Feast and Famine

Back at the beginning of November I started but never finished a post about a song I had recently completed called "Stay Close to Me." I just reread the paragraphs I wrote, and it's interesting to look back at that time when I was coming out of a long dry spell and had just finished a "good" song. I had a few blog posts prior to that and had hoped to keep writing about writing, but now I can honestly say I've been pouring my writing energy into songs instead of blogging: Since Summer's end, I've written five complete songs, and I've started at least as many and left them in various states of completion. Some of those will become complete songs, others will die away and never see the light of day. But I think it's safe to say my creativity has gone from a slow drip to a steady stream over a couple of months.

Who can say what triggers these things? If you know me, you won't be surprised to learn that I've had a marked increase in migraine activity during this time, averaging two headaches a week since I started keeping track in early November. But there's always a chicken and egg question there, and a general increase in creative activity doesn't always translate into more and better songs.

As much as anything, I think I benefited from some workshops I did this Fall with fourth and fifth graders. Every year, each class in my kids' school performs a song for an annual "Peace Celebration" in January. This year, my son's teacher decided to let some of the kids have a crack at writing their song themselves. With some help.

We agreed that I would work out a basic structure and melody ahead of time, and then conduct sessions with the kids to help them write lyrics. The kids worked very hard, coming up with pages and pages of rhyming couplets on their own, and then we worked as a group to select, edit, and refine lyrics that made sense together and fit the music. After three sessions, we had a pretty good draft of the song, and after just some minor revisions to smooth out a line here or there, I was able to give them a demo recording to rehearse with.

They (and their teacher) report having enjoyed the process and being proud of the results. But what I didn't count on was how great it was for me! Teaching songwriting to fourth and fifth graders somehow flipped a switch in my brain that really helped me in my own writing.

Working with the kids, I couldn't just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Instead, we had to approach songwriting in a very straightforward, practical way and use techniques to quickly work through problems and get on with it. So, for example, if we got stuck on a line, we would start brainstorming rhymes or ways of restating a line to create an easier rhyme (if that was the problem). We'd just write all the ideas on the board until something jumped out as the best answer. I've started using these same kinds of strategies in my own writing and damn if they don't work just as well for me as they did for nine and ten year olds!

We like to think of songwriting as this transcendental process in which disembodied voices speak through the writer directly into the purest art. The truth is, even when song seems to "write itself" in the first draft, I think most songwriters revise and rework the text through at least another draft or two to make them better. I think for my next post (or next couple of posts) I'll give some examples of this process -- show some "revision maps" of song fragments and talk about what I was thinking and why I made the changes.

Here's a list of my new songs, just for the heck of it:

• Stay Close to Me
• Victimless Crime
• In My Arms Tonight
• Without a Trace
• The Stone is Heavy