February 9th, 2010
Welcome to The Three 'R' Blogging service!
This is where I reduce, reuse, and recycle a conversation I've been having with someone in my Mensa group into a blog entry. We've been discussing songwriting, and it's a fascinating subject for me and at least one other member.
Most songwriters have experienced the same issues over and over again when it comes to chords or progressions, melodies and (maybe especially) lyrics.
Some lyrics that have sounded just about right in isolation from the music, sound horrible once placed into the musical context. Other times, lyrics float around for years, and only find value once cannibalised (my word for destruction to component parts) into phrases and lines that resurface in other songs.
Example: I wrote the music to a song last Fall, and while hammering away doing repairs to my bathroom one day, I suddenly realised that a letter I had written to a friend (and not ever sent) contained "the right words" for the song. The letter was cannibalised and most of the words were adapted to the song. The letter may still exist as an MS Word file, but it is dead now. Having being adapted to something else completely, its component parts are no longer alive. The song, on the other hand lives on nicely. I wrote about it already.
I do similar things with snippets of one unfinished song being cannibalised for another effort.
The most interesting part of songwriting is the creativity—particularly in a musical context—that comes from tearing off bits of the flesh of one effort to feed the ravenous maw of a much prettier and more fierce effort. Songs have some bits of others. So where does "the song" really come from? Hmm...
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