Songwriting: Waht is it Made?

I find it pretty easy to make a song (not necessarily a good one, of course !)
The melodies/harmonies and arrangements ideas always come very naturally and quickly and as for the lyrics, I have never cared much for the meaning... I mostly try to find words and ideas that sound good or are catchy. Actually, most of the times I tried to make something meaningful, it ended up embarrassingly corny !
I used to be able to finish a song within a couple of days of rush (from the first idea/inspiration to the "final" home recording) but nowadays a bit less, mainly because I lack motivation (I used to have a band + share songs online and with friends which made it exciting to have new material). So now I have many demos and sketches at various stages that might never become songs.
To me, one of the best feelings in the world is when you get to the point where something clicks during the recording process and the song becomes the most exhilarating thing ever (after/before becoming the worst shit at another step of the process !)
My approach of songwriting is more related to the work of a "craftsman" than the work of an "artist".

This thread actually made me realize that I had in fact finished a song that I kind of like -- I had the melody and guitar part for a long time and a lyrical germ, but I completely forgot that one night in the wee hours I had quickly tapped out the rest of the lyrics on an iphone note and then gone back to sleep. I think I like it well enough. If I can get a chance to record it maybe I'll post it.

FWIW this one started as just sort of an image and words that sounded good to me, and I didn't know what it was about, but then I wound up creating a story from it.

<stuffy music guy voice>
Of all the chord progressions/melodic/harmonic ideas I've come up with that I've liked and recorded, I've only put words to exactly one of them. Never recorded the song with the words; though I have recorded it in a few different variations. Mainly because I have a terrible singing voice and no microphone (or the desire to get one).

Mostly I just like making instrumental music because it allows me to convey something, but it can evoke something entirely different for the listener. . .
</stuffy music guy voice)

. . .who am I kidding? No one actually listens to my music, besides me.

Just sayin: there are easy ways to change that, Austin.

disagree with this! first of all, it's ageist and secondly i think older people have a lot of insights that teenagers don't have

I think I meant it to be ageist against young people who really believe they have Something to Say in a Song but either way I agree it's my usual offhand dismissiveness that nobody should pay attention to really (see what I did there)

when I was younger and stupider I used to delude myself into thinking that I was writing only for myself and didn't care what other people thought or how they might take my songs but as I've gotten older (and hopefully wiser) I've come to realize how critical it is to have some kind of audience in mind, even if it's totally imaginary and hypothetical, because it provides a framework, sometimes an unconscious one, that can guide you. Even back at the beginning I was doing this, I just didn't want to admit it.

Too $hort said in some interview once that every time he sits down to write something, he does it with a single fan in mind - the archetypal Too $hort fan. He has this vision of what that person's like and what they want from a song, and then he focuses in on delivering that, regardless of what type of song it is. And if it checks those boxes, then he knows he's done his job right.

This kinda gets around questions of "what do I have to say", "is it worth saying", "is this any good", etc. cuz it gives you a goal to shoot for, a target, it clarifies things.

Hmm yeah that's a pretty good insight from Too $hort. Maybe I will mess around with writing for different kinds of ideal audience members. Sometimes I used to think about specific friends and their musical taste, but that wound up being a hindrance because I would get too caught up in worrying about their judgment, and also it felt "inauthentic" to do it that way. I probably need to drop the latter concern.

Sometimes I get obsessed with certain specific "confessional" songwriters and I forget that even confessional songwriters have a persona and aren't just spilling straight from the heart.

also spilling from the heart should only be done if one wants to spill. i have personally never wanted to do that. first and foremost, being emotionally "bare" and "raw" with words about my own experience doesn't appeal to me and even if it did, too dangerous. no thanks.

i like the iggy pop method of not using more than 25 words or whatever

I relate to your posts ITT LL

yeah, songwriting is a dialogue between two imaginary parties - the singer and the listener - you have to imagine both and then the song is what connects the two.

xp

also spilling from the heart should only be done if one wants to spill.

yeah well "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

like, if you take the trad "confessional" route and write a bunch of very literal lyrics from personal experience, the thing that is inevitably most clearly conveyed is not the actual subject matter of a given song but the fact that the performer has bought into overwrought ideas about "authenticity" and is hopelessly self-absorbed.

cuz what is the role of the listener in that scenario, what can they bring to the table besides just being a bludgeoned recipient or worshipful acolyte? it limits the ways the listener can relate to the song, place themselves in it, or find something inscrutable to ponder over, it's a bad dynamic.

depends on who you are. best not to get worked up about that stuff imo. if you want to share, share. if you don't, write about what you want to write about. that's the grant hart way and it's good enough for me.

