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Write A Song

Music got the better of me from an early age, I’m not going to pretend to recall every childhood memory, but I have the utmost confidence in recalling that it played a huge part in my early years.  Whether it was The Doors resounding around my head at home, or the traditional Portuguese Fado heard at my grandparents, or the memory as a four year old of being driven around by my grandfather head banging to the opening bars of ‘Come On Eileen’ (naivety can bring forgiveness), the point is I have always embraced some form of music throughout my life. 

As soon as I hit my teens I took a bigger and somewhat more analytical interest in how music was made.  The process of writing a melody and finding the right lyrics to go with that melody, and then this in turn made me wonder about what happens when the situation is reversed?  How do you entwine a great set of lyrics that may mean nothing to anyone else but the person who wrote them, with a melody to do them justice?  I had always listened to various types of music, but my teens were what I would refer to as my formative music years, what I mean by this is that this was around the same time that bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Nirvana were popping up, bands that for want of a better word blew me away.  But for me, it was Pearl Jam who stood out, their melodies and lyrics really struck a chord with me. 

I think if you look back through time and reminisce about the song that you had your first dance to, or the song that was playing when you had your first kiss, or even more poignantly the song that was playing the first time you experienced a bigger emotion like loss, then you’ll love that song for your own reasons but there was something in that song that made you love it, it wasn’t just coincidence.  The lyrics may have hit home with the way you felt at the time, the melody may have mirrored your mood and drawn some parallel to the way you were feeling at the time.  Pearl Jam did this and a little bit more for me, as a kid no older than 14.  It didn’t matter to me that I didn’t fully understand the subject matter of every song on ‘Ten’, it didn’t matter to me that I was hopeless on the guitar and couldn’t replicate those songs in any way, shape or form, what mattered to me was that for every problem I thought I had at that age, as soon as I pressed play on my cassette deck or CD player, I felt synonymous with every second of that song. 

My aforementioned failed career at becoming a guitar hero behind me, I began jotting down thoughts I was having.  I’m not going to go through details of what was going on in my life at the time, but needless to say it wasn’t the happiest period of my life so I thought I had a lot to say.  For me, it was a way of expressing how I was feeling without actually talking about it. So I decided to attack a piece of A4 paper and put my world to rights.  My bedroom became an oversized waste-paper bin as I spent the next few years writing words that had some relevance to events occurring in my life at the time and in turn this got me thinking that all the musicians that I was allowing into my head, heart and soul must have written songs in the exact same way. 

So in April 1994, when I was lying on my bed listening to the radio, thinking about the fact that in a couple of weeks time I would be seeing Nirvana in concert for the first time, the news came through that Kurt Cobain had taken his life.  It was sad, it was a tragedy, but above all it was not surprising.  I’m no professor in psychology or lyricism for that matter, but if you listen to that last Nirvana album and really replay some of those words in your head they are unhappy songs, but nonetheless written how a song should be written, from your own thoughts and feelings at that moment in time, projecting your inner feelings outwards and capturing time.

For me, the key to writing a decent song, whether it sells to children, old age pensioners or whatever demographic you want to aim at, is that the piece of paper in front of you with the lyrics on it mean something to you.  Over the years, I have written about a lot of things, but the things that give me the inspiration to write in the first place are personal reflections of my life or events that occur in my life.  A relationship break-up, someone that is no longer in my life for one reason or another, the start of a new relationship or just a great time or night out or moment I had with a friend or loved one that I want to document. There’s no structure or wrong or right way to write lyrics, just write them and different people will take what they want from reading them.  This will also come across if you write for other people.  They can only produce a melody based on what they took from the words they read. 

I remember when I started writing for other people, I sent my lyrics to a guy advertising in the music press.  I sent him what I believed to be a collection of my best work, because they were lyrics I had written in the space of a couple of days where something had happened in my personal life that knocked me for six and in my own humble opinion I wrote some top lyrics.  A week or so later I received a package in the post which included a contract and a tape with a recording of one of the songs I had sent him on it.  The song I had sent him was about the last days of a relationship and how I was sure I was not to blame for one iota of the breakdown in communication and the loss of love.  What I got on this tape was an upbeat melody that to me portrayed a “plenty more fish” attitude, now there’s nothing wrong with that, it just wasn’t the interpretation I wanted for that particular song.  This is the reason why my career in the music industry took so long to get off the ground. Not being a musician I was unable to hear my lyrics the way I believed they where meant to sound, I was too opinionated for my own good and always found it hard releasing my lyrics to a world which was not my own! 

The point here is that for those of you who can write and want to write as a career, once you hand your lyrics over to someone else, prepare yourself for the fact that it’s not always going to sound like it did in your head.  The feeling you had when you wrote that song about losing your virginity may well be an acoustic number in your head, but it may be interpreted as a floor filler in a down and out club with beer stained seats and a floor that has seen less cleaning fluid than a public toilet at a music festival.  There is no correct way or step by step guide to writing the perfect lyric.  Write down what you have in your thoughts and don’t worry about arranging them in a particular order, don’t even worry about any sort of rhyming process.  As long as you can apply some words to paper that have relevance to you and have some sort of flow to them you’re off to a good start.  A song doesn’t have to have a chorus, in your head it might be a poem but to someone who can write music, they can arrange it so one of the verses you have becomes a chorus.  There’s no limit to the number of words you write down, as long as it tells a story, and the best part is, your story doesn’t have to have an ending. 

There are albums out there that are based on one subject matter, so you can look at it as chapters to a story.  There’s a rumour out there that when U2 were in the process of writing Achtung Baby, Bono had absolutely no words, but The Edge was going through a painful break-up at the time and Bono wrote about that, and you can read it all in print or listen to the story unfold when you listen to that album. The beauty of music as I have previously stated, is that it means different things to different people and they get different things from the same pieces of music and the attitude to adopt when you write lyrics is that you shouldn’t be targeting an audience.  If you’re honest with yourself and write from the heart, and one person out of a thousand takes some sort of meaning from words you have written, I would say that’s a job well done. Not that you should look at it in terms of a job, look at it more as a way of expressing yourself, for those of you, like myself, who can’t always find the words to say verbally.

So, how do you get started? Well, I was on the train a few months back and was thinking about a situation I was going through at the time and I decided to get my mobile phone out and just wrote a series of random words into a draft text message - ok, this was more because I didn’t happen to have a pad or a pen about my person at the time, but the process was in place.  I had something to say and wanted to note it down before I forgot. So that’s my tip for you, write it down now, so what you feel at this moment in time can never be forgotten and that is the first step towards songwriting success.

Ernest Fiasco