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Esoterica of SongwritingBy: Stephen FosterStephen is the owner of On Course Publishing, Howler Recording, and maintains two domains besides IDN: yardageguides.com, for golf books, and golphoto.com, for golf photographs. |
| So much is made of the formulae which supposedly make up good songwriting, but the real guts of a great song come from the heart, and heart comes from experiencing and immersing yourself in life. Pain is only fleeting, physically, but if you close your eyes and just for a moment let yourself go back to the actual moment when something painful happened, you can actually feel the pain again. All emotions and events are not so keen as pain, but they are there in your memories nonetheless, and you can relive them just as vivedly. The best painters can always get a picture in their mind and hold it there while they copy it onto canvas, and the very best can imagine something never seen and copy that onto canvas. I hear a radio playing, very far away, but there. If I concentrate on it too hard I can't hear it clearly. It's sort of like catching something out of the corner of your eye. As soon as you look directly at it, it fades, but if you just casually let it be there, just a little off-center, it's really there. You can do the same with a mood, or a feel, or a style of writing. Just keep it going until the song is finished. Be sure to finish it, because when you get into a mood or feel like that, it's a one-in-a-million point in time, and you may never get that feel again. Then the song can become two or three bits of music put together instead of a real, complete song. I make sure that the people around me understand that when I ignore them during a writing session it's nothing personal. I'm just somewhere else doing my job. If someone does interrupt me I just drift until they go away, and don't let them stir the mood. I make sure that I don't allow myself to cop things from other songs just because I didn't listen carefully enough. Be faithful to what you hear. I've learned to play several instruments, so that I could write the song on the instrument I heard in the song. If I hear the music first, I write that first, or the lyrics first, whatever. The trick is to do it easily. Just let it flow like water over stone. When it gets hard to hear just play it from the first again and let the feel come back again. Play it to the point where the music or lyrics are finished and then just listen. If you expect to hear the rest of it you probably will. That's esoteric. SF |