I just wrote a song ahh new song new song <33
Yes, I know this news pisses you off. You're not at all excited by this. Why should you be? I finished my new album at the end of March, and yet I've been keeping it from you for months, concealing it away like a cheap whore, and already I'm harping on about even newer stuff that it'll take even longer for you to hear.
I get it, and I'm sorry :p The good news is that you'll get the album soon, I promise. In fact, it should be going up for pre-order in the next two weeks - I haven't decided a final date yet, but I can tell you that I approved all of the physical CD artwork today so the album has officially been sent off for manafacturing :D We're still on for a June 28th release.
To the point: I've been in a total writing funk ever since I played The Time Of Your Life to a dear friend of mine, Jonathan, and he told me that he thought it was a hit. From that moment, the pressure was ON. I thought "shit, well now every song I write will have to be as good as that!"
That's obviously stupid logic, and getting into the habit of just writing for the sake of writing is important. Long-time blog readers will remember that I did this during the writing sessions for The World Is Mine (which back then was called Epigrams And Interludes) - I mentioned several songs which didn't make it on to the final release. Out On The Town and You Can't Trust Me are two that I remember off the top of my head. The more songs you write, the more choice you have to pick the best ones from the pile. It's a good thing to do.
But, alas, for the last few months, I've been picking up the guitar, trying out a line or two, feeling out a melody, deciding it's shit and just giving up. "This doesn't sound like a hit", I'd say. "Maybe I'll never write a song that good again," I'd say. "Stop talking to yourself," the neighbours say.
I joke about it, but over the last month I had just accepted the idea that it'd be a really long time before I released anything new, and that maybe you guys would have to wait a year or even longer while I try to write enough songs that I'm happy releasing. And that'd be mental - a year in internet terms is CRAZY! Can you remember what the internet was like a year ago? We didn't have bubzbeauty, or Chartjackers, or Facebook like buttons. So much can change in such a short time when you're online.
So anyway. Now I'm gonna tell you what happened today.
You should know that today was already quite weird. I went into an office for a meeting and found myself sitting next to Nicholas Parsons. Both of us just sitting there, waiting to be seen. And then this girl Jo said to me while discussing education and the rise of depression in British teenagers that "schools teach English and maths and physics, but they don't teach kids how to be happy". That might be the most beautiful thing I've ever heard anyone say.
So I'm at home, listening to Ed's new album 'Confidence Tricks', which we finished mixing two days ago. I get to the last track and halfway through I just pause it.
"I'm in SUCH a songwriting mood", I tell myself. (The neighbours groan.) Truthfully, Ed's music has always inspired me. I don't think he's realised yet that I adapted the melody of Less Than Three for the second part of my song Missing You, and adapted the melody of You're My World for the third part of that same song. Maybe he'll never realise…
So I pick up the guitar and I feel out a few chords that I think sound right together, chords that have a natural flow from one to the next. I start by playing all the chords I know until I find the right starter. Ooh, B. Yeah. B's a good starter. B feels right for this song. This is a B song. I won't play the A shape with a capo on 2nd - I'll just play B. Oh, and then - F#! Ooh, and E! Three chords! We're flying!
I start playing them together. Sounds really nice.
And then I start singing Ed's final album track over the top.
Shit.
I'm not writing a song. I'm just transposing Ed's song.
Again.
But fuck it - I can play those chords in a way that makes them sound different. I like this chord sequence. You can't copyright chords. All the best artists steal chords. I bet Ed has stolen chords. Maybe that B isn't even his. Dirty, dirty Eddplant.
So I open my mouth and sing something.
"I can't tell you what I wanted to."
That's good. I'll keep that. Ooh, and that melody I just sung - ooh, this is gonna be so fun!
I run to my computer, and already I just know that this time I'm actually gonna finish a song. This is an idea that's working. You can immediately feel if it's working or not.
I need to sing about something real, at least at first, so I think about what I need to sing about. I haven't spoken to Lily in ages, and she's one of my best friends. I miss her. I need to sing about that.
I go back to those first lyrics. "I can't tell you what I wanted to". That's fine. When I'm working out a melody, I'll just sing arbitrary words so I can work out the rhythm, and sometimes the words stay there, and sometimes they don't. Holding On's first line, "a million and one thousand things are screaming in my head", was a placeholder lyric when I started writing that song. That's why it doesn't make an ounce of sense. But I liked it. Placeholder lyrics are useful cos you can take this arbitrary first line and then build on it: what does that mean? Where can I go from there?
