I Hate Mornings

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Beaten Up was an exercise in textbook songwriting, and it turned out really well. It doesn’t push any boundaries, and it’s not edgy in the slightest, but it works as a song. And I like it.

I’m trying to relate each of these articles to an aspect of songwriting or creativity. This one is about writing songs by the book.

Starting with the title

During the 50/90 I was very good at always having my notebook to hand so I could record title ideas. I overheard someone say they felt “beaten up” and wrote it down. When I sat down with a guitar to start writing the song I wanted to find the perfect way of setting the title, so I spent a while singing “Beaten up” to a load of different tunes and rhythms. It’s always a good idea to try to match the contour and rhythm of natural speech for a title. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a good start. In this case, it was perfect. By this time I was singing “Beaten up and beaten down”, which I liked. Say it aloud, and you’ll naturally raise the pitch on “up”, and lower it on “down” because of the structure of the phrase. It’s a bonus that the cheesy word-painting is built in…

Textbook structure

With the chorus saying (essentially) “I feel crappy”, I started building a structure around it based on the tried and tested “contrasting sections” model. If the chorus is set in the present, you set the verse in the past or future. The chorus is a general statement, so the verses deal with specifics. The chorus melody goes quite high, so the verse melody is lower. And so on. I ended up with something like this:

• Verse 1: I’m sitting around with friends telling sad stories about you.
• Chorus: I feel crappy.
• Verse 2: I’m trying to think of a fun story but I can’t.
• Chorus: I feel crappy.
• Bridge: I just want to be able to tell them something great about you.
• Chorus: But I feel crappy.

Simple yet effective. There’s no need to over-complicate song structure. In fact, it’s usually a bad idea. People have very specific ideas of what to expect from a song, and usually you only ever want to surprise them with one aspect. Pop songs are all about familiarity.

Chord progressions

I wanted this to be a real campfire strumalong of a song, so I went with some classic progressions in D. The verse progression (G, D/F#, Em, D) was straight from Van Morrison’s Caravan (the Last Waltz version with The Band, obviously ;o).

The bridge (D/F#, G, A, D/F#) was a slight variation on the Alanis Morissette Ironic chords with the classic guitar trick of holding the same notes on the top two strings and changing the bass note. I like a bridge that teases you with inversions, never quite hitting the root of chord I, so when the chorus kicks in you get a real sense of return. If I had used a straight D chord at the end of the bridge progression you would get the feeling that it was complete without another chorus, and that’s not good. A bridge’s only harmonic function is to make you ache for the chorus.

The only harmonic surprise in the chorus is the F#7 chord on “back around” (lifted from Ben Folds – think Tom and Mary) that gives the section a bit of character that it might otherwise have lacked.

Melody

The melody is quite simply built around the chord notes, but it has a couple of good hooks: the title line, and the “sick and tired” line, which I used as a piano hook to tie it all together. My favourite thing about the melody is the rhythm. It sings really easily, and I spent ages getting all the lines to scan perfectly. Sometimes that means ditching great ideas because their syllables just don’t fit. But you end up with a song that sounds familiar, catchy and easy to play along to. Beautiful campfire fodder.

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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…

This is number 1 of a series of 11 articles, each one based on a song from This Is Not An Album.

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Old is the new new.

Deep down you love what you already know. However much people seek out new experiences, new people, and new places, they are still searching within a set defined by their previous experiences and relationships. A novel experience is exciting and interesting when there’s a part of it that you recognise and a part that has changed.

I find the same listening to new music. It’s very difficult to get into something new until it’s become a little familiar. That’s why I don’t often get excited about a new album until the second or third listen. Once my brain starts to fire off the happy sparks of recognition, I start to get excited by the stuff that I haven’t heard before. Of course, if an album sounds like one I already know it’s easy. I’ll always like a new Little Feat album.

Writing the song

In the summer I was visiting Greg, a friend who had moved from Oxford to Manchester and been living there for a couple of years. As I waited for him on the benches in front of the train station, I was thinking about how the first thing you do when you move to a new place is find the places that feel like home. When I lived in London I found a local pub that was exactly like the pubs in Oxford I knew so well.

I scribbled down a couple of verse ideas and spent the afternoon with Greg. He showed me his favourite places in Manchester, and I instantly liked them too. They were almost exactly like the places we used to hang out over ten years ago.

Close enough for jazz

During the 50/90 Challenge I had some pretty strict rules about the time I took to write and record songs. I had this one mostly finished when I got home, so I spent an hour or so tidying it up and finding a good middle 8. Then I ran up to the barn and grabbed a guitar.

In the 50/90 I always wrote the lyrics first (it’s usually more efficient – you avoid the drawn out jamming process), so I didn’t yet have any music. The chorus lyrics suggested a strong melody, so I used that. I probably spent about half an hour trying different verse progressions, and figuring out that it wasn’t going to work in 6/8. Two or three takes in front of a couple of microphones straight into ProTools, and it was mixed, bounced and uploaded in time for tea.

In my head, this song sounds like a Bryan Adams anthem in the chorus, an Elliott Smith tune in the verses, and Bon Jovi in the middle 8. Sometimes it’s a good idea to keep the recording basic. ;o)