Andrew Bird Shows Me How To Write the Words

This morning I sat down at my writing table with a notebook and my ukulele and a cup of coffee, and began strumming and humming a tune I’ve been working at for about a week now. I had the idea not long ago of taking mandolin chord shapes and playing them on the ukulele (which is tuned very differently from the mandolin) in order to hear what kind of strange and complex harmonies and dissonances might result, and from those experiments I derived at least one very interesting chord sequence. (My listening, of late, to Eddie Vedder’s ukulele album has been very inspiring too.) A day or two later, sitting on a public staircase in an out-of-the-way corner of Bernal Heights, I developed a melody for it, which means I have now arrived at my old creative wall: writing the damn words.

After twenty minutes of making no headway (not enough effort, of course, but by now I’m very frustrated with the difficulty I have matching words to melody) I decided to Google “songwriting creative process” and see how other artists approach the different components of songwriting. And that search immediately reminded me of a great blog that the New York Times published back in 2008 and 2009, “Measure for Measure,” about the songwriting process.

Andrew Bird was one of the contributors — at the time he was working on Noble Beast — and he wrote these words in his first post from 2008, which I found very encouraging:

I’ve got 11 songs mostly written and several dozen distinct melodies. I never worry about the melodies drying up. Since I can remember, I’ve had melodies in my head. I chew my food to them.

Almost every breath contains some fragments of an escaping melody. If I shape my lips so as to whistle, my breath will take on a musical shape like sonic vapor. Words are much trickier. I would forgo words altogether if I didn’t love singing them so much. My choice of words and my voice betray so much and that’s what’s so terrifying and attractive about it.

And a little bit later he writes something I can relate to equally well:

I’m kind of the opposite of the confessional singer-songwriter who fills notebooks full of poetry and intones them over a bed of chords. Meaning or “the truth that’s in my heart” usually reveals itself well after the record is released. I’m often surprised that the things I care about actually end up in my songs. Until then I’m mostly concerned with shape, tone and texture. I’m really an instrumentalist who sings words and if you care to pay attention you might enjoy them.

The very interesting thing to me is the way Bird gets started writing the lyrics to “Oh No,” which is the subject of his post: on an airplane ride somewhere he got stuck behind a child who just wants to get off the plane, and something about the kid’s wail reminds him of the hitherto un-worded tune. When he sits down to put some words to the tune, he imagines himself in the child’s place, and begins accessing his own memories and dreams from when he was that age. And from there, the associative process takes over, and before long he has a workable draft.

All this very closely reflects my own experience with the process, so this is perhaps the best way for me to open it up in the future. Like Bird, I’m basically an instrumentalist. For me, coming up with interesting and satisfying chord progressions and melodies is extremely easy — put a stringed instrument in my hands, or seat me in front of a piano, and within about 10 minutes I’ll be playing something coherent that I’ve never played before. It’s not always all that interesting, but if it is any good I will clean up the rough edges a bit and make an immediate field recording so I don’t forget the basic idea. Melodies come after the harmonies, always — never on their own without any bidding; it’s as if I need the harmonic & rhythmic framework to anchor my melodic imagination.

But the words are an intense struggle every time, which is kind of ironic for a guy who calls himself a writer too. Since I began this project almost a year ago, I’ve completed or mostly written ten songs. Every one of them is fully formed in the sense that I have a chord sequence and melody that is set, but only four of them have finished lyrics (including the two that I have posted videos of here). Some are more successful than others, but in each of those four cases, I began with a certain scenario in mind, a picture from my life or imagination that the song kind of reminded me of, for no obvious reason, and I just started writing from there. A draft or three later, I had taken out the too-obvious or too-explanatory lines, and had come up with something mostly satisfactory, though it usually had changed quite a bit in the writing.

For example, for some reason the simple piano chords for the song I would call “Under Different Skies,” caused this picture in my head of someone being left behind on a train platform, as seen from the train pulling away. Sort of a clichéd cinematic moment, sure, but it was dreamlike in that I was certain about various aspects of the story behind the image even though there was nothing in the image to suggest any of what I knew. It seemed like a remembered image. It seemed like the last time this person was seen by the viewer. It seemed like an affair that had ended right there, perhaps abruptly. And it also seemed, paradoxically, that the person on the platform was the one who had broken away from the affair, not the person in motion on the train.

And so I started trying out words around this theme, trying to evoke this elusive mysterious picture, and after many false starts and several drafts, eventually arrived at the following lyrics:

I’m at the familiar station
Where I bring all my questions
Like so many bags to be lost

Somewhere down those rusted rails
That’s where I lost you
To some other time and place

Those rails can carry me away
They can carry me far, far away
Past the station where I left you

Everything looks different
Under different skies
Where the stars are changed and all the whats are whys

Answers here are questions there,
That’s what I believe
But I hope somewhere you’ve found what you need.

Which, if I do say so myself, seems pretty okay even though I’m not terribly content with certain lines. And I have to admit, that my favorite line, “where the stars are changed,” came directly from thinking about Werner Herzog’s famous rant in Burden of Dreams, where he complains that “even the stars in the sky here are a mess” — in that moment Herzog had lost all his bearings in the universe, and it seemed to me that not recognizing the stars was a good shorthand for not knowing where you are anymore.

Well now I’ve spent half the morning writing a small essay instead of the lyrics for my latest ukulele tune, but at least I now have a plan as to how to proceed — be open to random images taking hold of my imagination, and keep walking around the city with my ukulele and a sketchbook. If I’m looking, maybe I’ll start matching the right images to the right tunes with a bit more regularity.

posted: 11 September 22
under: Open Folio