songwriting thoughts a) acoustics, sentiments & syllables
Spent today mostly writing a song with the word ‘surreptitious’ in it. The ‘surreptitious’ part wasn’t on purpose of course, just one of those delightful word-surprises that occasionally flies off the tongue – something to do with the combination of sentiment and syllables. I do love it. After a nice long walk this morning and a slow couple of hours with my guitar, I stopped for lunch, and while I was partaking I was playing the song back in my head, only I was accompanied by a pounding piano rather than a guitar; so I switched to the upright in our dining room for the afternoon, and Bob’s your uncle (actually, my father), the song came together.
One of my favorite things about songwriting is experiencing the inter-play between music, ideas and lyrics and how dependent they are on one anothers’ development, at least from my songwriting process point of view. I knew when I began the song a couple of weeks ago where it was coming from emotionally, but after the initial step forward, I got stuck, and it wasn’t until I moved to the piano that I was able to feel the rest of what needed to be felt in order to access the appropriate words and overall direction in fact. The darker side of the story I was trying to express was pushed forward to my attention, through an uncanny combination of an almost ‘accidental’ lyric, and sudden move of melody, which gave the song the added gravity that was there all along but which had been eluding me for days. A bit strange perhaps, but true, and actually, rather beautiful.
I guess there’s a vote for experimenting more with sounds – I don’t have any funky instruments at the moment but perhaps there are other more subtle ways of getting acoustically creative that can help draw out feelings I wasn’t particularly aware that I had, or words, such as ‘surreptitious’, which I wouldn’t have expected to feel so at home in a song.