So I'm singing the first line. I like it. I open up QuickTime Player, record myself singing and playing it cos I'm scared I'll forget. The melody, the rhythm, the chords, the words - it's all new, and fragile, and it could fall apart at any moment. I might mess around with it and accidentally do something good and then forget it seconds later. It's like trying to lift up a jigsaw puzzle before you've put all the pieces in. Once it's finished, each individual part will keep the whole thing held together, but right now it's not solid enough and it might scatter everywhere, and then I'll lose half the pieces and I'll never be able to finish it. We can't have that.
I write another line. I play the first line again to make sure I haven't forgotten it. Play the second line. Play both lines together. This feels good. I re-record myself singing both lines, and delete the first recording. Start singing along to a DIFFERENT song in my head, an old Cat Stevens track, because I want to remember what a hit should sound like. What the rhythm of the words is like, what the structure is. What I can learn from it. I want to go back and listen to Ed's song to make sure I'm not thieving it too much, but I'm worried his melodies will make me forget my new ones.
I start writing the chorus, remembering an old trick I picked up from studying Green Day melodies and drawing them out as graphs; the first note of their hit choruses are always the highest note in their verses. This happens in American Idiot, Holiday and in Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, and it probably happens in others. (Yes, I plot out melodies I like as graphs. It helps me learn.)
So I take that first high note, then descend down. It sounds slow, and nice, and singalong-sounding. I picture being in a crowd, hearing myself sing the words. Are they easy to sing along to? That's a big thing when I write. I want the words to be simple enough that they can be shouted by a mass. I want people to love these words. There might be one person, somewhere, who's listening to my music and who has had exactly the experience that I'm writing about in a song of mine, and who needs exactly that song to communicate their feelings. It's like my "things in 3 minutes" videos - I make them because I want to help people explain something they previously couldn't find the words to do. And I want my songs to do the same thing, but with emotions. So for this new song, there'll hopefully be someone who hears this song and it's exactly what they needed; exactly the words they wanted to hear, exactly the things they couldn't put into words themselves to describe how they feel, but my lyrics can do that for them. And I need to make sure the words are going to be good at doing that.
It's at this point of the songwriting process that I get carried away. This is my hit! The best song I've ever written! (I think this about every song I write, at first.) I'm adding new bits, constantly going back and playing the old bits, making sure I still remember it all as I go, and then finally I'm ready to record it all at once. Full song. I always pick a few people to hear it so I can get their thoughts; people who I know won't send it around and who I can trust to be honest about the quality of the song. In this instance, I record a take to send to Ed, Tom and Charlie. (I don't tell Ed that I've thieved his chords. I want to see if he notices or not.)
But I'm getting way too into it. Still improving and improvising the melodies in places.
During the last chorus, I really go for it.
And the worst happens.
I unleash falsetto vocals.
Gah.
No.
Too far.
Doesn't work.
Take two.
Okay, this take's better, though I'm still working out the best melodies and fuck up occasionally. But the guys know I've literally just finished writing it.
Now I need to let it simmer, go back to it in a while and continue to hone it into the best it can be over the next couple days, and finally in the studio, where it gets bent into a proper shape and adapts to the sudden array of sound that envelops it.
That's how I write. I've never really been able to explain or document it before. It's always been this zone I go into where I sit quietly for an hour and then a song comes out at the end, and I tend to forget what the process is like. Having finished this song relatively quickly, I wanted to take the opportunity to blog it here for posterity. It's incredibly ritualistic; add a line, record, add another line, play the first line, play both, record both, delete the first line, try out a chorus … and all of this comes complete with these little visualisations and ideas that battle through in my brain until the right stuff comes out. Is this anything like your songwriting experience, if you're a songwriter? I've never had much trouble writing songs, once I get going I can get it done in 30-60 minutes and it'll 90% sound like it does when it's finally recorded and released. But I have to isolate myself and just focus on it, because if I get interrupted and my thoughts stray too far, the jigsaw falls apart and I'll have lost it forever.
In the time I've spent writing and re-writing this blog (I proof my blog several times before upload), I've all-but-forgotten how the song sounds. Forgetting the song is helpful because you can be more objective about it once you've let it fall out of your head and listen to it fresh. So I'm about to listen through to the recording that I sent the boys and see if it's any good. But in my head, now, it sucks. What a boring droney melody. This will never work. I can't believe I sent this to people. This is gonna be awful. My memory is telling me that the song is never going to be heard again.
Let's give it a listen.
Hmm. Okay. Yeah, I think it's okay. Tom can probably work with it and make it into something better, because his production is fantastic. The first time I recorded The Time Of Your Life and sent it to the boys it sounded pretty average, too.
So maybe this isn't my BEST HIT EVUR, but either way, I'm writing again. And that's important.
The ultimate moral of this story, though, is that everyone should listen to Ed’s music. =)
x
