Process Planning? - LyricsLyricsLyricsLyrics

After last weekend spent working/socializing with the better half of the band, we now have shape for the entirety of what is hoped to be the upcoming album. I say shape, because what we have is the basis for a lot of the songs. The musical basis. The lyrical basis exists for several of them, and is... 'in potentia', shall we say, for the rest. I've spent a certain amount of time talking to people and generally thinking about this lack of product on my part (I am the lyricist/writer of the pairing).

The other night I attended a concert/Q&A session with one of the songwriting/composition Prof's at McNally Smith College of Music, and was amused when he refused to share his songwriting 'method', citing it as rather private; that I completely understand; the process of writing a song can be extremely personal, and privacy is a nice thing to have, both in the moment and in the general sense. The piece he did feel capable of sharing was that it starts with doing everything possible to do other then write a song.

This got me thinking about my own drive for writing songs, and especially my specific area for the moment, lyrics. I have only, to my memory, managed to actually sit down and completely write a song in one sitting twice (not including revisions). Normally a song is a fairly pained affair for me, with lots of scribbling on pads of engineering paper (an affectation left over from my days as an engineering student), a great many cups of earl grey consumed, and lots of cursing of out of tune guitars, my personally poor piano skills, my lack of inspiration, my sudden lack of pencil lead, batteries for my tuner, and especially cursing of that greatest of drains of productivity: The Internet (with video games coming in a close second). Also involved tends to be lots of digging around in old notebooks from highschool, and in my 'random writings' folder in which lie many sheets of bad poetry and random metaphors and similes which occured to me in the middle of the night (or in the middle of a calculus class). I tend to write things, then start working on a song, and when I run out of inspiration I start flipping through the folder; the lyrics for at least one of the songs we're finishing up is pulled together almost entirely from about six different sets of poetry, random lyrics for songs that never happened, and in one case, a rather bad short story involving some random and rather tasteless linguistic play; (un?)fortunately, the linguistic play wasn't what made it into the song.

When I get really beaten down and can't find any inspiration, I flip on the playlist on my computer made up of all the stuff I've listened to over the years which has suddenly inspired me to write stuff; Leonard Cohen, Missy Higgins, David Bowie, and Mostly Autumn all turn up and I sit down and just write.

When even that fails, there's still one option left: Go to a concert.

Now, that seems rather contrary to many people; normally one goes to a concert to listen, not to write. But for some reason, certain concerts cause me to just become inspired. George Maurer, Storyhill, Cliff Eberhardt and Lucy Kaplansky just to name a few, have all been concerts which have made me suddenly dig around for scraps of paper and pencil. The most recent, a sadly rather less well attended concert by fledgling but already extraordinary singer-songwriter Allye Gaietto was single-handedly responsible for completing sets of lyrics on two songs (one of which, unfortunately, is not slated to go on the album, due to complete narrative discord). Still, these sudden spurts of productivity are incredibly useful. Now if I could only isolate a real cause for them, and somehow utilize that elsewhere.

In any case, progress is slooooooooooooow but steady. This whole writing music via e-mail thing is working, though. And sooner then I probably think, King Arthur and the Bearded Lady shall ride forth and shall (metaphorically) give birth to what shall likely not quite be a magnum opus, but should hopefully be an interesting and somewhat philosophical good time, if not for anyone else, then at least for us.