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.

 

The Tiger Who Came to Tea: Not about Nazis, but absolutely about Nazis.

Judith Kerr has quite definitively stated that the Tiger Who Came To Tea is not about the Nazis. As far as the author is concerned, she's already covered this ground with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit -- a child's view of the horrors of not only war, but of the unimaginable inhumanity of Nazi Germany.

So. That's that, right? But authors writing one thing and having it interpreted another way is nothing new. In the case of Bram Stoker's Dracula, that interpretation has steamrolled his own meaning behind the piece. He may not have known he was writing a homoerotic novel, but he was. 

And so in comparable fashion, Judith Kerr was inadvertently writing about the effect of the war on the home front. Take the opening. A ring at the doorbell and immediately the mum cycles through the people it could be. The milkman? The grocer? Dad? That's it. All she can think about is food, or her husband. Somehow the mention that he "has his key" makes it feel even more like he could be back at any moment, but he's been gone a long time. 

Anyway. She opens the door, and it is, obviously, the Tiger. 

The Tiger's first thought? Food. Everyone is hungry. 

He immediately sits down to eat with them, and immediately eats all the food. All of it. It's all gone, which is when he finally decides to leave. 

Again, the mother's thoughts turn to the husband. She has no food for his supper. Or, perhaps, her home is in disarray upon his return from the war. 

They're completely at a loss, until dad gets home, and he announces the end of rationing, the end of war. It's over. He's back. 

Look at his face. Not convinced? 

Look at it. The things he's seen. Things they'll never know. The most important picture in the whole book though, is of course, this one: 

Firstly, the explosion of colour. Until now we've been in a white nowherespace, with just whatever table or fridge or kitchen counter the mum or Sophie is dealing with. This, by contrast, is an entire street. The way it takes up two pages, so you don't see it coming until you turn the page and it bursts into view. All the shops have their lights on. Everything's open, at night -- that's right, no more blitz. The father's head is down but he's happy. He's back, but forever, irreparably, changed. The mum and daughter look toward him, effectively holding him up, carrying their hero. 

But also notice two other things. The cat-tiger, an easy spot, represents our previously terrifying war-rations-death creature that once invaded our home and took all our food and upended our life. Now? It's a tiny little cat. They're literally walking past it, leaving it in the past, leaving it behind. It's small and insignificant. 

And the other thing? The man. 

Here we have the casualties. Those that didn't come back, those that came back and were so changed they couldn't function in their normal life. He's the first thing that catches the eye when you open this colourful page, and it's intentional. He's the what could have been. The maybe. The fear. 

So maybe after all, it's not about Nazis. It's about an impossibly large event, a looming fear -- which is then somehow avoided. 

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. 

A Monk's Perspective

 

A monk's perspective, eh? A monk's perspective. You know what I always want to hear from when I'm getting up in the morning to continue mandatory participation in a capitalist society? From some hippie who lives outside it. 

Look at him, peering at our strange lives from that little box. He can't make head nor tails of it. What's that device you're pointing at me, he says. To film me? For what purpose? For views? To what end? For GoogleAdservices dollars? What could that possibly do for you? Here, do some light agricultural work instead.

Come on, man! He's a monk! Does he even have to commute? Does he get paid? Who washes his clothes? Is it him? Does he find it therapeutic? I bet he does, the arse.

To save you from watching the video (and the thousands of others like it, lots of monks out there I guess), his 5 "things" (because we can't do "tips" anymore, just "things") are as follows:

1. Be a monk

2. Be a monk

3. Be a monk

4. Be a monk

5. Watch loads of stupid youtube videos about productivity until the sun sets again and it's time to roll over and try again tomorrow.

Dickheads worrying about crap

Like everyone, I read too much crap. Not novels or even magazines, but crap. Crap is defined by the dictionary as here's-my-newsletter-with-50-links-to-articles-I-have-"consumed" and I've-rewatched-the-Sopranos-through-the-lens-of-mordern-America. 

Buddy you can rewatch the Sopranos or literally anything through any lens you want. Season 3 of the Simpsons is still achingly relevant to our contemporary discourse. I bet the first episode of Rugrats offers a tellingly prescient glimpse of a post-worth culture manifesting itself in the haphazard nature of modern parenting in the shadow of the 80s (or, thrillingly, the 2008 financial crash). 

What does our relationship to work say about our need to be productive? What does our work say to our relationship with sending mindless emails about non-meetings that no one needs to attend? Is work work or is it work work work? 

One man looks at his Spotify account and cries.

One man (it's always a man, isn't it) looks at his Instagram account and cries.

One man realises he spends more time listening to podcasts about shame and the trauma of shame and the shame of trauma than talking to his damn children.

I don't have to read these things but you don't have to write 'em either.

Indeed and jobs as salvation

That Indeed advert. 

The portrayal of jobseekers as lost and desperate, the choral faux-gospel music saying "rise up", the woman crying in stunned disbelief that she was finally accepted at some miserable hellhole job that almost definitely doesn't deserve her or her skills and will only serve to keep her fed and warm until she can claw her way out of that pit and into a new one---it all communicates one thing. Work as salvation. Not just work. Acceptance by a corporate gatekeeper. Definitely corporate, because no one gets a job down the road from Indeed. Indeed is jobs at desks or jobs that pretend they're at desks but are actually at cashiers. Hoping that some recruitment HR doofus will decide you're dynamic enough to work there, when we (millennials) know that anyone can do anything at an Indeed-desk-job if they know how to google.