02: Ten
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Prove it
I’m not a person who can plan five years into the future while debating politics and writing an essay on the cultural significance of gendered pronouns in literature. I prefer to focus on a well-defined problem and work out a solution. My mind likes systems.
Maybe it’s a man thing, maybe it’s a left brain thing. For whatever reason, I’m a crafter of solutions and not a spewer-forth of emotion. As a songwriter, I set myself up a musical or lyrical problem, and solve it. I write a chorus, then I use the verse to construct a proof of the chorus statement (although it’s usually more of a proof by example than a watertight mathematical theorem).
This problem-solving nature is almost certainly connected to the general male problem of trying to solve emotional problems whose answers neither exist in the logical space nor would be at all useful. The idea of using maths to prove your love to someone started me off writing Ten, with the image of a mad scientist sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by sheets of scribbled paper desperately trying to make logical sense of his love so that he can prove it and stop worrying.
Songwriting is an exercise in form
Once I had this image as a starting point, writing the song became an exercise in pop songcraft. That’s the way I write, and there’s a part of me that thinks it’s the best way. I generally keep this kind of fighting talk quiet, but this weekend I found an unpublished letter by T. S. Eliot hanging in a downstairs bathroom that seems to prove me right:
…how else is one to write a poem except as an exercise? It seems to me the only way to get the proper humility of the writer towards the thing-to-be-written. One lets the thing-to-be-said look after itself. The opposite method produces expression of ideas, or personal sentiment, or usually a mush of undigested ideas and vomited emotions. All the thought about what the poem is to say should take place some time before the poem is started. Once begun, it becomes an exercise in form. And the other thing is to keep a big dictionary and look up the words one uses.
Now I won’t try and use the last line to justify the use of a rhyming dictionary. This would be an invalid logical step, and anyway I want to save the rhyming dictionary debate for another time…