Part one of this mini-series looked at some of the stages between having creative inspiration and getting something into a Digital Audio Workstation.
So far there is a barebones backing track and a vocal line that is more intended as a guide to the lead melody. This is usually a good point to mixdown and keep listening and listening. The track so far is a draft that mainly gives me an impression of the overall structure. Nothing is set in stone at this point; any aspect of it is subject to revision.
At this stage, I am wanting to develop a good idea of how the verses will progress. Of course, this is genre-dependent. House lyrics tend to be vacuous “Oh, baby baby”, “Yeh! yeh! yeh!” stuff. It is more of a vocal tone over the beat and anything more sophisticated would stretch the genre. Country, on the other hand, tends to epic melancholy tales intended to play on the mind. These are tendencies; not rules.
I tend to find that it does help to have some theme, however simplistic or convoluted. However, country type songs are subject to more selection pressure than are house tracks. House lyrics don’t have to make a lick of sense; country requires a coherent narrative arc. This selection pressure, accommodating for the competing and often conflicting needs, translates into the amount of effort required to make the lyrics meaningful within the genre. Three strong verses and a chorus of a piece portraying a complex story will require much more thinking about, variation and revision, to convey the message while at the same time preserving rhythm, rhyme and all the other good stuff.
The first verse can be a breeze; subsequent ones can be a headache from hell. This is because one of the selection pressures is that each lyrical element of the song must conform to every other across several aspects. The initial effort is so much easier as it has nothing to conform to. But, any additional material has to conform to what is already there, or what is already there must conform to the new stuff. Trying to write in a linear fashion has its appeal, but is thwarted by emerging complexity as a combinatorial explosion of selection pressures raise their ugly heads. Although, when sorted, that is what makes for a strong song.
How can this complexity, this “writer’s block” be circumvented? Well, cybernetics calls it requisite variety, psychotherapy calls it cognitive flexibility, most of us call it creativity. This is the ability to be more flexible than the problem, the ability not to be stuck with a limited set of non-working solutions, but to generate and test new solutions that might work. The source of those solutions may not be immediately obvious and just bashing your head against an obstinate line might not provide the creativity that you are looking for. Oftentimes, some “second-order” change, a different way of looking at things are required, and this offers a good life-hack for the songwriter too.
The next part of this mini-series will look at a method of overcoming this sticking point so as to develop the song theme.
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