Writer's Block - No Such Thing?

I came across an article the other day where the author insisted that writer's block really didn't exist. My guess is that he was trying to draw attention to his blog by coming up with something that might be, in the songwriter's world, considered "controversial". Like a sucker, I was drawn in and I protested his claims, and therefore I guess I did exactly what he wanted. I engaged.

There's more advice on songwriting on the web these days than there ever has been. If nothing else, MY only piece of advice to you is to consider who is writing this stuff before using it. Or believing it.

Writer's block exists. I know, because I have it. In a bad way.

I have been writing songs since I was 12 years old. I'm not saying I wrote every day, or that I have a thousand songs to my credit. But I was consistently inspired and if not coming up with something new, always working on something unfinished. A couple of years ago, I finished my last song, and that was a laborious task because I had been working on it for some time. My excuse might be that I have had a lot of personal things to overcome, one being the death of my father last December after a long battle with Alzheimer's. It wasn't fun and it shook me to the core. I kept telling myself that eventually this would give me fodder for more songs, but so far it really hasn't.

I was, however, inspired recently when I read an excerpt from an interview with Sting, who had a very long dry period until he went back to the town he grew up in, and found that writing in someone else's voice was his cure. He wrote from the perspective of the people who lived in his home town, past and present. I think that's a good idea. Not just the idea of going back to your home town, but trying to write in someone else's voice. I've rarely, if ever, done that. So I'm going to try.

I have written several articles on finding inspiration but when I wrote them I was having no trouble myself. I had a muse or two back then, but they have long gone. For awhile I told myself that maybe I just wasn't going to write any more, and I haven't pushed it. But since reading that little snippet by Sting, I have found the odd line or phrase or verse coming out. My intention is to continue to explore that.

I'll let you know how I'm progressing.

No such thing as writer's block? Yeah, sure.

IJ

Songs I (Almost) Like - Soul Meets Body

I have no idea what this song is about, and so if you think this is just going to be another gush about another song -- it isn't.

I really don't like it when songwriters just meander on in their own minds and then put it out there for others to try and swallow.  I think it's selfish and lazy.  And so, with apologies to Deathcab for Cutie (another conundrum, what the heck does that mean??), I love/hate their song "Soul Meets Body".

Musically, it is great, it is fun to play on guitar and the production and arrangement are excellent.  Lyrically, it is none of these things.  It starts out promisingly enough.  But how did you go from this beautiful, earthy description to a greyhound station?  And then back to the dirt?  And then "roads left in both our shoes"?  And eventually to a "brown eyes" that you want to hold near?  Come on, man, obscurity is no excuse for laziness!

Here are the lyrics for those of you who don't know the song:

I want to live where soul meets body
And let the sun wrap its arms around me
And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing
And feel, feel what its like to be new

Cause in my head there’s a greyhound station
Where I send my thoughts to far off destinations
So they may have a chance of finding a place
where they’re far more suited than here

And I cannot guess what we'll discover
When we turn the dirt with our palms cupped like shovels
But I know our filthy hands can wash one another’s
And not one speck will remain

And I do believe it’s true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
But if the silence takes you
Then I hope it takes me too
So brown eyes I hold you near
Cause you’re the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

Where soul meets body
Where soul meets body
Where soul meets body

And I do believe it’s true
That there are roads left in both of our shoes
But if the silence takes you
Then I hope it takes me too
So brown eyes I hold you near
Cause you’re the only song I want to hear
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere
A melody softly soaring through my atmosphere

Some of you may say "who cares?  It's a great song!"  Yes and no.  Some of you might think you know what it means.  Maybe you do.  And the songwriter is counting on you coming to his rescue that way.  "You see?  People know what my song is about!"

If songwriters actually spent more time thinking about what they're actually saying instead of throwing a few obscure lines out there like feed to fish, we'd actually have something worth singing!

Here's the video:

Good Things Come In Threes

There's an expression that people often speak of when bad things happen;  bad things come in threes.  Whether that's true or not, I suppose people tend to look for and count "bad things" when they happen in order to prove it to themselves.

I am also finding more and more evidence that when it comes to songs, good things also come in threes.  Let me explain.

I wrote in another article years ago called Self-Indulgence about repetition; how some songwriters repeat things too often, and others not enough.  At the time I didn't come to any particular conclusion other than the fact that I often would repeat things three times and that seemed to be enough.  The elements that I referred to were things like melodic phrases, or lyrics that repeated, often in a chorus, but also in other parts of the song.

Lately I've been paying attention to how many times certain things are repeated in popular songs, especially melodic phrases since most of us tend to be drawn to the music first.  When I was playing a song with a young guitar student last week, Coldplay's "Paradise", it occurred to me that this song had that very type of repetition:

Dreamed of para- para- paradise
Para- para- paradise
Para- para- paradise
Every time she closed her eyes

The "para-para-paradise" is repeated three times in this chorus before it changes in the last line.

I recently posted in my blog about a song that was a recent Academy Award nominee, "Happy" by Pharrell Williams.  I think it's a great song and should have won, but what do I know?  :-)

Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do

Ah, but Irene, you'll say, the line is repeated FOUR times.  Yes, but.  The melody isn't quite the same in each repetition, is it?  You have to listen to the song to see what I mean if you don't know it.

Repetition is an interesting phenomenon.  You'll notice it with very young children, the desire to have something repeated, especially something that makes them laugh.  Human beings are wired to want to experience something that gives us pleasure over and over again.  And there's a psychological reason for that!  It's called "Mere-Exposure Effect".

Wikipedia describes the effect this way: "The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds."  The emphasis is mine.

Pop music is notoriously repetitive...the choruses in pop are meant to be memorable and originally titles (or the "hook", if you will) were specifically placed in the chorus so you would remember the name of the song in order to either request it on the radio, or buy the record.  Yes, manipulative, right?  But people wanted to hear those songs again and again, and the mere-exposure affect partly explains why.  We like what we know.

But how much is too much?

Today I saw an article about another remix of the Academy award-winning song "Let It Go" and the article began with "You're probably sick of 'Let It Go' remixes, but...".  We've all had the nausea-inducing effect of hearing a song or something in a song, once too often.  Even Taylor Swift chooses the songs she's going to include on her next album by weeding out the ones she gets tired of first.

The Perfect Three Effect, which I am now going to call it just because I can, refers to how many times in a row something can safely be repeated without tiring the listener.  This includes lyrical and/or musical phrases.  If you look at your own songs, can you find any that include this phenomenon?  Sometimes these things come out of us without much thinking, and that's the way it should be when you're first sitting down to write.  But when you go back to re-write a song, that's when you have to scrutinize it for elements that have to be fixed. 

Watching out for how many times you repeat something, is an important part of that process.

IJ