Nothing in the history of the world has ever gone to plan. Plans are like beautiful dreams of a world that unfolds beneath you like a yellow brick road wherever you want to go. Hm…., too many similes. How about this: as John Lennon is reported to have said, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” A full ten days has gone by since my last a Album Month completion point. What have I been doing? The stuff of life, I guess.

I spent two days building a greenhouse wth my dad. I now have a sunburn in the shape of a tee shirt. I also spent a day celebrating an important birthday (not mine). I made a lot of food. I played with a toddler quite a bit. For whatever reason, though, it remained difficult to make it into the studio to work, except for the last three days which have been intense.

Cowriting Rules

There are many reasons why cowriting is a great idea. Cross pollination is one. The synergy of two like but different minds working together to make something great. The “alignment of incentives” that arises from mutual ownership is also pretty good (I’ve had more than one licensing deal come about through the connections of my cowriters). But, my favorite aspect of it is that, most of the time, I don’t have to write all the lyrics.

That’s exactly what happened with this latest song. In fact, in between greenhouse-building sessions, I was wondering what I would work on next when my friend and writing partner Adrianne popped up out of the blue with lyrics to two songs we had worked on months and years ago. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. And, just as she passed them on to me, reporting that she was stuck on them, I was suddenly ready to start working on them. So that was awesome.

I just spent the better part of three days working on this song called “Don’t Get To Go Back.” Adrianne presented the chorus to me as a song fragment years ago. I was immediately entranced by it, but we could never seem to make any headway on it. Then years went by and lots of stuff happened to the both of us. In preparation for Album Month, I did a reasonably comprehensive search through all of my song starts to curate the ones I thought might be worth working on and found this little gem in the rough again. Right before Album Month began, I told Adrianne that I’d found it. She remembered it and another song that we’d started about a year ago. And then I didn’t hear from her for two weeks. Then, like a Christmas present, she sent me complete melody and lyrics to both of them.

So, that’s why cowriting rules.

After spending days swinging for the fences, I wanted to try something more lightweight. I gave myself four hours to go from concept to completion on this one. I never know when this kind of exercise will yield fruit… or rotten eggs.

I’m not sure about it yet. It doesn’t SUCK, but it’s not the freshest thing I’ve ever done, either.

I’m any case, it was interesting to blast something out without second-guessing myself. Every effort, every decision I made was very quick with no looking back. It will be interesting to listen to this again in a few weeks to see if it has any merit at all.

I know the spirit of Album Month is not to get hung up or precious about anything in particular. But, the creative process is strange and unpredictable. That’s sometimes the most frustrating thing about it—creation from nothing to something has its own pace unrelated to your own schedule and preference. That’s been true of the last week of Album Month. The scope of the song I’m working on now has grown far beyond my initial conception and is taking far longer than I expected it to.

A few posts back, I described the strategy of moving fluidly past roadblocks by moving on to something else with the intention of, like skipping a hard problem on a timed test, coming back to it later if there’s time. Every extra day I work on this behemoth of a song, I wonder if I’m violating my own self-imposed rule of fluidity. What stops me from moving on is a desire to explore. I’m not actually stuck. I’m exploring. I’m exploring different arrangement ideas, exploring production and mixing techniques, exploring ways to increase the quality of my work with the tools at hand, building skills and honing craft. The value of Album Month—for me—is to impose motivation, consistency and discipline on a process that has traditionally been none of those things. Ten songs in a month is a guiding principle, but not to be achieved at any cost. I want to be proud of my work when I’m done. I want to learn along the way. I don’t want to rush through it and have ten new songs that the world doesn’t need to show for it.

Ebb And Flow

There’s no way around it. I love to write songs—in fact, I have to; I get restless and fidgety if I haven’t written or worked on a song in a few days. But I HATE HATE HATE writing lyrics. Composing is a delicious process with a flow to it.  Lyrics are a different story altogether. I rarely feel like there’s a flow to writing lyrics. Quite the contrary. I’m often stuck for days or weeks on lyrics. Many, many promising song starts have withered on the vine for lack of a rain of words.

In the early days, this wasn’t so much the case. I once sat down and wrote lyrics to two songs back-to-back. I’ve had speed writing sessions with other writers that yielded as many as five (weird, but charming) songs in an hour. But, as my standards have increased, so has my struggle finding the right words.

A practice that I now mostly follow of writing the chorus first has helped. You sort of write backwards from the chorus, then a prechorus that ramps into the chorus and a verse that supports the whole towering pile of goo. That, at least, grounds my efforts in the context of a specific theme. But, it’s no panacaea.

I find lyric writing to be like attempting to assemble a dense, multi-dimensional puzzle in the dark while wearing mittens. Perhaps because I’m a giant word nerd and a meticulous, persnickety and detail-obsessed editor, I constantly battle multiple competing tensions: between the banal and the precious, cerebral, intellectual or just plain purple; between the beguilingly circumspect and the plainly vague and confusing; between the sing-songy stuff of nursery rhymes (here’s a mid-thought tip: if children dance to your songs, you are doing something incredibly right–and they don’t even care what the words are) and the puffy ramblings of a self-obsessed poet wannabe. And then, there’s the simple diffuculty of trying to figure out exactly what I’m trying to say.

I’ve heard anecdotes about the second verse being the hardest to write—because if you write a first verse that perfectly pays off the chorus, there’s nothing left to say in the second verse. That’s sometimes a problem, but really, the whole enterprise is fraught with difficulty.

After all the sturm und drang, almost nobody cares what your lyrics are when they listen to your songs anyway. Song lyrics are near-universally ignored as long as the groove is there and it’s fun to sing along with—unless the lyrics are wrong. When the lyrics are wrong, everyone notices. It’s like a sixth sense people have. So, while it seems like a lot of effort for little return (except for the satisfaction of enjoying your own achievement and getting to sing the nice words you made up), you have to at least put in the time to get the lyrics not wrong.

Music Or Lyrics First?

Good Enough