I have been sort of obsessed with Adrianne Lenker/Big Thief in the last few days, and she is very much in the raw, confessional style, but it's clear that (1) many of her chosen experiences are highly relatable and (2) some of her songs really serve a purpose for the audience beyond just telling a story

I can't help it LL, I think about this stuff a lot! like, all the time.

yeah i mean it's fine -- but overthinking it for me leads to madness and a fully stifled spirit. i guess my ideal audience is myself. when i make music or try to compose a tune, it's because i like it and i don't hear it anywhere else. like if i don't make it, it won't exist. if i went to a show and saw someone perform it, i would enjoy it. beyond that? whatever.

I think the other danger of the overly literal confessional mode is that it carries a lot of personal risk. in general, other people don't like/appreciate being written about, it opens up a whole other emotional minefield and you have to commit yourself to basically using people and treating them as creative fodder rather than as, y'know, actual real people.

xp

violating other people's privacy without their consent is never cool

Well you can be "confessional" in style without being literal, change enough details and names etc. I have no idea if the people in the Big Thief songs I'm thinking of are real individuals, amalgams, etc.

that's the art part i think!

Well you can be "confessional" in style without being literal, change enough details and names etc

how far do you have to go with this before it's no longer "confessional"?

just spitballin'... seems like by nature a "confessional" song requires the narrator to be conflated with the singer, the POV has to come across as being the singer's own, there's gotta be an "I" at the lyrical center, and that "I" has to line up with what the audience knows about the singer (gender, age, ethnicity, etc.) And then from there the other details, characters, events revolve around that. But how far removed from real-life can those other elements get before a song is no longer "confessional" and is instead wholly fictional? I mean usually there's some mixture of the two and the audience has no real way of knowing which is which, and that ambiguity tends to be where a lot of the most interesting stuff happens.

Just sayin: there are easy ways to change that, Austin.

I've posted a song here and there on ilx from time to time. But, as opposed to most people in this topic, I accepted years ago and have been okay with the fact that I make music almost exclusively for myself. Even when I'm inspired to write about a specific event or person, I only really go on what I think sounds good. It may be tacky, but I'm the most played artist in my iTunes library.

That being said, for some reason, I do post my music on bandcamp.

sure sounds like Nevada!

(also Eno-era U2 if there were no drums, bass or Bono)

Nah, always been more Vini Reilly than Dave Evans.

Bringing things back to Man Alive's original post, I believe there are as many songwriting styles as there are songwriters. Likewise, there are as many types of listeners as there are types of songwriting.

I agree and disagree with bits and pieces of what a few people have said here (too many different people and too many things, so I won't point them out). I fear sounding uninteresting and obvious, but I think this should be said and put aside first: the most basic way to approach writing a song that you want to have the most mass appeal (i.e., a pop song) is probably to arrange predictable chord progressions (that sound "natural," or the most commonly used chord progressions) with parts that resolve very predictably, so not using a lot of fancy or harmonically complex chords.

The reason I state the obvious is because it sets the context for a question I think is important, and that I've not seen directly asked in this thread yet, and it's "What is a good song?" I sense people are referring to a "good" or "ideal" song when reading posts. But isn't chasing after writing a good song like chasing after a unicorn, and correct me if I'm wrong Man Alive, but it seems like you are preoccupied with writing a "good" song? If I'm wrong, I apologize. Assuming you are, though, I think this is the wrong track to go down. Most people have heard enough types of musics and our collective conscience probably already stores enough songs from all periods of music to divide what has been commercially successful and what hasn't. "Good" meaning appealing to a particular mass of people is there in the annals of music history. Create a mock-up of a song based on another popular song and transpose or write it in a different scale/key, I suppose. But this isn't interesting, is it? So what is really being asked? I think the question is what kind of song do you want to write? Telling someone how or what things to consider too narrowly is probably the most creatively stifling thing you can do.

Part of becoming a person who plays an instrument is digging through yourself's creative side and seeing what comes out. That's probably what you should write at the moment of composing. The notion that something you write will have mass appeal or will be liked by a particular group you predict is kind of useless, right?

I don't understand the concept of "not writing for oneself." I mean, the composer is not some metaphysical entity existing outside of this world. Unfortunately, the composer also belongs to a particular group, even if he hops from clique to musical clique. This idea of imagining writing for a non-self is an exercise of detachment from the composition, surely. It's a way to get passed all your emotions and preconceived notions and be comfortable with continuing to write a piece from end to finish. If you can do this without having to write for the non-self, I don't see what the problem is. But then again looking at a brightly lit mirror can be a harrowing experience. Which is why people are so shocked with their recorded voice. I know I have written songs and months later, I have played it to someone, and it has sounded so poppy that it frightened me how I thought at the time of composing it that it wasn't that generic sounding. My songs also sound different to my ear when I play a recording of them for people in the same room as I, which is always a weird experience. It doesn't happen as often anymore.

So, I write songs in a very mathematical way. In fact, some well-meaning people tell me I'm so creative after listening to my music, but I'm not, really. Music is just numbers to me, which took me a while to understand this is just how I remove just enough of myself from the song to continue writing a song. The song is still written for myself. I'm sure a few people like it. I'm pretty sure millions hate it. I've never been sure what is a "good" lyrical line, only what was a terrible one. Rather, I know what I don't want my songs to be. I just don't know what they want them to be. But I still manage to write songs this way.

The best for me has been to try writing as many types of songs as possible, then write whatever you feel or whatever idea you want to explore, adding enough components to keep you interested.

Weirdly enough, this concept of not knowing what good is has led me to liking what a lot of my friends consider to be corny songs, by the way. But I'm too old to care about those things.

I should mention that writing and performing with other people is a completely different beast, but as someone above said, when things click in a song, especially when everyone clicks in a band, this is just probably one of very few very miraculous things I've ever experienced.

arrange predictable chord progressions (that sound "natural," or the most commonly used chord progressions) with parts that resolve very predictably, so not using a lot of fancy or harmonically complex chords

Okay but this also describes a great many songs that most of us would agree are awesome. It's not just pop, or calculated for "mass appeal." Plenty of actively good songs are three- and four-chord "predictable" progressions.

I agree that all writing is "writing for oneself," in that you want to be reasonably pleased by what you've come up with, even if you're never quite satisfied that you've reached some illusory perfect pinnacle.

Yes. "Pop" is such a difficult word. The parts in my post where I talk about pop I probably did not take enough time to craft well enough or articulate what I meant properly. I sound like I'm against it or that it's a negative, but I don't actually believe this.

I know my take on this thread's topic is pretty personal and out there, though.

just for example, this morning I tried the "common chord progression" approach. I actually got a bite pretty quickly, a progression I liked but that still sounded "simple" and a bit of vocal melody, a few lines that set a scene/story, but then suddenly I found it going in a direction I didn't like, the character annoyed me, it was a second person song to a woman and the stuff the character was saying seemed slightly creepy or stalkerish. Maybe I should just run with it anyway and see where it goes, but that's an example of the kind of roadblock I tend to hit.

if you've never written much of anything before, songs or stories or whatever, and you're trying to jump immediately into a deep but relatable confessional or a complex shaded narrative, it's going to be ... difficult. i would recommend trying to keep things simple to start. a couple of verses and a chorus. don't worry too much about it meaning anything super important. maybe just an observation or a scenario or even nonsense that sounds good. try writing lyrics before writing music and stockpiling them so when you have a musical idea you can see if you have something prepared that fits. i mean, if that doesn't sound fulfilling to you, feel free to ignore me, but it feels like you're setting the bar way too high for yourself.

try writing lyrics before writing music and stockpiling them so when you have a musical idea you can see if you have something prepared that fits

^^^ ime every good songwriter does this

there's something to be said for writing something that can mean different things to different people, depending on how they look at it, instead of being really didactic about "this is my song and this is what it's about"

Joni Mitchell: “[Bob] Dylan said to me at one point that he, you know, he couldn’t write anymore, and I said, “Oh, what about this and what about that?” And he said, “Oh, the box wrote it.” I said, “What do you mean ‘the box’?” He said, “I write down things from movies and things I’ve heard people say and I throw them in the box.” I said, “I don’t care where you got your bits and pieces; you still put them all together.”

i don't think there's a right way to do any of this. music before lyrics is fine, lyrics before music is fine. this is just advice intended to reset your brain and approach from a different perspective.

i definitely have written several songs that are just describing the plots or ideas of movies or books that i have enjoyed recently

writing a bunch of bad and embarrassing songs is part of the process

yeah good stories can come from anywhere

xp

I wrote a couple songs where I liked the music and just sang words that fit into those bars nicely. The words themselves had no real relationship to one another. It was more of a free association thing, but when I had finished, I could definitely see how a stranger could construct some sort of meaning out of it.

I'm sure there are examples of musicians who did this, I just can't think of any at the moment.

Eno

Good call!

In terms of ideas for a cohesive narrative, I usually rely on books and movies to inspire me to write something.

I think Doug Martsch claimed that that was his approach to lyric writing.

Karl Hyde said somewhere he uses pieces of overheard conversation. Lyrics as collage is what I was sort of talking about up thread

i definitely have written several songs that are just describing the plots or ideas of movies or books that i have enjoyed recently

Ah yes, the Iron Maiden method

Man Alive's first post is basically where i'm at. i have a million couplets and notes. a million little hooks with melodies recorded. i just cannot put it all together. my only luck has been when i set out to write in a particular song form, typically country, where there are rules and cliches to play with. it's when i get into this vague territory where anything can go that i freeze. i don't really want to write country songs, though.

otoh, after 7 (!!) years of being a tired dad, i feel the juice again. i finally have a space to be loud in, so thankful to be back at it.