Cheap Advice On Music

If you’re someone who enjoys making up their own songs and then recording them, like I am, you’ve probably had the experience of wanting to write a brand new song, but coming up dry when you actually sit down to do it. I know I have! Maybe it’s because everything you come up with to play seems familiar, like you already made up that pattern. Or maybe the chords are OK and you may even have a “la la la” melody part, but nothing is coming to you for the lyrics to actually be about.

Sound familiar? Well, before you get frustrated and start wondering whether you will in fact ever write another original song, here are four tips that might help get your creative juices flowing the way they should.

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The day Bo Diddley died, I suddenly realized that of all of the hundreds of songs I have written over the years, there was not a single one that used the so-called “Bo Diddley beat,” you know, that bum-pa-dum-pa-dum, BUM BUM beat that you hear in songs like Not Fade Away by the Rolling Stones. I thought I had tried everything, but I had never used that beat! This had to change.

When I finally sat down to write my “Bo Diddley beat song,” I made the fateful decision to write it on the bass guitar, which I don’t usually do, to avoid if possible having it come out as just my version of Not Fade Away or some other song I had heard a million times.

As Mr. Monk would say, here’s what happened. I came up with a bass riff in A that definitely had the Bo Diddley beat and I used that for the verses of the new song. For variety, I threw in a 4-bar link that was only half Bo Diddley to serve as a refrain and then added an 8-bar bridge with no Bo Diddley and a different overall feel. Finally, I wrote a set of lyrics, based on two lines that I already had in mind to start the song. I called it “Just Like A Man.” Ta da!

Well, when I wrote the song, it seemed to indeed be a “Bo Diddley beat song.” But when I went to record it, things went in a different direction.

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Does your lyrical well ever run dry? Do you find yourself casting about for an idea, a notion, an opening line - anything to help you kick off a new set of lyrics? I have that happen a lot. If I just write down “whatever comes to me” without a specific idea or starting point, it tends to come out sounding like the same “talking points” (singing points?) I’ve been writing about for the last 30 years!

One good source for new lyrical ideas is the things people say in movies or on TV (or in movies on TV). Here’s something that I’ve tried that might work for you. Pick a movie, any movie, although for some reason the older ones (40s and 50s) tend to work better for this - maybe people talked different back then or something. Anyway, put in the DVD and watch the movie, with a pencil and pad at the ready. Write down everything anyone says that sounds like it might be a line in a song. There will be lots!

You should have at least 25 or 30 lines once the movie’s over. Check and see whether some of them seem to go together, or even already rhyme. See if there’s one that can be the opening line of the song, setting the tone for what it’s about. (The song need not follow the story of the movie, of course - that’s a different kind of project!)

Give this idea a try sometime - you never know what you’ll come up with!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook Cheap Advice On Songwriting.]

Writing good lyrics is hard. Writing great lyrics is very hard. I’ve written hundreds of songs, with hundreds of sets of lyrics, and I can’t think of a single one that I would consider to be truly great. But hey, a good set of lyrics is OK too, and I have written a fair number of those!

Maybe you’re at the stage where you’re not even sure whether you’ve written any good lyrics yet. Maybe you’re not sure that the way you’re going about it is effective, or maybe you don’t really have a way of going about it and as a result haven’t actually gotten started yet. If this is you, what are you planning to do about it?

One possibility is to listen to a lot of music, paying special attention to the lyrics, including their structure and use of repetition, rhyming patterns, etc., then try to imitate what you’ve heard. Or, you can get one of the many books on the basics of songwriting and learn the theoretical underpinnings of successful lyrics. You could also “learn by doing” by just dashing off a bunch of quick songs without worrying about whether they are any good, just for practice. Actually, a combination of these approaches is probably the best way to go.

(Commercial message: My eBook Cheap Advice On Songwriting bags the theoretical approach, presenting 60 specific tips on getting ideas for lyrics, novel song structures, etc.)

Lyrics are typically not made up in order, from the first line in the song to the last. Like a movie whose scenes are shot out of order for technical reasons, the parts of your song may emerge in any sequence. The cool line you thought of first may end up being the third line in the second verse!

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You’ve heard of summer movies, summer vacation, and summer school - but are you familiar with the concept of summer songs? If you remember the Beach Boys circa 1963-67 you are! “Surfin’ USA,” “California Girls,” “Surfer Girl” - they even had an album called “Summer Days (and Summer Nights!)”.

But it isn’t just the Beach Boys. Here are some songs by other artists that are deemed to be true “summer songs”:

(OK, that last one was the Beach Boys again, but it turned up on so many people’s lists that I just had to include it in this one!)

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Probably the easiest thing to write a song about is our own lives. After all, we have all the info! And, we know exactly what emotions are involved and what they feel like. The only problem is that limiting ourselves to writing about our own lives leaves out an awful lot, namely the whole rest of the world!

We can expand our songwriting horizons by trying to relate to other people, whether they be friends, strangers, or even historical figures, and to tell their stories instead of just our own. (See my article Write A Song About Someone Else’s Life for some general thoughts on this approach.)

One specific source of “someone else’s story” is the daily newspaper or the TV news shows that now run 24 hours a day on cable. Some of the stories they cover are serious, some are trivial, but any of them could present an idea or even a specific narrative for you to develop into a song. I have even written a song based on one of the oddball stories in “News Of the Weird”!

You can write about big, well-known news stories like the Iraq War (whether you are gung-ho or gung-no) but once you get into politics or social commentary you do run the risk of alienating some people with your choice of words or subject. Again, a lot of us wrote songs about 9/11, but the whole subject is so fraught with baggage and a sense of “what more is there to say” that I would be hesitant to play mine for anyone.

The “features” or “human interest stories” that are always reported along alongside the real news are often more fruitful songwriting-wise than the big, major stories. Hearing about some guy who is riding his lawnmower across the country might give you a great idea for a song. Or maybe it’s the plight of farmers in Bolivia. Anything to break yourself out of your little circle of you!

I’m not really suggesting that you tell the stories that you come across in your songs, although that can sometimes work. It’s more a matter of describing the situation, or a reaction to it, preferably from the point of view of one of the participants in the story, or as someone reacting to hearing the story.

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I have found that if I can come up with a good title, I can usually come up with a good song to go with it. I think it’s because having a specific title establishes the general subject of the song, freeing me of the “option glut” problem that arises when the new lyrics can be about anything at all. If I’m lucky enough to think of a title like “He Doesn’t Know Her (Like I Do),” as I once did, the song practically writes itself!

There are many sources of possible titles besides staring into space and dreaming them up. One little-known but productive approach is to simply steal the title of some book and use that! You can test this out by strolling through the “Fiction and Literature” section next time you are in Barnes & Noble and scanning the titles of the books. I’d be surprised if you didn’t find at least a few really good prospects!

Of course, you can find endless lists of titles online too, at Amazon or FictionDB or various other places. Here are a few titles I found online under “Romance”:

* A Little Bit Wicked
* Midnight Eyes
* The Trouble With Love
* Love Under Cover

See what I mean? Every one of those titles puts promising melodies into my mind. You too, I’ll bet!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook Cheap Advice On Songwriting.]

Do you remember the poem Jabberwocky, from “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There”? The first verse goes like this:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Upon hearing the poem Alice declares, “Somehow it fills my head with ideas – only I don’t know exactly what they are!”

When I was in high school, I noticed that the student poems that won the prizes were not the ones about houses and trees and cars. The winning poems all had titles like “Purple Tangents” and lines about “the feral, livid hues of the banners of the blind” or some such imponderable image. I could never figure out what any of them meant, but I knew that they were Significant.

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