts off like a professional log line kind of synopsis and then devolves into snatches of dialogue or whole scenes and random question marks and other nonsense. It's bits to be stitched together later. 

The definitive artistic statement of 2021

You can hear it when the chorus hits.

It’s not often that you can hear a singer smiling while singing, but you can hear it in the "Taylor’s Version" of Love Story. The song has come home.

For those not on the frontline, 2020 was largely about turning inward. That could be reassessing what’s important (“why am I commuting two hours a day just to use my laptop in a different building?”), or reassessing what’s not important (“trousers”).

For Taylor Swift, country megastar and planet-eating pop-Galactus, it was to pursue a new musical direction while simultaneously dragging her beginnings into the future with her. It was about navel-gazing to the point of releasing two albums within six months of each other. New year, new pandemic, new you -- she used the time to release something that reflected where she was now musically, a break with the previous pure pop of 2019’s Lover. 

This might, then, seem like a weird time to release your first albums all over again. Most artists would look at their beginnings, especially if they’ve moved entirely out of the genre they started in, with a sense of cringe. But not Swift. She chose to wrap both ends of her career inside a big cardigan and pull them together like the siblings they are.

She chose to record the definitive artistic statement of 2021.

The audacity of following through with it, based purely on principle and 'fuck you'. What once seemed an impossible Goliath to defeat is now slain, like returning to your hometown with superpowers and showing everyone who's boss. The decision to keep the same players as the original. The decision to ever so-slightly turn up the country elements, but otherwise leave it the same.

It's not a remake, it's the song, again, a twin, free from the clutches of an evil money-grubbing bastard. You can hear that in her voice as the chorus takes off, flying away from the grasping claws of Scooter Braun and whichever private equity scumbag he's sold her masters to now. It's off, up, and away, out of here, into its rightful place with its writer and creator and the band playing on it. It's free.

The song feels light under their fingers. A decade of playing it has made it second nature, but the act of re-recording it has awakened that killer instinct, powering home a version of the song like a seasoned pro showing you how it's done. It's muscular, lean, light, forceful, match-fit.

She clearly doesn’t need the money. Both 2020 releases went to number one and sold a million copies each. Her house has a Wikipedia page. And besides -- the royalties would continue to flow in regardless of which faceless private equity firm owned the masters. 

This was about something else, something more important than money. It was about control, about the self, about what you're willing to put with.

This was about bringing something back to where it rightfully belonged, taking something sullied by business and making it pure again.

Bringing it home, again.

Isles of wonder

 I remember watching it go out live.

We had planned to move but this cemented it. It was like a ripcord being pulled. 

I remember my wife, then girlfriend, crying, as we watched it at some ungodly hour. 

I can't remember which bit finished her off. Was it the NHS beds? Kenneth Branagh watching the satanic mills shoot up out of the countryside? James Bond?

It all sounds a bit silly on paper, but even now it moves me to tears. Even the BBCs opening bit, flying down the Thames, is magic.

It's a sincere outpouring of love for a country. 

A beacon.

I might go watch it now.

A distant ship

 You ever hear a lyric that sounds like a whole world?

"A distant ship smoke on the horizon".

It sort of comes out of nowhere in Comfortably Numb. There's no other mention of ships, horizons, seafaring. Maybe it links to the "waves" in the next line -- It's purely a metaphor for some trouble or pain now being distant and no longer relevant except for it very slowly washing up on your shores -- but I also love the way it causes a mental image to flash in front of your eyes.

There is no pain, you are receding. Ok. More medical stuff. And then -- a distant ship smoke on the horizon. Look. You can see it, right now, a little ship, way off, barely perceptible, with a small plume of black smoke drifting away from it into the darkening blue skies above an impossibly huge, a comfortingly huge, ocean. It bobs around on the currents, detached from whatever turmoil is going on back on land. 

I sometimes wonder if it's referring to a painting the protagonist saw in a doctors office as a child. After the waves line he leads into a half-remembered memory of an illness as a child. A fever. A fleeting glimpse. The painting burning into his memory forever through the formative and traumatic trip to the emergency room. 

You can imagine that image, the painting, the ship, returning to his fevered mind as an adult. He lies back and goes into a Proustian stupor, instead of a biscuit (was there more to Proust than the biscuit?) it's the numbness of narcotics. They, obviously remind him of being an ill child (or just a child, The Wall seems to be entirely about adults dealing with childhood trauma), and that's where the painting of the calm, soothing ship appears in his mind and he slips back into the haze.

Somewhere else

 Have you ever found a little bit of your small town that looked like somewhere else and, if you blocked out whatever was on either side of it, you could pretend you were somewhere else?

Hamilton has a few of those. One of them was a passage next to the central library. For apparently no reason this passage was done up in an Art Deco style. I think it even had a name, as if it was a tiny shopping mall. There was a barbers in it, and some other business. How either of them attracted customers with zero roadside visibility is a mystery. 

Anyway. If you walked down this passage you could almost convince yourself you were in New York City. Or Chicago. Or one of the sets of either of those cities in a muppets movie. Nearby, a pizza place parped out that olivey, peppery, tomatoey, bready smell, a bit like the nose onslaught of Subway today but I don't think it was on purpose. It was more likely just a shitty building with ventilation ducts that vented into other parts of it rather than just straight outside. 

Anyway. Pizza. Art Deco. Muppets. Essential ingredients to convince one's sad library-going brain that they were somewhere far more exciting and atmospheric than bloody Hamilton. 

Apparently actual adults felt the same way, and they soon built a Mediterranean inspired passage across town, called Casabella Lane. It had white, Greek island inspired walls, cafes with metal outdoor furniture, and boutiques that seemed to just sell shit with fake flowers stuck on it. Directly outside the passage was a massive car park for a paint shop and an instrument store, and at the other end was a mostly vacant street with a Salvation Army store and a discount electronics place. 

But if you blocked out whatever was on either side of it, you could pretend you were somewhere else.