Singing and Songwriting

 

The above is a song I wrote a few years back titled "Call Waiting". I think it is pretty good, I've gotten compliments throughout the years because of it, and that all makes me feel like I might have some modest success musically. If I could get to a place where I didn't mind the prospect of financial insecurity, where I could say 'to hell with my credit rating!" because I wasn't trying to get a job that demands rigorous economic discipline, I would dive headlong into the starving artist lifestyle and do my best to just rock out all the time. Actually, who am I kidding...I tend to fill the overwhelming majority of my time playing one instrument or another, probably to the detriment of other areas in my life. So I think maybe I'll stop making excuses and instead redouble my efforts with the band, Genre Zero, and also take a little more of a 'what am I doing today to move my musical aspirations further down the line?' approach - as opposed to just jamming out for hours at a time.

I tend to get compliments on my songwriting specifically, although more and more people seem to be impressed by my guitar playing and even (gasp!) my singing - gone, hopefully, are the days when I would get ran out of parties because of my shaky, overreaching voice. So about songwriting - what is that all about? Well, I can describe some of the mechanics that work for me:

Writing a straightforward pop song isn't that technical, although it can certainly take a lot of mental, emotional, and even spiritual work. I say spiritual because a lot of my best stuff seems to just come to me from the æther, although rarely all at once, so I have to practice being in touch with the great flow of life to keep my finger on the muse's pulse. This way I can be working on a song and when the missing pieces come to me, I'll be ready, and have a place to put them. I say it isn't that technical because most of the songs that I write, and many hugely famous hit songs through the ages, are just a few simple chords. Probably 40% of all 'popular' (i.e. not 'classical') music is constructed with 3 or 4 chords repeated in the same pattern, let's say Pattern V for verse, with another 3 or 4 chords or the same verse chords in a different order as the Chorus (Pattern C). Am I making sense? Most songs on the radio are essentially just some variation of:

Verse

Chorus

Verse

Chorus

Even some of the more complicated songs will just have a few additions to this, maybe a Verse 1 and 2 part that are different progressions, and maybe a completely different Bridge section. Even a pretty busy song that I learned recently - "Your Song" by Elton John - is really just five different chord patterns:

Intro                         

V-1, V-2, V-3, V-4

Verse                         

V-1, V-2, V-3, V-4

V-1, V-2, V-3, V-4

Chorus                      

C-1, C-1, V-2, V-4

Verse                         

V-1, V-2, V-3, V-4

V-1, V-2, V-3, V-4

Chorus                      

C-1, C-1, V-2, V-4

Outro                       

V-2, V-4

Each individual pattern is made up of four chords, and most of this song is the four verse patterns, a total of 16 chords played for one measure each. This is similar to the construction of a "16-Bar Blues" song, although it would probably be the same pattern three times and then a different pattern known as the 'turnaround'. This 'turnaround pattern' resolves the song, and can lead into the chorus, another verse, or end the song. You'll notice in "Your Song" that the same chord pattern ends each verse, ends the chorus, and ends the song. The V-3 pattern, also present both verse and chorus, is a really pretty breakdown consisting of B-minor variations ([Bm] [Bm/A] [Bm/Ab] [G]) wherein the chorus Elton sings "...I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind, that I put down in words...".

So a pop song is music and lyrics. The music part, as shown, is relatively simple. The words can be more difficult, and finding the appropriate pairing of words to music can be more difficult still. Usually, I'll have the music pretty much down, and then either try to get words worked out, or maybe just hum or sing some nonsense to work out a vocal melody. I have been blessed enough, a handful of times, to come up with it all straight away. There is one song of mine, "Distance Fades", that arrived in my head one morning in Iraq. I knew the whole song at that moment - all of the lyrics, and exactly how the music should sound. Not the chord progressions, I couldn't necessarily just name the notes, but the complete idea. My parents shipped me a guitar which arrived a month or so later, and I immediately played this whole song: