rock'n'rill

Songwriting 101

Hi guys,

I’ve recently been approached by a German music mag about possibly writing a bi-monthly column on songwriting, maybe as a workshop kind of thing. Not sure yet whether this is actually going to happen but I thought about what kind of advice I could give, what kinds of things I could talk about.

And I remembered one song I wrote in about ’98 – it appeared on my ’99 album The Devil & The Open Road – that I learned a lot from. Not that I’d want to talk about my own songs all the time and it’s not like this particular song is mindblowingly amazing but I did learn a few crucial things while writing it. So maybe it would be interesting to share them.

The song started with an opening line that just fell out of my mouth (straight from the subconscious, one may assume):

Sally holds a grudge against the world
but the she ain’t to blame for all the anger and the hurt

Oh, gee, why does she hold a grudge, what’s with the hurt & anger? It’s not like I knew. But I got an idea and the next two lines explained a little something.

She’s got a baby boy and she’s still in her teens
Charlie senior split and has never since been seen

I liked the information, I thought it gave us a sense of Sally and her grudge and the reasons for it BUT it was very heavy-handed. The information is dished out in a much too literal way and the part about Charlie struck me as very uncomfortable English.
I think I went on with the song but I know that these lines bothered me for a long long time. There’s a lot of information in those lines and it took me ages to come up with a better way of providing this information.
Here’s what I came up with to replace these awkward lines:

Things ain’t been the same since Charlie split
and she dropped out of school to take care of the kid

And I must say, I still think that’s ten times better. It’s much more conversational and it has a cumulative effect: her boyfriend split (big deal), she dropped out of school (hm, not good), AND she’s got a baby? (Wow)
See what I mean? It tells you the exact same things that the original lines told you but in a much more interesting way. I love that the kid is almost an afterthought. Obviously, it’s the main thing but it sort of just gets mentioned on the side. And Sally’s age is just there between the lines (“dropped out of school”) but doesn’t get hammered home.

Raymond Chandler does that a lot (not that I’m comparing myself to him). He will often convey crucial information just as an afterthought. Like he’ll describe a conversation between two adversaries over many pages and just end with something like “I left him with his mouth open and a bullet from my .38 in his cranium” (I made that up but … you see what I mean, I hope). He won’t use the words “dead”, “murder”, “killing” or anything.
Chandler’s fabulous that way and I think it’s a wonderful way of writing. So, what I learned might seem obvious - “if you can, convey information in an artful, poetic, conversational manner – it’s much more interesting than just iterating facts” – but you would be surprised how difficult it is to convey the worth of that little nugget of wisdom. I have quite a few German friends who often ask me to check their lyrics for “mistakes”. It’s not as simple as that. The original two lines weren’t wrong, strictly speaking. But they simply weren’t good lines. How do you get a good line? Well, it sure takes a lot of thinking.
Mary Gauthier once said in an interview that she sometimes spends weeks agonizing over the right word or turn of phrase. And her songs show that it’s worth it.

This would be enough for a magazine column, I suppose but I learned another trick during the writing of this song. And, yes, I’ll share.
Here’s verse 1 & 2 of the song plus the choruses:

Sally holds a grudge against the world
But she ain’t to blame for all the anger and the hurt
Things ain’t been the same since Charlie split
And she dropped out of school to take care of the kid
Life ain’t always fair and now she knows
She’s been crying but she hopes it doesn’t show

Sally’s stuck in Rainville,
yeah, she’s stuck in Rainville
And this ain’t what she needs, you can tell her what you will
But Sally’s stuck in Rainville

This town, it don’t do nothing but make her sad
Home of all the highschool sweethearts that she ever had
They all seem to look down on her now
And they all remind her of her Charlie-boy somehow
Life is cold and hard and that ain’t right
She’s got no-one to hold onto in the night

She’s gotta get out of Rainville
Gotta get out of Rainville
For this ain’t what she wants, by now she’s had her fill
She’s gotta get out of Rainville

So, yeah, the song is called “Rainville”. I thought it was an original idea at the time. I was young.

But, anyway, there I was and I had no clue what would happen next. Looks like Sally’s gonna leave ol’ Rainville for greener pastures, la-dee-da. Very predictable at this point, isn’t it? How to make this interesting and less predictable without changing the entire thrust of the song?
Here’s where I had the second not-so-bad idea during the writing of this song (I so wish there’d been more): I switched the focus from Sally to ol’ Charlie.
The third verse and last chorus:

Charlie, he’s been drifting along
He’s had lotsa time to think about his doggone life and think about his son
And he remembers what it feels like to not have a Daddy’s hand to hold on to
And he figures that maybe Sally’s missing him too
So now he’s going back but Sally’s gone
She packed up all her things and she moved on

She’s gotten out of Rainville
Gotten out of Rainville
Where the wind is blowing cold and Charlie feels a chill
For now he’s stuck in Rainville

I admit that’s a mouthful to squeeze into those lines in the 3rd verse but the general idea to look at Charlie at this point is not a bad one. You thought the song was gonna run on this very foreseeable track – Sally’s a tough Mama now, Charlie’s an a*hole – and then you learn something new.
This is something I’ve done in a number of songs, change the point of view in the third verse or reveal a little something in the final verse that’ll shed a different light on everything that come before (cf: Trouble With The Law, The Price You Pay For Sin).
I once read a book on songwriting with this piece of advice that seems so obvious but doesn’t always get the attention it deserves.

“Every line (or at least every verse) needs to move the song forward.
Ergo: There needs to be a reason for every line/every verse. If it only repeats what’s been said before, it’s not necessary to the song.”

Even though this is my paraphrase (possibly my interpretation), this is one of the most useful things I’ve ever learned from one of those songwriting books (I never bought one but I sure spent a lot of time at Book People in Austin reading them).
If you keep this advice in mind, it’s funny how often you encounter songs in which the second verse is only a paraphrase of the first with not one new idea or concept.

Side note: The only one I know who’ll get away with that is Dylan. And that’s because he not only has two or three verses but often six, seven or eight. I mean, look at “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, the verses are not that different from each other. I asked my friend Doug Hoekstra how Dylan gets away with it and he had a great answer. “It’s like he looks at the subject matter from every possible angle, twisting and turning his topic this way and that way and describing it and by the end you get a full picture.” I think Doug’s right about that. But, please folks, remember this is Bob Dylan we’re talking about. It can’t be done by mere mortals.

As for my song “Rainville” – I learned a lot from writing it, I’ve learned some more in the meantime. From today’s perspective the “Rainville” metaphor isn’t as original or powerful as I thought back then, the second verse is plenty “meh” but the song’s main problem is its melodic weakness in the chorus. It has this nice little guitar intro, a pleasant enough verse, pre-chorus and then the chorus lets the listener down, melodically. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all.

Maybe you’ll enjoy it anyway. Here’s a version I recorded in my kitchen this morning. I stumbled over a line in the last chorus, please bear with me.

Rainville by markusrill

I hope this post gave you something to chew on. Obviously, for a magazine column, I’d not ramble on as long and I’d not be using my own songs as examples all the time. But, hey, this is my blog, what else am I gonna use over here?

Would love to hear from you!
Markus

26 July 2010 ·

rock'n'rill

Songwriting 101

rock'n'rill

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