Fanzines and Webpages: Song-writing

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Sometimes people come up to me and say "How do you write songs?"

Well, to be honest, they actually say "Why do you write songs? Why? WHY?" and then cry a bit, but it's the same general idea, I think. My answer is the same as most people give - you wake up one morning with a burning idea and an amazing tune, leap out of bed, sit at the piano in your pyjamas and ten minutes later you have a rock solid hit. You play it around a few times, then cut to Later That Evening when you're onstage at the local flea pit, performing it for the first time. After initial nervousness the audience gets into it and by the time we reach the middle eight we're in a fantastic montage of it being played on the radio, TV appearances, and a headline set at Glastonbury.

I may, admittedly, have watched a few too many rock biographies.

But a few weeks ago I learnt of Another Way. I got onto a three day course about writing songs for musicals. I was hoping it would mostly involve tap dancing and spangly trousers, but it turned out to be a lot more work than that. We spent the whole first day talking about the character we were writing the song for. What did the character want? How did the character speak? Usually this is peasy as the character is me and though I may not always be sure what I want, I do know pretty much how I speak. I do it all the time!

That was hard work, but there was more to come. On the second day we were divided into pairs, put in a room for several hours, and told to write a song. I thought this would be terribly exciting as it reminded me of 50's songwriters sitting in adjoining office in The Brill Building churning out hit after hit after hit, and imagined it would be much like the Carole King documentary I'd watched - twenty seconds of banging on a piano then half an hour of montages again. However, it turns out that those documentaries miss out heaving great lumps of time where you have to sit there and grind through the song line by line and word by word, justifying pretty much every single syllable. Saying "Ha! This sounds clever, also it rhymes, so that'll do" was Not Good Enough anymore. Everything had to be there for a reason.

At his point my Punk Rock Jiminy Cricket piped up to say that this goes against everything I believed in - a song comes from the heart, man, it is Art, not a craft. I suddenly realised that my Punk Rock Jiminy Cricket was actually a ruddy hippy. "As if by magic, you mean?" I asked him. He began to nod enthusiastically, then saw that he had betrayed himself.

Thinking about words and structure was vaguely familiar to me, but I was not prepared for what happened next: working on the vocal melody. Normally what this means for me is that I think of how the first line of the verse goes, then do that for the second line, the third line, and so on until we get to the chorus and then do the same for every other verse. Apparently this does not have to be the case - if you can actually Sing Properly you can vary it, make the tune do different things to reflect the emotions of the words and make everything more interesting and also better. It was a revelation - I mean, I may never get to use it, what with the whole "being able to sing" requirement, but still.

In the afternoon we went back and played our new song to everyone else on the course. I expected the course leader to stand, applauding, and proclaim �We might as well all go home now, this is a timeless classic!" but I was surprised again to find there was Criticism and Suggestions, ideas for how the song might progress and indeed grow. I was stunned - once I've written a song that song is done. I might go back and change a word here and there over the years (i.e. get it wrong continually until the wrong version becomes the right one), but that's it! I certainly don't edit, and if a song doesn't work first time round then it's never going to work at all.

But we had a third day booked for the course, so back we came and we spent another morning re-writing, and re-writing, and re-writing some more. After half an hour or so a whole middle section appeared, changing the whole thrust of the song, and another verse, an introduction, hooks, arrangements and all sorts of new bits - it was, genuinely and sincerely, amazing. When we went back later that day to perform it again it was hugely improved and I felt all emotional whilst playing it. We had moved ourselves!

It turns out that putting in a bit more effort reaps huge rewards, and it made me think of all the half decent songs I've abandoned over the years that might have turned out better. It also made me think of all the songs that did make it through to being recorded and played over and over again, and how they might have been improved. For example, if I'd spent another hour working on our song "The Lesson Of The Smiths" I'd probably have realised that I could sing about "a bunch of glads" (the flowers Morrissey used to have onstage with him) just as easily as "a bunch of daffs" (which he didn't), and I also might have taken the time to find out how to pronounce "epitome" correctly, rather than having to spend the next decade having to say it wrong!

I think it�s going to change my songwriting, and I hope it�s going to make my songwriting better. So next time you hear me singing a new song and you think to yourself �Why on earth is he singing that?� I will hopefully have a good answer!

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