A woman asked me, last night, how I write a song. She said, “How do you come up with words and match them to a melody, and a progression?”
I said, “Dumb luck.” And I thought I was being serious.
She gave me a knowing look, and said, “There’s no such thing as luck.”
And I said, “There is for me.”
I wasn’t trying to be flippant. I tried then, to explain my method, but, not having ever had a method, I ended up with something that strongly resembles dumb luck. She may as well have been asking how I make my beard grow.
Sometimes it starts with a riff on the guitar. In the case of one song in particular, “The Captain,” I played this little riff for about a month, and finally sat down and wrote a lyric for it. The riff had a nautical flavor, so I wrote the song about a sea captain. Where did it come from? I don’t know. Maybe, like a sculptor, I removed the excess from the riff, and found it in there.
Some songs come easy. I was driving home from work one day, and a whole song came racing down the road and hit me, head-on. It was called “Midnight.” I pulled over, grabbed a pencil and a piece of notebook paper, and wrote it all down. When I got home, I picked up my guitar and played the song from beginning to end, and I’ve never changed a word of it.
Other songs are like puzzles that need to be solved. Some of them are started in one decade, and finished in another. There is one, “Don’t Tell Me,” that I’ve been playing with for twenty years or so, and I still don’t like the chorus. The rest of the song has potential, but the chorus sucks, and I can’t seem to come up with a better one. So the song remains unfinished.
Sometimes a lyric will form in my head, and a tune just naturally follows. I work out the progression on the guitar, and voila! There’s a song.
Sometimes I’ll work out a progression on the piano. I don’t play piano, but since a keyboard has a different feel than a guitar neck, sometimes chords will form, I transpose them to the guitar, and away we go. I wrote “The Dreamer,” and “Morning Has Come” that way.
Most of my songs start as an idea. I sit down with this idea, and flesh it out. Either I just follow along and see where it leads, or I manipulate and guide it where I want it to go. The English language is like a toy box. Our words have such interesting connotations, nuances, and layers of meaning, that my choice of words can influence the direction and impact of the song.
I like to paint pictures with words. To be successful, I believe a song should take the listener to a new (or even a familiar) place. It should introduce the listener to something within themselves that, either they’d forgotten about, or they didn’t realize was there. The best reaction a song can generate is an “aha” moment, wherein the listener is nudged into opening her/his mind, just a little.
So that’s how I write a song. It’s a lot like growing a beard, only it’s more work. A song grows from the heart, in a process that, when analyzed, ends up looking a bit like dumb luck.
