Writing lyrics is a strange situation, as I have mentioned before in this blog. But the human voice fairly cries out for something vaguely coherent to sing, and if you write enough music, you will find yourself writing about subjects that you originally found questionable. The only intelligent expression of the dilemma of lyric writing was written by Frank Zappa, where he expressed his considerable opinion that all love songs were 'bad mental health'; if you actually tried to live the attitudes of those words, you would wind up locked up in a mental institute.
I've written somewhere around 50 or 60 lyrics, not all of which I had the courage to actually use. It is a hard process, and inspiration only comes in rare bursts, usually when on vacation or at other odd moments. Normally it requires sitting down rather glumly and grinding out the majority of the verbiage after getting a few small points of inspiration. Some of the earliest lyrics that I did are painful to go back to, as I have also mentioned before.
I think that my lyrics have become better over time; every cycle of songwriting seems to be better than the one before, or at least more ambitious. Instead of pulling subjects out of the air, I started writing on themes. It was easier for the music, which flows with inspiration a great deal easier than the words. Practice may not make perfect, but it does let the writer focus on ways of getting something down that can be polished. That is the key; just get something down, no matter how bad you think it is at the time. Sit on it for a wh9ile, and then you may find something worth polishing up.
The above song, 'Fear the Gear', has an alternate version now in the alternate/outtakes bin that had a complete set of lyrics telling a twisted fairy tale. It was perfectly fine, except for my choice of using studio trickery to lower my voice a couple of octaves. It was amusing the first few times and annoying after that, plus the music was a strong 7/4 beat with enough strange charm to stand on it's own. The voice only distracted from the best aspects of the song, IMHO, so that version was shit canned.
In the beginning I only did instrumentals, being the most reluctant vocalist. It's not that my voice is bad; in the genres that I normally work in, bad and good are relative to the attitude being presented. The more that I sang, the more that I realized that the only way to convincingly sing a song is to live it, at least the very moment it is leaving your lungs. Cover songs were usually the best choice, someone else's emotions laid bare the best way to learn.
There were more than a few times when my stomach dropped to the floor listening back to the vocals, realizing how badly I had misjudged my ability to sell a song. Those were carefully buried, exercises to learn from, not to be heard by the general public. There were success stories, songs that flowed along with the cover versions on an album, not drawing attention to themselves, occasionally shining brighter. I could only be the judge, and I found my efforts getting better.
It seemed that among the many breakthroughs that I had in 2014, while recording sixty songs so fast that I really didn't have time to self-edit, that my lyric writing improved dramatically. I was telling stories now, expressing opinions, even demonstrating emotions. For someone like myself who walls up my persona from the outside world, that's a big step. 'Face of Another' was a rare ballad and it worked both musically and as a set of lyrics, just a hint of enigma.
The video was also interesting; normally, if I am raiding existing films and videos for images, I try to stay away from facial close ups. As a video editor for twenty five years, I have noticed that most film and television is made of up close ups and/or people talking to each other. If you cut out all the 'talking heads', you might wind up with ten minutes of so out of one hundred. Instead of my normal practice of discarding all that material and only using the long traveling shots, this video breaks my personal rule and is nearly all lingering close ups.
It works for the subject of 'Face of Another', which as a lyric was also a departure from my normal topics. I had written ballads before and also in the 2014 project, but they were mostly instrumentals. Expressing tenderness in music is a breeze compared to writing it down then singing it. Yet here I get away with it, selling the content, getting the music right, and even getting the visuals to synchronize. A lot of work went into this one, for sure.
From 2017, 'Dropped a Dime' is pure ambition. Here, I'm trying to tell a mini-story, a tale of personal betrayal between lovers, straight out of a film noir or pulp detective novel. James Ellroy is an especially influential writer, and this reflects his work as well as all the television and cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. I even went to the Prelinger Archives and found appropriately old footage to edit together for the video.
The phrase just 'dropped' into my head one morning; I even had to look it up to make sure that I trying understood the meaning. Since I keep a very active diary during the recording sessions, which tend to produce a minimum of two songs a week, I wrote down what I had. Within a matter of days, while sitting down at the piano, the chords just fell under my hand. I knew that I had the music to fit the idea instantly.
That's when the work started; I had to get a complete set of lyrics, including plot points and a middle eight that was inspired by the type of songwriting U2 does, as well as an arrangement. During recording, the vocals were typically arduous, and as is often the case, patched in nearly line by line. But the end result was something that I really hadn't done before, a story song from someone else's perspective completely. It slotted in well with an album that accidentally became a collection of love songs, the bad including the good.
The last example on display here is 'Weird In Me.' If I thought that 'Dropped a Dime' was ambitious, I was in for a shock with this one. Love is not a subject that I had been comfortable expressing in lyrics; in fact, I have avoided it like the plague. Yet after so many songs and albums, I felt that it was time to actually show some display of public affection to my wife.
Yet when the lyrics were finished, once again growing from a few small germs of verbal inspiration through hard work into a complete thought, it somehow seemed to be all about me. It was, to put it most simply, a confession of how difficult I must be to live with. And yet my wife has done this for thirty five years, and actually been a good sport about it most of the time. So I went all out on the music, and a simple folk song wound up becoming a progressive rock track.
The video only compounded the difficulties; what was I supposed to do, show a bunch of photos of my wife, myself, or the two of us? How about our wedding album from 1984? Fortunately, I found enough material from all over the place to put something together that was so close and yet so far away at the same time to work. And so I present it to you, the rare love song to my wife, for loving someone who doesn't always deserve it. And I love her back even more.
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