She Walked Away: Confessional
In the current Paste, Jeff Leven writes, "There's a misconception about primarily acoustic 'singer/songwriter' music that bears correction; whenever there is relatively sparse instrumentation, clearly audible vocals and a vaguely confessional atmosphere . . . the assumption tends to be that we're getting a more intimate, emotional moment" (December 06/January 07, p. 92). He's on to something there.
When you write songs that sound confessional, people assume they are confessional. And if you're happily married with children and write songs about bad relationships or the ends of relationships, it can set people to worrying. So I find myself saying ridiculous things like, "by the way, the man in this song isn't me." Well, duh.
I often write either about or from the point of view of imagined characters, just as a fiction-writer would. At the same time, I suppose a song can be confessional without being literal. I think most of what I write is like that: I expose the things I think about, the filmstrips in my head, some bits of memory and maybe a little anxiety, but I don't necessarily narrate an episode from my life.
So "She Walked Away" feels very personal to me without having much to do with actual events. In thinking about how to write about writing the song, I've been re-reading lots of journal entries from almost a year ago, and it has reminded me that it started out as the coda to the song "Shudder" (of which I have a new recording; stream to follow this post). Both songs came out of imagery from a pretty bad poem I'd written years earlier in college that started, "She turned and walked away and left him standing there with a taste in his mouth; / A thought of cool falling. . . . " Pretty soon, I had more material for the coda than I had for the rest of the song, so I decided to start over and let it be its own song.
But here's something else I had forgotten: my idea for "She Walked Away" was that it would be about the end of a trivial relationship, something that wouldn't have much of a lasting impact on the people involved. The early versions of the song try to convey this notion, that they'll just walk away and that'll be it. I was thinking about a Billy Bragg song that ends, "Then one day it happened: she cut her hair, and I quit loving her." But at some point, I was listening to another song, Paul Simon's "Graceland," and a line in that song transformed completely the way I thought and felt about "She Walked Away." Next time, I'll write about the influence of those two songs, what I borrowed from each, and how I got from there to here. And what the original title of the song was.
Technorati Tags: music, songwriting, relationships, billy bragg, paul simon, blogs
When you write songs that sound confessional, people assume they are confessional. And if you're happily married with children and write songs about bad relationships or the ends of relationships, it can set people to worrying. So I find myself saying ridiculous things like, "by the way, the man in this song isn't me." Well, duh.
I often write either about or from the point of view of imagined characters, just as a fiction-writer would. At the same time, I suppose a song can be confessional without being literal. I think most of what I write is like that: I expose the things I think about, the filmstrips in my head, some bits of memory and maybe a little anxiety, but I don't necessarily narrate an episode from my life.
So "She Walked Away" feels very personal to me without having much to do with actual events. In thinking about how to write about writing the song, I've been re-reading lots of journal entries from almost a year ago, and it has reminded me that it started out as the coda to the song "Shudder" (of which I have a new recording; stream to follow this post). Both songs came out of imagery from a pretty bad poem I'd written years earlier in college that started, "She turned and walked away and left him standing there with a taste in his mouth; / A thought of cool falling. . . . " Pretty soon, I had more material for the coda than I had for the rest of the song, so I decided to start over and let it be its own song.
But here's something else I had forgotten: my idea for "She Walked Away" was that it would be about the end of a trivial relationship, something that wouldn't have much of a lasting impact on the people involved. The early versions of the song try to convey this notion, that they'll just walk away and that'll be it. I was thinking about a Billy Bragg song that ends, "Then one day it happened: she cut her hair, and I quit loving her." But at some point, I was listening to another song, Paul Simon's "Graceland," and a line in that song transformed completely the way I thought and felt about "She Walked Away." Next time, I'll write about the influence of those two songs, what I borrowed from each, and how I got from there to here. And what the original title of the song was.
Here's Shudder:
Technorati Tags: music, songwriting, relationships, billy bragg, paul simon, blogs
No comments:
Post a Comment