Songwriter: musician and poet

Two disciplines that strive for freedom in the midst of rules and forms are driven together like Siamese twins forced to share one body. And, each must be fed a special diet or atrophy and risk compromising the entire organism. 

Instrumental music expresses the emotions of an experience but leaves the listener guessing at the images provoked by the melody. Lyrics without a melody are nothing but a poem. Yet, as songwriters, we must be at home in both worlds and establish a symbiotic relationship between words and melody. How?

Guided, mindful, disciplined dedication to a path or a plan, plus “time” are essential. Music does not come from a lazy mind but a fully engaged brain that has learned to harmonize the logical and intuitive aspects of form and beauty in the creative process. The songwriter is an alchemist transforming sounds into vibrations that tickle the ears and manipulate the listen’s emotions.

It takes tremendous effort, but the end result is an ecstasy of released expression, and the voice of comfort and joy.

These are the steps I’ve taken to become a songwriter and I recommend to you, if you chose this path: 

1. Learn an instrument. Learn three. Chose mastery and dicipline and be as good a musician as possible. Practice 2+ hours a day. Find a teacher. Follow the program of study. Be patient and think in terms of years not months. 

2. Learn and study melodic improvisation. Melodies have natural cadences that your ear must learn to hear an your mind must learn to create.

3. Listen to music daily. All of it. Notice what emotion is evoked by the different styles of music. Notice the use of repetition. 

4. Learn to sing. Find a teacher who knows how to sing very well. Do your warmups daily.

5. Read everything especially stories, novels, poetry and history. Pay attention to nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs and description of people, places, and things.

6. Start a song title/song idea journal. These are great starting points for new songs or fleshing out old songs. Remember that inspiration is for amateurs. I’m always working on two or three songs in my head.

7. Start a melody/riff journal. Use the recorder on your iPhone to get down any musical ideas.

8. This is work. Treat it like a job and be a tough boss on yourself.

9. Most importantly, Don’t ever fucking give up. You are the only person on the planet who is gonna write those songs, nobody is gonna do it for you. If you don’t, nobody else will.

Like snowflakes, remember that yours is a unique voice that will never be duplicated again. Don’t be so critical that you don’t share your music with others. 

10. Learn to finish a song and then share it.  The world is a musical place and we are part and parcel of that symphony. Play your part.

Carpe Canticum

-Will

The cat in many hats

Nobody ever talks about the engineering involved in recording, especially stuff like setting up mics, or getting levels on the mixing board. It’s not sexy, but last Sunday I spent the morning getting the recording studio up and running and prepared for a guest instrumentalist: bass player Paul Cingolani. He wanted a few things like a mic propped over his bass, a straight line to the board, and a music chart.

Ask me: what’s the best motivation for getting my house clean is? Answer: Inviting guests. This was my first musical guest and creating an inviting, relaxed atmosphere for music production was foremost in my thoughts. So, now my engineering hat comes off and my producer hat gets fitted snugly on my head. A clean work environment, beer, and food are what musicians need. My wife becomes an executive producer by preparing a delicious sausage and peppers meal as motivation for “after the recording session.” The sweet aroma of home cooked heaven permeates our home and manages to find it’s way into the recording studio, promising satiation for a job well done.

Our harried bass player arrives,  stressed from family obligations and we greet him with a nice cold beer.  After chugging the first 3-4 gulps of the bottle, he breathes a sigh of relief and smiles. No more laundry, kids, or late wife to knot him up, just a few hours of musical creativity and a nice beer buzz to loosen things up.

We head into the studio where I plug him in, set up levels, talk about the song, makes notes on the chart, and and hit the play button for a couple of practice runs to work out a bass counterpoint to the guitar, vocal, and harp parts. As producer, I explain that I want something fairly iconic that would make the song instantly identifiable just by hearing the bass alone. 

He plays the bass.  It’s sound fills the room and saturates the song. The first take sounds good. By the fifth take that iconic sounding bass line has formed. The seven and ninth takes are genius and I don’t know how I’m going to decide between them. We talk about the soccer mom singing the song as she waits in her van watching her kids run around. We talk funk and funky. We talk Fred Sanford funky. We talk, then record, and magically the sound I want is corralled and captured.

We finish the recording session and heading out to the kitchen serve ourselves and sit down to eat open-faced-sausage-and-peppers sandwiches in front of of a Nora Jones concert on Axis TV. All this complimented with a Bullet Rye Whiskey on the rocks and a feeling of contentment. And of course, we talk music. Paul leaves tired an happy, while I stay up all night listening to the different takes, and mixing the song till my eyes can’t stay open. It was a good day.

Songwriter turned into sound engineer, turned into music producer, turned into photographer, turned into host, turned into blogger, soon to be turned into music-video director. Damn, that’s a lot of hats.  If I ever make any money, I’ll hire some cats.

Will

Do what you do

Do what you do.

That’s the title of a new song that I recorded yesterday. And, it’s the theme of this blog entry.

Songwriting is hard and it’s taken me years to figure out how to do it. I started kinda ass-backwards, meaning that, when I first stared trying write songs, I started with a bass riff or a guitar chord progression and built the song up from the bottom up. The problem with that approach is that the lyric becomes the last thing I write. I’ve got a backlog of songs with no lyrics and worse: I’m looking for the right subject matter to express the musical mood. So, I’ll listen to the instrumental version of the song and think: now what is this song about? It can take days, months, or even years to get the lyric right. 

 Now, I write songs from the lyric. Once the words are down, I know exactly how to express the emotion of the words through the notes and chords. If I write about a woman who traveled across the country facing trials and tribulations, then I have an idea that the music needs to express the melancholy of the chorus, or the apprehension of the verse. In other words, I have a sense of orientation and direction. I’m not necessarily going to automatically use minor chords to express sadness; maybe I’ll contrast the minor chord verse to a major chord chorus to get a better sense of the the contrast of emotion and so hi-light the emotion of the song. The choices are limitless; so, it’s good to have a direction.

So, lyric first. Then I’ll play around with chords and begin selecting chord tones that might work for a melody.

It usually takes me several months to write and learn to play my own songs; but, the end result is creatively satisfying. 

 That’s what I do. 

 -Will

P.S.  Ill’ll cover my process for recording and arranging in a future post.