“The only war is the war against the imagination.”
—Diane di Prima
“Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager, stay eager.
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.” –Susan Sontag
——
“Every hundred feet the world changes.” –Roberto Belano
{photo below, backstage at McGonnigal’s Mucky Duck, in Houston, by David Ensmiger}
1) ” WHOSE KID IS THAT?”
songs language must be at least that powerful.
2) development: something happens
3) experience of the concrete world
—–
“Negative Capability”
” I IS SOMEONE ELSE”
–from the second verse of “long, good time”
Sweet little flowers called snowdrops
in the backyard with the fresh mint leaves
A cherry tree with a rope to climb
& robins nests under the eaves
My band was playing in the basement
driving folks out of their minds
Mother called down from the top of the steps
“Boys, play that nice song about suicide”
-That’s a song about people in a place, and I’m trying to render it as vividly as I can. It can “live” in a song, and others can feel it and will bring their own experience to it.
Songs can be written so you can walk into any place in the country and sing them and people will “get it.”
Is songwriting an art, or a craft?
Either way, the words have a double meaning.
Art is many things, but one definition would be: Art is the sum-total of techniques we use to get people to care about something. By people, I not only mean an audience, but also ourselves.
There are a couple of levels to look at:
1) Formal & technical aspects, that is, structure, rhyme, melody, harmony, rhythm, harmony, & the uses of repetition.
2) Content, depth, meaning. “Only emotion endures.” Concrete vs. abstract language.
“I like music where something happens.” — A & R rep, 1985
The comments I make in a songwriting class don’t mean I “like” or “don’t like” : they are meant as “probes,” to stimulate the discussion.
“Now…well for one thing, the music, the
rhyming and rhythm, what I call the
mathematics of a song, are more second-
-nature to me. I used to have to go after a
song, seek it out. But now, instead of going
to it I stay where I am and let everything
disappear and the song rushes to me. Not
just the music, the words, too.”
–BD, 1965
the beatles: improvising
melody + lyrics
over chord changes
“it’s what you don’t play.”
Jack Lee used to say, that professional songwriters always have three songs: the one they just finished, the one they’re working on in the present, and the next one they’re going to write.
at some point I began to feel that whenever you had a problem in life, the best thing was to write your way through it.
(below; Blue Distance, from Flying Saucer Blues, Vanguard records, 2000)
singer/songwriter–mustn’t forget the “singer” part of the deal.
turn secrets into songs, then sing them for strangers. tell everybody you just make them up out of the blue.
These are all notes from a songwriting class I put together 10 years ago:
-make a list of your fifty favorite words, then write a page in your notebook, exploring each one. discuss them in terms of things, the sensual world–.
-ideas can be your friends. existentialism, dreams as a mirror of reality, economic justice, environmentalism, human rights, grass roots democracy, beatitude, the grotesque.
-seize on clarifying the ideas you are actually living by–your philosophy.
every word, every note, every beat is important.
-figure out who or what your biggest influences are. then figure out what about their work you would improve on if you could. then set to work at doing it.
-if you get stuck, move on.
— if you are stuck in your writing, just try to put down one honest line
learn all of your favorite songs, and sing’em.
“no ideas but in things”: “close to the nose”
“develop a friendly attitude towards your own thoughts and ideas.” –Ginsberg
-If you don’t get it right the first time, try again…do this as many times as you need.
I no longer try to teach anyone about songwriting. I realized that people just want to be heard.
William Blake–“Without unceasing Practice nothing can be accomplished
Art is Practice. Leave off Practice and you are Lost.”
William Burroughs: “Kerouac… he was a writer. That is, he wrote.”
William Carlos Williams: “It is in things that for the artist the power lies, not beyond them. Only where the eye hits does sight occur”
Andy Warhol : “You think too much. That’s ’cause there’s work you don’t want to do” –quoted in Lou Reed’s song Work, from Songs For Drella.
