How I Critique

 

© I.Woloshen

Critiques can be brutal. Most of the time, the level of brutality is in direct relation to the thickness of your skin! I used to scoff and bristle at ANY suggestion that my songs might be less than perfect! How dare they!!??

More and more, I come across this scenario…people send me their lyrics for critique, I spend some time on them and send a reply, and never hear another word! Is it that I’m expecting you to love what I say? Not at all…you’re not likely going to agree with everything, in fact you may outright disagree with every word! I am not an insensitive boor who loves tearing other songwriter‘s work apart, but I DO tend to be quite upfront about the weaknesses and the strengths, whatever they may be. Therein lies the point…what do you expect of a critique?

The first and most important point…I can never emphasize this enough…is that it is nothing personal!! I can love you as a person and not like what you wrote! I can just as easily think you’re a twerp and LOVE your writing! Okay, I’ll admit that there are VERY few people in this world that I totally dislike 

Secondly, I am at least equally as hard on myself when it comes to my own writing! I will never say anything to you that I wouldn’t say to myself…in fact, I’m probably easier on you than I am on me because I don’t know how for sure how sensitive you might be. The truth is that I want you to get better…and how can you improve unless you can identify your weaknesses? I want the same for myself.

I do not treat anyone differently…the only exception to this would be a very young songwriter (in age, not experience), in which case I try to be more encouraging. If a nine-year-old came up to you with her first serious effort at drawing a cat…you’d think twice before getting too critical.

Lastly, I compare ALL lyrics/songs with those on a professional level. If you want to be a carpenter, you have to set your goals in such a way that you can compare your work with the best darn carpenter you know. Even if you intend only to be an amateur songwriter, the very fact that you’ve sent your lyrics to someone for a critique shows that you want to be good at it, no? Otherwise, why bother?

In my experiences being a reviewer on Gods Of Music , I’ve noticed a number of things in the feedback artists/bands give reviewers when they get their reviews. This is a really common response…”you didn’t get my song/you didn’t understand my music”. Who’s responsibility is it to get the message across, the reviewer, or the songwriter/artist? If someone doesn’t understand your music…especially if a number of people don’t, you have to start looking at whether or not you are doing enough to communicate in your songs. You are putting yourself out there into the “big, bad world” of the music industry and they are not going to be nice. They are going to be brutally honest. So get used to it!

Another response…”I got a great review at (some other obscure reviewer or article)…”. This doesn’t mean anything…all it does is reflect the wide variation of responses you will inevitably get to your songs. Don’t expect everyone to feel the same about your song…you don’t feel the same about every song you hear!

There are also various other defensive responses you see from songwriters and artists who are pretty new to this idea of criticism. On the other hand, I see many who respond in a mature, gracious manner to whatever feedback they get. If you don’t get the “that’s a number one hit!!!” response the way you thought you would, take a long breath before you put your fist through the wall  It takes time, tremendous luck and a whole lotta talent to begin to compete with the rest of the music world.

I sincerely hope that EVERY SINGLE PERSON who asks me for a critique reads this very article first, in order that they understand what I’m going to do. To be painfully honest, if you are looking for a pat on the back ONLY…don’t ask for a critique. Instead, play your song to your friends and family. They will ALWAYS accept what you do because they love you!

(PS…Irene is no longer giving personal critiques other than her work with Gods Of Music, but you can request a critique on the Message board!!)

IJ

Step By Step

 

© I.Woloshen

This is a more recent song lyric that was born from one line that hit me in the car (don’t worry, I wasn’t hurt  ) on the way home from dropping the kids off at school.

I thought it might be an interesting thing to take you through the process I went through in creating this lyric. I have mentioned before that usually my songs come from a “music first” place, but in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a tendency to come up with a line and melody at once.

I saw a man that I’ve seen many times, walking down the street. I don’t know him personally, but when I look at him, he reminds me of someone…

“There is a man who looks like Truman Capote“

That was the line…now I had no idea where the song was going to go, I had only that line! What on earth was this song going to be about? Some people start with a central idea or theme…these days, I tend to write the first line and then try to build a song from there.

So I recorded it into my trusty micro-cassette recorder, and left it for awhile. Later, I pulled it out, along with my guitar, and started playing around with it. The melody had come at the same time, so I picked a chord and a key and let the words kind of come out as I was creating the melody.

Okay. There is a man who looks like Truman Capote…I thought I’d give a bit of a description next:

There is a man who looks like Truman Capote
He wears a slanted smile and a wide-brimmed hat
A little pigeon-toed, a lot eccentric
He gets a kick out of what he’s smiling at
And as I pass him on the street I wonder
What it is he’d have to say…

But what’s the song about? At this point, I remembered something my Dad talked about once…how he always remembered the “characters” that were around when he was a kid: characters who had idiosynchracies or looked or spoke a little strangely whom he never forgot.

