Starting badly
I write bad music. I do. It's really awful. I
know some people sit down and amazing, original music just flows out of their
fingertips but, It doesn't happen that way for me. After I force myself to sit
down and actually write, after I've battled the demons of doubt and torn myself
away from the internets, I write bad music. I play listless things on the
guitar and hum listless melodies... all crap... all terrible... halfhearted
little things. I sound like a warbling frog with pitch issues. So I play my
half hearted same old same old chords and warble my frog voice over them with my
placer lyrics.... if you overheard me, you'd hear what sounded like a drunk
warbling frog singing complete nonsense.
And then, sometimes, a little glimmer of
a melody comes through, something that might not completely suck and I play it
some more. I try some variations on it. I record it on my phone. Sometimes if
I play it enough, I hate it. Then I just forget about it. I go through a bunch
of ideas like that. If I like the music but not the chords I try other melodies
and vice versa. I have a little rough nugget of an idea and I hack it down a
bit, trying to find the things I like and the things I don't. Then I start
trying to marry it concepts I have kicking around. I have a huge file called
"s-chick random thoughts" that I squirrel away all my song ideas in. I look
through there and see if one of those ideas fits and can replace my placer
lyrics. The placer lyrics themselves sometimes go on to be songs. When I wrote
"Get Up", I just had this placer lyric: "if I get up, I might fall back down
again" and it was the most ridiculous lyric but I wrote a song about it and it
made beautiful sense when it was done. So I try to fit concepts to melodies and
sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If I can shoehorn it in and it's not
too awkward, I record it on my phone again so I don't forget. Drew Ramsey has
told me about songs that India Arie recorded that started out with him singing
on his phone. If we robbed producers of their phones we might find rough
nuggets of great songs.
Then I eat lunch.
Or call the fencing guy or whatever. Just get away from it. If it sticks with
me, then I come back to it. I may venture to sing it for someone who may
convince me not to throw it away. I take my tiny seed of an idea and have
Tricia sing it. A lot of songs die right there as I discover that my idea was
greater in my head than in my reality. If it sounds good in Tricia's voice, I
start to fiddle with it some more. Having a guide vocal down gives me a roadmap
for the song. It's like a synopsis. At that point everything helps the song or
hurts it. I start to get everyone's input. Everyone starts to add their
talents to the mix and I get excited because it starts to sound like real music.
The girls weigh in on lyrics and melodies and harmonies and the guys play my
crappy parts better and add sections to the song now that we know where the song
is going. I listen to the song over and over and over. The things that are
wrong start to bug me. I change them and make everyone else help me find ways
to fix them. I smooth transitions, I tweak parts. I rough mix as we go and the
song starts to take shape.
Legend says
that when asked how he created the statue David out of a block of marble,
Michelangelo said "It was simple, I just chipped away everything that was not
David." And that is how I start to feel, that I am listening to the song over
and over and smoothing away the parts that are not David. I'm no Michelangelo,
but my creative process echoes his. My obsessive compulsive personality works
well for me here as repeated listenings show me what is annoying about the song.
It's like rubbing your fingers over wood to find the splinters you can't see. I
keep working towards what we call "the superfunk", which is the point where
everyone's head in the room must bob in time with the song. I have never
achieved "the superfunk" but you can see it in action. Put on a copy of "Jungle
Boogie" by Kool and the Gang or anything by James Brown or most Rage Against the
Machine songs and you will see heads bob, even those people not consciously
listening.
At this point, either we love
the song or we are very frustrated with a problem we can't solve. Sometimes we
just can't find a bridge that is as beautiful as the verse and chorus.
Sometimes the parts don't seem to fit the melody. We put it away and come back
to it later. If the song doesn't generate a strong reaction, it usually fades
away and we stop working on it. But when the problems are solved and it feels
right we get very excited and we love it. Then I take it to mix and hope that I
didn't create any weird frequency issues that will make Reid turn to me and say
"you meant it to sound broke and busted right?".
I always work with Reid because whenever
Reid is done, my music sounds like "a real record'. Then it gets mastered.
Then it goes out the public and we cross our fingers and watch sales. Then our
manager calls us with news that we have our new song in yet another movie. And
we celebrate like monkeys.
Then it starts
all over again.
I believe it was Gene
Simmons who said, that he writes 100 songs, out of those, he likes 10 which he
plays for other people. Out of those, they only like 1. So his ratio is 100 to
1. I understand that. Music does not flow from my fingers like lightning from
a God, rather music for me is born in the fields of labor where I turn over
rocks and rocks and rocks looking for coal that can be forged into diamonds.
When you hear one of my songs on TV, it is the product of many creative people
and much time and sweat and tears. I write bad music, I really do, but if you
write enough bad songs, magic is bound to
happen.
Don't wait to be good, start now.
Give yourself permission to make bad art.
Posted: Mon - August 27, 2007 at 11:55 AM
