deefstes
I seem to be a horrible songwriter lately, and by "lately" I mean ever since I grew up ? I used to be the most prolific songwriter in varsity and I think it's because, as a varsity student, your life is just so "complicated". There's forever some or other girl who is the object of your unrequited love, there's forever some exam that you're about to flunk, there's forever some exam that you have just flunked, you're getting to experience life outside of the confines of your parental home, you're starting to become politically aware...
All of these things are great catalysts for poetry and song writing. It seems that, when your mind is divided between two conflicting sides of an argument, is when you come up with the best songs. Much as I enjoy being a happily married man, I'd have to admit that it's probably not the best germinating ground for great songs.
So I'm curious, where do you guys draw inspiration from? Do you try to put yourself in someone else's shoes and come up with songs that don't pertain to you personally? Do you write songs that has no real meaning but just a cool tune? Do you have a special talent that I lack which enables you to write awesome songs from pedestrian topics? Or, is your life sufficiently messed up that you have plenty of thought-provoking topics to write about?
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
makepeace
I haven't written a song to save my life, but I have thoughts ?. I think a cool/interesting approach to writing is to write about your impression of other people's lives in the first person. Kind of like how a lot of Kurt Cobain's songs were written. Because if you think about it, he's right.. Its kind of self-centered, biased and stupid to write about your own life/experiences etc and arrogant to assume that people want to hear about it.
vic
Deefs, a lot of inspiration can be drawn from this forum.....I mean song titles at least
Do you know the way to TJ
I wanna woman (but have no job)......great for a blues song
Baby I'm back (from the US of A)
(My glasses are) Slippin' down
Show me your licks
Don't ya think my Gibson's sexy
?
Songwriting has no recipe I guess but it sure is an art...many hit songs were written in a flash (there are plenty examples). Maybe one should not put pressure on oneself by saying 'I'm gonna write a song now"......I do not have a good answer on this one.
Averatu
Life. Mostly stuff that pisses me off.
deefstes
makepeace wrote:I think a cool/interesting approach to writing is to write about your impression of other people's lives in the first person. Kind of like how a lot of Kurt Cobain's songs were written. Because if you think about it, he's right.. Its kind of self-centered, biased and stupid to write about your own life/experiences etc and arrogant to assume that people want to hear about it.
I like that. Very true. Who wants to hear about my life experiences anyway. There are way more interesting people in this world than me.
Vic wrote:
Deefs, a lot of inspiration can be drawn from this forum.....I mean song titles at least
Do you know the way to TJ
I wanna woman (but have no job)......great for a blues song
Baby I'm back (from the US of A)
(My glasses are) Slippin' down
Show me your licks
Don't ya think my Gibson's sexy
:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:
Dude! That's epic.
Kalcium
I find it depends on the situation, but often I write songs in segments. Like I'll get an idea for a topic, sometimes its just a phrase and then try to expand on that for say 20 mins, then if nothing else comes up, I go do something else. Sometimes I end up having lines that work with a song I've started previously come up in the middle of doing something totally different. I've also written a song based on a theme/feeling that I got from an episode of supernatural, they went back to the 1950s with the old school suits and gangsters and all, so I wrote a song that seemed to fit that mood...I was washing dishes after the episode and kept having to dry my hands to go write lyrics that came to me while washing up...
Other times its just an idea, a view of the world, sometimes my view, sometimes not. Im literally the happiest person I know and yet often I write sad songs. Much like when you watch a movie and feel emotions for a character, or feel their emotions (characters wife dies etc) you can write about an emotion you might feel if you were in that situation, or how you imagine you might feel
costafonix
I find it a lot easier to write tunes than to write lyrics...
so would also be keen to understand what the other GFSA'ers do to get inspiration..
deefstes
CostaFonix wrote:
I find it a lot easier to write tunes than to write lyrics...
so would also be keen to understand what the other GFSA'ers do to get inspiration..
Precisely. I come up with catchy tunes or hooks that I could use for songs all the time. But I never know what to do with them as I have no inspiration when it comes to finding good lyrics. Even in my varsity days when I wrote plenty of songs, I always found coming up with tunes much easier than coming up with lyrics.
