“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
- Andre Gide
How do you say something about an emotion or an idea, in a way that's never been done? How do you express the feelings or love, say, or frustration or heartbreak in a fresh and creative way? After all, people have been saying things about those things since language was invented. How do you put a new twist on those ideas?
That's one of the challenges that faces songwriters when they sit down to a blank page. Ask ten different ones how they go about writing a song and you'll get ten different answers, but they're all looking to say something new in ways that you haven't heard before.
Most songwriters that I'm familiar with will tell of a song or two they've written that show up out of nowhere, unbidden, arriving more or less fully-formed. Ten minutes. Bang! Almost as if the writer is simply a stenographer for some mystical source. Those occurrences are rare, though, it seems. Most often it involves the discipline of paying attention and repeatedly putting oneself in a creative environment. It's like fishing, you cast your line in hopes of catching something. Sometimes you will, but you never catch anything if you don't cast.
We humans tend to be logical, linear thinkers. From a creative standpoint, it helps to shake yourself out of that mode. Songwriters have many different techniques for bringing that about. Here are a few.
One of the first approaches I learned was from the great songwriter Ryan Adams. He does a daily exercise of what he calls “Stacks.” That's as in stacks of books. He selects about four different books each morning. Two might be novels. One might be a reference book and another might be a book of poetry. There's no particular rule to it. With each book, he flips it open to a random page and scans that page for any word, phrase or sentence that jumps out. He writes those down. He goes to the next book and does the same and so on. When he's through all the books, he looks over what he's written down and tries to formulate something from it. Maybe one of the lines sparks an idea or maybe connecting ideas from the different sources creates something interesting. As he said in the interview I saw, “Get something down and the id will go to work.” I started using the idea the minute I saw him demonstrate it. The very first book I selected was Willa Cather's novel My Antonia. I opened the book to a page and the first thing my eyes landed on was this, “He thought he could pull down lightning.” Do I need to say more about the value of the exercise?
Jeff Tweedy, originally of Uncle Tupelo and since 1995, Wilco, has been one of the most prolific songwriters of the last few decades. He wrote a handy book called How to Write One Song. Tweedy says he's not sure you can teach someone to write a song. You can teach them the architecture of song structure and techniques to create ideas but he says:
Songs are mysterious. Any idea where they come from? I've written tons and tons of songs and STILL the best I can think to say after I finish one I'm happy with is “How'd I do that?” It's confusing when you can DO something and not know exactly HOW you did it (and then somehow expect to do it again).
But, in his book, Tweedy offers several different methods he uses to stimulate ideas. One is called a “Word Ladder.” An example would be writing down a vertical column of ten verbs and a column next to it of ten nouns. Then you look at interesting ways to combine them. Maybe one gives you a fresh idea. As Tweedy says, the only time you hear the word “smattering” is “a smattering of applause.” But smattering is an interesting and fun word. What if you said a “smattering of teeth” or a “smattering of heartbeats?” That starts to create some intrigue. I have to think Tweedy was using this method when he wrote his well-known song, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart. The first two verses go:
I'm an American aquarium drinker
I assassin down the avenue
I'm hiding out in the big city blinking
What was I thinking when I let go of you?
Let's forget about the tongue-tied lightning
Let's undress just like cross-eyed strangers
This is not a joke, so please stop smiling
What was I thinking when I said it didn't hurt?
Another approach is the "Cut-out" method. The idea is most often attributed to the beat poet, William S. Burroughs, but it's been used my many others, David Bowie being one. Tweedy is also a proponent. Here the idea is to take some prewritten texts and, with scissors, cut up phrases or words from them. Then take those and move them around to create something that possibly generates some sparks. Putting disassociated ideas together can make for awkward relationships that can be fun and fascinating. It's not that everything will be useful, but just maybe a diamond will show up. I try to do one of these every morning just to get the brain working. Here's an example of a recent one. I simply shuffled the cut out phrases around without trying to make sense, just enjoying the way they sounded together.
Cover your heart, safe for now
as sparks fall over advice from luxurious dreams -
Good intent swells and floods
a new path an inch wide -
In the last moment, a frantic bird
opens the back door -
A sentry chases time
and bargins with the vagrant clouds -
The cashew moon drifts like wings on a rose,
squabbling over a souvenir of the skinny days
that have burned down to embers
There you go. If nothing else, “vagrant clouds," “drifts like wings on a rose” and “skinny days” might be useful somewhere.
Tweedy sums up these ideas by saying:
Take the time to play with your words. Allow yourself the joy of getting to know them without being precious about directing everything they are trying to say. It's still you! The decision is yours.
So there's a little songwriter talk, for what it's worth. Below is a Wilco song where I'm sure Tweedy had fun letting the words do what they wanted. Enjoy!