This is a culmination of a bunch of stuff I’ve been thinking about when it comes to how I seem to write songs, some of which ended up in this ridiculously long blog post about rhythm and things. A lot of this is stuff I just do, rather than being stuff I think about the whole time.
I’ve gone for 8 main ‘tips’. There will be, of course, plenty of other tips that plenty of other people might have. And some of my tips may not make sense or work for you, but this is just some stuff that’s worked for me so far. I’d love to hear how you go about writing songs (or fiction or poems or anything else for that matter) so that I can steal your process from you.
Word-cloud of the complete Cooper365 lyrics.
This has been lingering about in my mind-tank for a while and I wanted to solidify some of it by writing it out. So I thought maybe I could write one of those blog posts I say I sometimes write. This could be considered a kind of advice post, but it really would be in the loosest sense of the word. If you’re interested in my take on putting lyrics together, however, then you’ve come to the right place. There’s even subheadings, guys. Subheadings.
So if you’re the sort of person that can’t stand context or long introductory justifications for why a blog post should be allowed to exist then the following jumpy links might be of interest to you.
Subheading 1: Why does this post you’re showing me even exist?
Subheading 2: Please patronise me by pretending you understand poetry.
Subheading 3: Are you finally going to talk about writing lyrics now?
Subheading 4: Can I go now?
Subheading 1: Why does this post you’re showing me even exist?
So there were a few things that prompted all of this mulch which is about to spew out in the form of a blog post. The first is a series of videos by Jonathan Mann that I was watching back when he was uploading them on a more regular basis where he was offering advice to people about how he writes a song a day. And he’s now been writing a song a day for over 1,200 days, so he’s pretty dedicated and in a good position to be dishing out this advice, I think. The second was a video by Alan Lastufka about how he writes lyrics. He was dealing more with the meaning behind lyrics and the basic use of similies and metaphors and that kind of thing. This post isn’t so much about that, it’s more about the actual process of getting lyrics down on paper. Read the rest of this entry
I am an atheist. And there is often an inherent difficulty when entering a dialogue about religion. People can become offended by what comes out of it. My hero, Douglas Adams (I wrote a post about him yesterday), put it this way:
“the invention of the scientific method and science is…the most powerful intellectual idea… it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with…that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it…But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it’.”
At ‘Digital Biota 2′, Cambridge, September 1998
I am not in the business of offending people. And I am not in the business of accusing those that hold a belief in a god or gods of being foolish or unintelligent. This is an unfair and unreasonable stance to take, in my opinion. There are historical, cultural and social reasons that people find themselves holding a belief in a god. Although I may have assessed the situation from my perspective and come out the other end as a firm atheist, I don’t take the attitude that those that have not done the same are, somehow, unreasonable.
I do, however, think they are wrong. And this is where Adams’ argument that religion, like anything, should be open to discussion is realised – I respect a person’s right to believe in a god, but I happen to disagree with the conclusion they’ve arrived at.
Here’s my bizarre voice explaining more.
Irrational Nonsense Blues – A song I wrote with Ross Exton.
I was very conscious of how I was discussing religion when I wrote my novel because it could, at times, seem as though I am directly mocking anyone that holds a religious belief. I was extremely careful not to be outlandish or aimlessly provocative in my writing, but the entire premise of the book (and the original idea) comes out of an interest in the subject of why people are so drawn to religious beliefs in the first place. And I am interested. Fascinated, actually. Although I am of the opinion that a belief in a god is an irrational belief, I can rationally understand why such a belief would exist. Read the rest of this entry
For many there’s nothing more humourless than insisting on analysing humour. E.B. White famously said: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” I can agree to an extent, to begin over-analysing why something is funny can end up sucking the humour out of it. On the other hand, I think that when we find something funny, we are making those connections in our minds anyway. Humour is often about drawing attention to the familiar, or finding a common understanding, and so to dismiss laughter as a simple reaction that isn’t the result of any thought does comedy, and the people who enjoy it, a disservice. I would argue that we laugh because we understand why something is funny. It’s strange that White’s oft-quoted take on analysing humour (and who knows how serious he was being about it anyway) is both humorous and seemingly worthy of analysis. Even the language choice of ‘the frog dies of it’ is a great punch-line. So, it turns out, for better or worse, that I am a person that is interested in analysing it. As well as being interested in humour for humour’s sake, I’m also interested in comedy that uses humour to say something, and I think almost all comedy does.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide series is as silly as it is smart, and as thought-provoking as it is humorous. Adams chose to deal with our species’ position in the Universe from the very opening of the first novel in this series. Read the rest of this entry