This made me think about another older woman who we buy pumpkins from every year…she has an old house and some property and it’s become our tradition to always buy our hallowe’en pumpkins from her:

There is a woman, must be in her nineties
She sells her pumpkins every Hallowe’en
She’s all bent over with the weight of something
But every year, her crop’s the best I’ve seen
And as she prices out the one I’ve chosen
I wonder what she’d have to say

Now it seemed was the right time for a chorus…as it turns out, I wrote a melody and a different chord progression, but no lyrics! I just hummed a melody. Now, that’s not very conventional…but somehow or other, it works. If it feels good, do it 

So did I just want to write about characters? I could probably think of others, but at this point, I decided to take a different direction:

A friend of mine who rides the bus on weekdays
With sixty travelers she’ll never know
She looks at every one and writes their story
To entertain herself when the ride is slow
If she saw Truman and the Pumpkin Lady
She’d know just what they had to say….

All of these people are real people…there really is a friend who does this…I always thought it was an interesting way to pass the time on a bus! It just goes to show that little bits and pieces of ideas and thoughts can stay with you and come in handy in your songwriting sometimes. And it gave me the title of the song…again, not very conventional, because there’s no lyrical chorus, which is where the title is more commonly found. So I decided at this point to call the song “Truman and the Pumpkin Lady”. Kind of unusual :-). Now I needed to finish the song…how do I tie all of these thoughts together? This is what I came up with:

And as we reach our final earthly hours
Looking back at what our lives have been
It will appear as though a giant weaving
Of every person, place, and time we’ve seen
And maybe someone will pass by and wonder
What it is we’d have to say…

Then I finished with humming that chorus again…a kind of wistful exit to a wistful lyric. One point I’d like to make is that I wrote it all in the present tense…this is intentional. If I had written it in past tense, it would have had less impact. There is an immediacy to the present tense that works very well with this type of lyric.

Of course, the verses didn’t come out all that easily and just as I’ve shown them here…they went through two or three drafts first. And is the song finished? I dunno!! But that’s the story of how it got this far.

***Update*** I finally broke down and wrote lyrics to the chorus…in fact I changed the chorus melody altogether. Why? Because I felt it was missing a summation, outside of the repetition of the line at the end of each verse. Here it is:

Don’t be unkind
Live a simple life
Laugh at yourself sometimes
Look at me now
You’ll be here someday
So love a little bit along the way

When I was in my teens I bought my step-grandmother a little wall plaque, that said “Live, Laugh and Love”. She thought it represented exactly what she believed. So there you go.

IJ

Go With The Flow

 © I.Woloshen

You’d think that, being a songwriter, my interest in literature would venture more to the fiction arena. But ever since I discovered non-fiction (working in a public library for eight years helped), I’ve been hooked. I’ll read anything from spiritual to the so-called self-help books, with the aim of developing a greater understanding of myself and the world around me. I find great inspiration in many of the books I’m reading…lots of song ideas!

I’ve been reading a book lately called “Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ” by Daniel Goleman. I highly recommend it as a source of understanding your own emotional brain, how it works, and how you can work with it. One of the more fascinating sections deals with the creative mind and learning…the chapter is entitled “The Master Aptitude”. It begins by discussing how paralyzing worry, anxiety and fear can be…how it affects our learning and sabotages our ability to function. Eventually, the author moves on to a discussion of “flow”.

This immediately piqued my curiosity…flow is described as that state which “represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning.” Athletes call it the “zone”, but it can be found in almost any type of situation, whether it’s a doctor performing surgery or a composer creating a piece of music. The traits of “flow” are intense concentration, where pretty much everything else around you is shut out of your consciousness, a feeling of bliss and a loss of the sense of “self”. This is how I often feel when I’m writing! It can last a few minutes or hours…depending on the task at hand. It’s a kind of “in between” state, whereby if there wasn’t enough stimulation you’d grow bored and if there was too much you would lose control…a very thin line. The feelings associated with it become the motivation…in other words, you work at getting a flow because of how it makes you feel .

That’s a perfect set up for this next question: Do you write because you like the flow, or do you write because you want to get rich and famous? The fact is, that in studies done around this phenomenon, those who are more likely to succeed are the ones who do it for the feeling it gives them! The ones who are motivated by outside success will give up sooner, or have a lower success rate.

We will find flow more easily in the things we feel we are “good at”. For you beginning songwriters out there who don’t feel you’re good at it yet…think about why you do it. I find that from all of the songwriters I have met so far, the ones who began writing as a source of self-fulfillment are more likely to stick to it. Inevitably, the writers who have been writing for a good length of time began from that frame of mind. On the whole, do you find joy in writing? If you do, you’re more likely to succeed! Simple as that.

Oh, yes…and how do you get into the flow? There are as many answers to that as there are those who experience it. The more you write, the more you will find your own way to it. Some find the flow only when they are inspired. Some are disciplined enough to write everyday…they likely will get into the flow more often. The only answer is to DO. Go for it!

IJ