Leonard Cohen: On his relatively paltry recorded output and how he sets about the creative process, he is blithely dismissive of his talents. “Writing an album, it always feels like I am scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get the songs together,” he says. “I’ve never had the sense that I’ve had a multitude of choices. There is no sense of abundance – I’m just picking at what I have. It’s like what Yeats said about working in ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. I do get discouraged by the work.
“It is a mysterious process, it involves perseverance and perspiration and sometimes, by some grace, something stands out and invites you to elaborate or animate it. These are sacred mechanics and you have to be careful analysing them as you would never write a line again. If you looked too deeply into the process you’d end up in a state of paralysis.
“People ask about the imagery all the time but sometimes it’s enough to say that the imagery has its own validity.”
He does confess to a troubling kind of perfectionism. “I wrote 80 verses or something for Hallelujah .
That song was written over the space of four years and that’s my trouble – I can’t discard a verse. I have to work on it and polish it. I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it’s not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.”
Bob Dylan on Woody Guthrie: “You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live.”
Tom Waits: “We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.”
“Just the right phrase can go a long way.'” -Chris Rock
Invention: the finding of suitable topics. ‘a finding, a reaching into oneself to find what comes next.’
William Carlos Williams: “So most of my life has been lived in hell–a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspiration, when a poem such as this or that would appear. What would have happened in a world similarly lit by the imagination?”
Charles Baudelaire: “To use a language with superior knowledge and skill is to practice a kind of conjuring.”
Plato–“He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration, in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.”
Robert Graves–“Poetry is rooted in love and love in desire, and desire in hope of continued existence.” Also, “The poet must learn to think mythically as well as rationally.”
Hart Crane– “An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake.” –quoted by John Berryman
Bob Dylan–“I always try to turn a song on it’s head. Otherwise, I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time.”
“potential… of a single vibrant word’ to create a world, to release infinite energies”
“The nucleus of my solar system is ADVENTURE “
— Roberto Bolano
“Journey of the act of writing through zones not at
all favorable to the act of writing”
—Roberto Bolano
“push the dragon out of the way… & walk in!”
‘the void, charged with potential’
” It has to come naturally, you know…you’ve got to do it just like you talk & walk..”
—John Coltrane
“Every hundred feet the world changes.
—Roberto Bolano
“The only war is the war against the imagination.”
—Diane di Prima
“Imagination is nothing but the springing up of
reminiscences. And ingenuity, or invention is nothing
but the working over of what is remembered”
—Gaimbattista Vico
“The sound in your mind/ is the first sound that you could sing.” —JK
“It is by folly alone, that the world
moves, and so it is a respectable thing
upon the whole.”
– Joseph Conrad
“…the duty of a poem in his mind was to be as good as possible when ever possible…”
—Mark Van Doren
” In true plain words, by thy true telling friend.”
-Jacques-Pierre
“Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.
It made me realize that so much of what makes music great is courage, and up to that, what I thought made music great was practice and study…This album says there’s more to life than you thought. Life can be lived more deeply, with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined.”
“Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he’s waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along…It’s the great search, fuelled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.” ~Lester Bangs
William Carlos Williams:
“Life is absolutely simple. In any civilized society everyone should know EVERYTHING there is to know about life at once and always, there should never be permitted, confusion–
There are difficulties to life, under conditions that are impasses, life may prove impossible–But it must never be lost–as it is today–
The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated facts is not Knowledge. There is no end–
And what is the fourth dimension? It is the endlessness of knowledge–
It is for this reason I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science–in spite of everything.
Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality–Poetry.
The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current–which it has always sought–
In other times men counted it as a tragedy to be dislocated from sense–today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts–broken, bruised
few escape whole–slaughter. This is not civilization but stupidity–Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination–
With decent knowledge we can tell what things are for
There is no confusion only difficulties.”
” I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers – bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn’t make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way.”
-Bob Dylan