Writing song lyrics is as challenging a thing as...well as the hardest things I try to do well. It feels arbitrary a lot of times and I don’t know that I use that form to really get out a lot of thoughts. I used to. Now it feels like I do more of that in a longer form, so the short form of expression feels like I’m assigning rhymes.
Having recently begun playing music again, I’ve gravitated to writing. I never was a huge cover player and from early on in picking up the guitar, it was as an expression of my thoughts and less as a way to learn music theory. I alluded recently in another post that I was never a player who could play elaborate solos or songs note for note. I’d pick up a guitar and string together chords to sing around and hope to find something that made sense.
The stories I have written were mostly autobiographical but like my writing now, would start out one way and end another. Fictional representations of the things I was feeling at a place in time. I could fabricate a story of a guy who drives to Oxford, MS to see his girlfriend and upon arrival finds out she’s been cheating on him. This didn’t happen to me rote. But something similar did 5 years prior to me writing it. The feeling propelled the story.
This I can still conjure in my writing, but the songs sometimes don’t make any sense. In a recent song I’m feeling like I’m explaining what it feels like to live in my mind, but the words don’t spell that out. I feel the melody and the intensity of the singing say it to me, but the words may never discern the former from the latter. I mean there’s a line I’ve been using in the song over and over. “My fest below the ground.” What does that even mean? In my brain “keeping our feet below the ground,” means keeping on. It makes complete sense for the feeling I’m having, yet grammatically and logically it makes no sense. Confused yet?
Straight ahead writing is easier but then that lacks any feeling for me. I could write a story and make it rhyme, possibly even make a formulaic melody. This is how hits work. Easy to say. Hard to make any good or I wouldn’t be here explaining the ins and outs of my brains and would be busy selling a million records.
What is true though is that I can’t play music without writing it. I’ve found a good deal of joy playing with my daughter and that’s a great thing but even there I think. “She could write great songs,” or “we should write together.” Maybe she just enjoys singing and doesn’t need this to be more.
When a song is right for me, performing it feels not unlike pushing myself on a run. There may not be the pain, but there is the exhilaration, the burning off of energy like a the first stage of a rocket. There’s a controlled violence to it when it’s done right and that feeling is intoxicating. It’s what “rock” feels like to me. You’ve felt it from the other side as well. The crowd. The chills. The noise. The motion. The collective energy. Maybe just the windows down, singing your favorite song at the top of your lungs on a fall day. That’s what it feels like on the other side too, in that we are the same.
I work through songs singing things that work together and sound right. I sometimes move from there back and create a story. Combing feelings or things from my past. In the same “feet below the ground” song, I keep singing about a friend of my Jay and how we always used to drive around looking for the party or hang out spot from back in the day. We mostly never found it but sometimes did.
“jay was always busy with something when we tried to keep from running around. I was always telling we shouldn’t keep our feet below the ground.” These are the words of madness but they make sense to me. Someone else can analyze it when it’s done.
Since I can remember, the feelings I’m trying to convey are the oldest ones. The most intense ones from my teenage years. I’m thankful, really, to be able to let those ring out. A lot of artists and writers seem to mellow out over time and I’ll be honest in saying I was for sure concerned this would be the case when I started writing again. That I’d go sock and sandals on myself and want every song to be slow and acoustic. Thank god that hasn’t happened. Maybe this means I’m not moving on or growing, but I couldn’t have it any other way.
I always crave the loud and never promise to let it make sense. I’ll just hope it’ll move you somehow or at the least, make you tap your foot.
#hugsandhi5s
