Note #33: Songs I Used to Write: Little Packages of Idealism
Age gives you perspective on life, for sure. Considering that I was well into my thirties before I wrote my first batch of legitimate songs, the idealism of youth still clung to my thoughts and seemed to undergird the grist of my songwriting.
I was writing songs about love, or more precisely, my experiences of disappointment in love, and the still yet to be imagined possibility of finding true love. Although I had been disappointed in that realm more than I could say I was successful, something in those songs expresses the possibility of redemption in love. It was a sentiment I pined about for years, and seemed to channel into all of my songwriting efforts. I am so aware of it because the one song I wrote counter to this vein, a song that was a conscious attempt to say, “I am moving on from this,” was titled, Wide River (Guess It’s Over). That was essentially an attempt to end the cycle.
Or perhaps not. Then I wrote “Nineteen” which was a nostalgia for an imagined life of someone I was infatuated with. In the ways of infatuation, a heavy dose of idealism was involved.
Moving ahead almost two decades, I haven’t revisited that elysian plain.
The youthful idealism is gone. More often than not, my songs are now about escape, self-sufficiency, and redemption through means other than “the other”. That could tell you a lot about the songwriter, though I’d like to adhere to the idea that my songs are not autobiographical and leave it at that.
Is it simply that my perspective has changed? Maybe. As well, my songs have developed. The two perhaps go hand in hand: one has fed into the other.
In the before-times, I used to be satisfied with three or four chord songs, with maybe an unusual or jarring chord thrown in for good measure. But I never really developed the songs. Most of them came together in the mysterious ways that songs always do, but I was less likely to work on them. Most often I wrote it, recorded it, maybe messed around with the lyrics. I usually didn’t even write them down. Once they were recorded, I might have played them a few times for someone, but the recording was the document of record.
My songwriting now usually requires writing several parts and linking them together somewhat logically, and finding the melodies that tie it all together. I’m less likely to just settle on the first idea that I come up with. I’m almost disappointed when a song is so simple. It may still work, but to me, it’s almost as if I haven’t had to do anything. So I need to complicate matters. I am now well into nine or twelve chord songs. But I am not using a dozen chords simply to be complicated, it’s just part of my process.
As well, I assiduously document these songs. I’ve learned my lesson: an unwritten down song might as well be an unwritten song.
At one of the open mics a few weeks ago, a young guy introduced a song and said, “It’s a post-breakup song”. My friend, who is closer to my age and life experience, was on after him and said, “You could call my song a post-post-breakup song.”
Or to quote from a recent song: “Another love song’s fate / ’Cause it’s easier to hate.” (from “Alright Again!”)
As I mentioned in Note #6, lyrics have become vehicles for the instrument that is the voice. They are not poetry, though they might seem, at times, to be that. I am happy to bring in the strange and unexpected, like this in a recent song, “Bliss”:
Life goes a lot like this / A python sizing you up for a kiss
Or, when I put a spin on a familiar line (Leonard Cohen’s Anthem):
There’s the crack where the light gets in / That’s the place where you can swim
