Half-Baked

I generally have a music-first approach to songwriting-- I start with the music and then let that inspire the lyrics. I suspect that my lyrics might suffer from using this approach, but whenever I try to write lyrics first, I can't seem to come up with music that works for them.

Today was my first day off work in far too long and it was my first chance to sit at the keyboard during piano-appropriate hours. I don't have anything finished, but I came up with three half-formed ideas... we'll see if any of them develop into full songs.



Fair warning: these aren't performances. This is just me improvising on the piano and making up lyrics as I go along. Definitely not ipod-ready!

photo credit luz a. villa

Letting the Bad Ones Have Their Turn

A friend of mine once said that writing is like having a thousand words queued up inside of your brain. The problem is that the best ones are stuck in the back, waiting their turn, which means you've got to spit out all the bad ones first.

My problem as a fiction writer is that I never want to let the bad ones have their turn. I just sit there with my mouth clamped shut, pen hovered, waiting for the good ones to leapfrog their way to the front.

They rarely do.


As a musician, I see every song as an opportunity to learn and to grow. My problem as a fiction writer is that there's no joy for me in the learning and growing; I see it only as an affirmation that I'm not already good enough. But as a musician? I don't expect to be good. When I write bad music, I'm unsurprised and unbothered and I move on. And when I write good music? I'm amazed and I'm thrilled and I move on.

The point of this post is to say that I write a lot of amazingly bad music. For every song that I post, there are a thousand deleted takes of me singing the most ridiculous lyrics, banging around on the keyboard like a six-year-old, and hitting notes that cannot and should not be heard by the human ear.

And that's the whole point of something like February Album Writing Month or 50 Songs in 90 Days: To get to the good ones, you've got to let the bad ones have their turn.

photo courtesy of meredith_farmer

Improvisation & Being Mindful of Your Medium

Tonight began with pisco sours & hand-rolled cigarettes on the front porch, but soon led, inevitably, to guitars and tambourines on sloping couches. I live in a house of musicians and usually these jam sessions find me playing an oil can with a wooden spoon or harmonizing shyly in a corner, but this time my housemates insisted that I haul my keyboard downstairs and join the fun.

I was incredibly nervous because I have essentially zero experience playing music with other people and certainly don't have experience improvising music with other people. But, guys, it was so much easier than I thought! I've been practicing piano almost every day and I'm getting much better at hearing a chord and then reproducing it on command or finding a complementary chord. I guess that really is something you can learn with practice. I'm still shy about playing music live, but I'm excited about getting better.


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I've been thinking a lot about songwriting lately. It's still very new to me, but I've spent most of my life thinking about writing in other forms.

Some of the best screenwriting advice I've ever heard is: Be mindful of your medium. Theoretically, you have a story to tell and you choose a certain medium (film, photography, poetry, etc.) because that's the best medium in which to tell your story. If you've chosen film as your medium, then you should take advantage of the aspects of film that make it unique; writing a screenplay that is purely dialogue-driven is a waste of the medium.

I think the same goes for music: every song is a story that you tell and you've chosen music as the medium for telling that story. We should make sure its the right medium and, if it is, take full advantage of what that medium has to offer. In other words: a song should be musical! It's not a poem.

These thoughts aren't entirely cohesive, but I hope it gives you something to think about. We can talk about it over pisco sours the next time I see you.

photo credit: zen

New Demo - "When My Eyes Are Blue"

New and drastically different demo for When My Eyes Are Blue. The song still isn't finished, but as a wise man once said: "Art is never finished, only abandoned."

This song feels like a major departure for me, although I don't know if it will sound that way to you. For one thing, I wrote this song entirely on the piano, whereas most of my songs rely on loops more heavily than I'd prefer.

I also feel like this song differs lyrically from some of my recent songs. As a writer, I'd expect lyrics to be the easiest part of songwriting, but I've found that I really struggle to be honest as a songwriter. It's so easy to fall back on cliches rather than writing a song than really comes from an honest place.

This song feels honest to me.





When My Eyes Are Blue

Talk me down again
Seem to love this ledge
What a view

I've got coffee on
I know you like it strong
You like it strong
Won't be warm for long

And you're waiting for me
To wake up from this dream
From this dream
And I don't want to lie to you
But I'm only sad when my eyes are blue

Twilight's slipping in
It's found me again
Oh, again

And you're waiting for me
To wake up from this dream
From this dream
And I don't want to lie to you
But I'm only sad when my eyes are blue

BRIDGE

And you're waiting for me
To wake up from this dream
But I just sleep

And I don't want to lie to you
But I'm only sad when my eyes are blue

Better Late Than Never

From the folks who brought you February Album Writing Month:


Fourteen songs in twenty-eight days was one thing, but fifty songs in ninety days? That just seems masochistic.

And yet, here I am. Nearly a month late, I've got two full songs and a slew of half-written ditties and only 64 days to go. Better get crackin'.

The Joys of Songwriting

This is how I feel today...

New Song - "lovehungry"

About this song:

In the following order:

1. I was visiting my parents and found some funny poetry that I wrote back in high school.
2. I heard Frances' amazing cover of Yeats' The Lake Isle of Innisfree on FAWM.
3. John A sent me a guitar piece he'd recorded and asked me if I wanted to add some lyrics.
4. I made the obvious mental leap.

My process:

1. Listened to John's guitar part once or twice just to get a rough idea of how it goes.
2. Recorded myself singing the poem-- no planning, no second takes. I wanted to come up with something as raw and organic as possible (mmm raw and organic).

I might come back to this later-- ask John to re-record the guitar to a click-track, add some loops, tighten up the lyrics, etc. The ending is really abrupt right now and it's because I ran out of music and couldn't finish the poem, ha.

Also, John's guitar-ing is really beautiful, but every time I get to the part where I sing "to make the whole like the hole in me" I start laughing. Oh, high school.

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lovehungry

sweet hell-bent
lovehungry:
your desire swells to me like
a red balloon at the Fair
on a hot summersticky after noon

but still not Fair as i wished
on a well you'd be,
thirsty for my kiss, but
still doorslamming mad,
i'm wanting to bash in the
wall to make the
whole like the hole
in me--

but i'm all emptied out like my
crack ed coffee cup
and you are the glue
i need

how many
doors opened last tuesday
to your heart