Keira-WitherKay
just write about what you know or "feel" passionate about ............
Bob-Dubery
I'm fascinated by songwriting - though it may be that people mystify it too much (I'll return to that later).
A while back I had a notebook with songs that I was working on. I had six of them, all more than half complete (well... unless more verses suddenly materialised out of wherever they materialise from). Then we moved house and I haven't seen that note book since ☹ I don't know if they were great songs, but they were songs and I hoped to learn something from writing them and to start building some momentum.
I bought a book a while back: Songwriters on Songwriting by Paul Zollo. Very interesting, but it doesn't actually reveal much about the method. Indeed many songwriters seem to not be sure about the process and how it works. Neil Young just tries to have a guitar handy at all times in case he finds the inspiration upon him. Paul Simon seems to look for ways to put himself into a specific state in which ideas will come to him. Sometimes he will sit and bounce a ball off a wall with a regular rhythm.
You'll recognise these words
"Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk to you again"
He says that's actually a reference to his songwriting process at the time. He was living in England and was renting a small flat. He used to go into the bathroom, turn of the lights and let a tap run and the sound of the running water would do something similar to the bouncing baseball - it would occupy one part of his mind and let him tap into another area where the ideas lay.
About the only other thing I found as regards a method was from Richard Thompson. When he's not on the road or busy with some other project he works office hours at songwriting, even if it means just slogging away at it without having any particular inspiration. He likens it to cranking a rusty tap. You crank and crank and nothing comes. Then eventually it starts to move and a drop or two drips out. Then you get a trickle and eventually, if you keep at it long enough, you get a strong, steady flow. His old bandmate Simon Nicol said that the difference between himself as a songwriter and Thompson is that whilst they both started writing songs and wrote a lot of bad songs early on, Thompson just kept on and on at it, got all the bad songs out of the way and then kept going. The implication from Nicol is that if he'd kept going despite the crap early songs he too would have hit some rich seam.
I think the Thompson method may have been more common 50 or 60 years ago when you had these buildings full of professional songwriters who had to produce songs or not earn any money.
Oh.... he says songwriters should always carry a note book, not just for ideas that suddenly come to you but also in case you hear a conversation or see something that may have in it an idea that you can use. Keep it with you all the time. Put it on your bedside table when you go to bed - you may have an interesting dream and want to write it down when you wake up and while you can still remember it.
Paul McCartney keeps notebooks with little fragments and ideas written down. If he can't finish a song he'll dig around in his notebooks to see if he can find something that will fit. Or he will take one of those ideas and try to develop it.
Another reason for having a notebook handy emerged in an interview I have on DVD - Elvis Costello interviewing Lyle Lovett. They started talking about how they'd be doing the groceries and half way down an ailse they suddenly get an idea and rush to the till so that they can pay and then rush through the parking lot to get to their car... and by the time they get to the car where they have their recorder or whatever they use the idea is gone. They both have several songs that came into their head but they couldn't get written down in time. Poof! Gone.
A famous use of a notebook is Mark Knopfler's "Money For Nothing". He tells the tale of how he was in a departmental store to buy some appliance or another and he heard an assistant in the shop start complaining about some MTV video that was on TV in the store. "That ain't working", "look at that little faggot in a tutu" etc etc. Knopfler hid just out of sight, wrote it all down and then later rearranged the litany of complaints into a song.
Bob-Dubery
makepeace wrote:
I haven't written a song to save my life, but I have thoughts ?. I think a cool/interesting approach to writing is to write about your impression of other people's lives in the first person. Kind of like how a lot of Kurt Cobain's songs were written. Because if you think about it, he's right.. Its kind of self-centered, biased and stupid to write about your own life/experiences etc and arrogant to assume that people want to hear about it.
I tend to think that way. But it ain't necessarily so. Loudon Wainwright writes a lot of songs about his own experiences. He says that he works on the theory that there's a lot of commonality in human experience so if he's going through something the chances are that other people somewhere have gone through or are going through the same thing, so he can write that song that's about him and something that's happening in his life, yet other people will relate to it. And he hits the mark a lot of the time. There's so many songs of his I've listened to that are clearly autobiographical and yet there's something in there that rings bells for me too.
Alex-B-Broadway
Well, there's this:
Averatu wrote:
Life. Mostly stuff that pisses me off.
And this:
Keira WitherKay wrote:
just write about what you know or "feel" passionate about ............
There are a lot of things you can draw from to write a song. Personal experience, something you saw crossing the street, someone you used to know, but it
has to be something that strikes a chord in you - pun intended. Keira's right when she says "write what you know" 'cause it applies to writing in general. As for where the ideas themselves come from, I doubt anyone really knows. Some people have their best lyric ideas while taking a shower and others will prefer to play around with chord progressions until they find something, so there's not really any set formula for a good song.
I find it helps when I listen to a lot of songs in the genre I'm trying to write in. Try going to
http://www.metrolyrics.com/ and pick apart random songs to try see what the songwriter tried to convey with it.
PeteM
CostaFonix wrote:
I find it a lot easier to write tunes than to write lyrics...
so would also be keen to understand what the other GFSA'ers do to get inspiration..
I've collaborated with a lyricist in the past... collaboration is good fun.
deefstes
Keira WitherKay wrote:
just write about what you know or "feel" passionate about ............
LOL. I'm not sure bird identification and taxonomy make for very good songs ? And as passionate as I am about my lovely wife, I think the world has a surplus of love songs.
Nitebob
General tendency (and lots of south african writers do it) they buy cd's from some unknown german or dutch bands, take the tune, have a backtrack made, and write a new one. This to me is a nono...
Ive written 1 'break up song' and had to explain to my girlfriend that Im not really missing anyone. I wrote a wedding song, and had to explain it's not a proposal. Seems the gospel song I wrote is the only one that did not land me in hot water...
Inspiration? Catch phrase and expand...(still wanna do a song on 'nice guys finish last') Something not done...something deep and emotional. I find inspiration while driving and keep the voice recorder handy
Jacquesg4j
I drew a lot of inspiration from this some how. It's afrikaans but yeah, maybe you've seen it. "Kriptiese notas van alledaagse gedagtes"... That really works! I have a "thought" book and I use that to write down all the crazy stuff I think about. I suppose it's like a diary??? You'll be amazed at how these thoughts fall in to categories and how when you see everything in front of you, you get inspired and creative. Do mind maps. Yeah. I write way more lyrics lately than melodies, but in good time these lyrics will meet good melodies and then, hopefully become beautiful music.
=
[deleted]
I'm a bit of a philosopher, so I like to write about how I see existence. I like songs that are a personal statement as well, so I wrote one of those too. I can ramble on forever though, so I try to stay away from lyrics.
V8
deefstes wrote:
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
Nice one Deefstes, this question has also been bouncing around my head recently.
Personally, I try keep a notebok and voice recorder (cellphone in this case) handy at all times. I find inspiration (E.g. the seed of an idea) comes at any time, usually guitar in hand, but occasionally not.
However taking the inspiration (10%) and turning it into a finished product (90% perspiration) is another story...Distracting the mind (bouncing balls, exercising, etc...) definitely helps me if I get stuck working on something. Trying progressions/harmonies on other instruments is something else I like to do when I'm feeling a bit stuck.
I try to remember that not every lyric needs to make sense and every song doesn't benefit from a guitar extravaganza. The only thing I really focus on is getting the song to breath - as there is a distinct rhythm to the melody/harmony that works when I sing/whistle it - more than a few singers have told me that they cannot sing their melody if the rhythm is not appropriate for their 'feel' (whatever that is ?).
deefstes
V8 wrote:I try to remember that not every lyric needs to make sense and every song doesn't benefit from a guitar extravaganza.
Good point. I often fall into this trap; I try to make the lyrics a poetic masterpiece and I end up not having anything at all. The thing is, there are songs out there of which the lyrics are poetic masterpieces (some of my fav Afrikaans artists like Lucas Maree, Coenie de Villiers and Chris Chameleon come to mind) but the majority of songs have lyrics that make very little sense. When you look at the lyrics of some of the top songs they seem to have very little poetic value - but the songs work and they sell millions of copies.
Jack-Flash-Jr
Shared methodology ?
