Songwriter’s Workshop
USE TOOLS
1)Notebook: collect titles and phrases
flow: a) object writing,
b) sketching
c) journal
d) people places times
e) couplets—rhyming dictionary
f) the bones
g) words in keys, or suits—metaphors, imagery
h) mining this writing for song ideas and lines, etc.
2) The Harmonized Scale
I—IIm—IIIm—IV—V—VIm—VIIdim—I
3) Progressions, substitutions
building blocks of popular music
I—VIm—IIm—V7 (Rhythm changes) or I—VIm—IV—V7
I—IV—V—IV—I (La Bamba)
I—IIm—IIIm—IV—V (Like A Rolling Stone)
I—VI—II—V7 (Salty Dog, ragtime)
I—bVII—IV—I (rock, Gloria)
I—IV—bIII—bVI) (Nirvana)
Im—bVII—bVI—V7 (Hit The Road Jack, Spanish, Latin American)
I—III7—IV—I—V7—I (Pallet On Your Floor)
substitutions, major for minor, minor for major
bVII chord (Bb in C) •see substitution chart handed out in class
•modes “the scales on the white keys, starting at each note from C up”
4) Nonsense— “tongues” as a key to creativity
“I is another.”
5) Rhythm and melody
6) Listening for and recognizing inspiration.
“Develop a friendly attitude toward your own thoughts.”
7)Desires and Fears (are vision.)
8) Learn your favorite songs and sing them.
9)Work out melodies on the piano and accapella.
10) Absolute freedom in secret notebooks!
11) Put what you love straight into your music. Beg, borrow and steal!
12) When blocked lower the bar! Don’t get bogged down.
13) Finding our own voice.
14) Singing to warm our own hearts.
imagery:
Downtown Train
by Tom Waits
Outside another yellow moon
Has punched a hole in the nighttime, yes
I climb through the window and down to the street
I’m shining like a new dime
The downtown trains are full with all of those Brooklyn girls
They try so hard to break out of their little worlds
Well you wave your hand and they scatter like crows
They have nothing that will ever capture your heart
They’re just thorns without the rose
Be careful of them in the dark
Oh, if I was the one you chose to be your only one
Oh baby can’t you hear me now, can’t you hear me now
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
Every night it’s just the same, you leave me lonely now
I know your window and I know it’s late
I know your stairs and your doorway
I walk down your street and past your gate
I stand by the light at the four-way
You watch them as they fall, oh baby, they all have heart attacks
They stay at the carnival, but they’ll never win you back
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
Where every night, every night it’s just the same, oh baby
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
All of my dreams they fall like rain, oh baby on a downtown train
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
Where every night, every night it’s just the same, oh baby
Will I see you tonight on a downtown train
All of my dreams just fall like rain, all on a downtown train
All on a downtown train, all on a downtown train
All on a downtown train, a downtown train
The Formula
“1) Get in touch with your feelings- access your underground: the unconscious: always feeling the background.
2) Nobody can make any good music unless they first learn to play for themselves. Forget about exterior stuff, their image, whether the stuff they play is any good or not , whether the audience is pleased or not, and all that superficial stuff.
Go by your feelings, kid, forget about whether the audience likes what you write, what you play…
3) Hard work…there’s no such thing as talent. Just emotions & paying attention to them, & hard work…thats the formula, & in the end, you can’t lose.”
-John Fahey
Within the personality, a womb of originality.
BE VIVID!
1) notice what you notice
2) catch yourself thinking
3) observe whats vivid
4) vividness is self selecting
-Allen Ginsburg
Clamping the mind down on details. some exercises that can help with generating ideas for the “memory song” we’re writing.
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”
–haiku, I think, is a clever method to get ourselves to write/see/picture simultaneously.
First, most people during early school years actually did write some form of it,
and might recall it with fondness or joy, or embarrassment and scoffing. Either way,
many of us can remember the act of really writing, before we began an endless series of quizzes and bubbles and dumbed down education.
So, we tap into what we might call, original joy. Like hearing an effective pop song for the first time, and trying it yourself for a few seconds, dreaming of the Monkees. Even if it didn’t pan out, it tapped into your creative impulse.
In this exercise, I could care less about counting syllables, but I am concerned with three crisp lines.
The first two must relate/offer images of nature — you must immerse the reader, your must draw the picture in words, you must avoid abstraction and empty language, vessels of nothingness. You must engage.
The third line is the repository of understanding, the link: eureka/satori/understanding, of how the first two interrelate, how two juxtaposed images, by and of themselves, create a unifying element, stir an association, and become packed with potential meaning, however latent.
Now, as you model this (I’ve even done this with fellow writers and teachers, and trust me, they are just as stumped and shy as anyone at first), you can also show other writerly techniques, devices, conceits, tools, etc.
For instance, I use a variation of this, imperfect, no doubt, but useful:
sun slants through trees barely naked
crow caws as moths whir
spring is here
Now, again, I don’t aim for profundity as much as potential.
I can exhibit:
Alliteration (sun slant / crows caw)
Parallelism (slants/caws)
Onomatopoeia (caw)
Inverted syntax (trees naked/ naked trees …
Personification (naked trees)
Near/off/imperfect rhymes (whir/here)
etc.
Gray clouds drift through skyscrapers
Birds fly in V-patterns
Winter awaits
But, most important, the images confer a crispness, a photograph-etching-eye glimpse quality…
Exercise:
So, we set to work making two similar works based on our own sense of nature
Now, to get that started, we’ll do an immersive activity, like shut the lights off, and then silently recall a meaningful place of nature, and then flush out our senses in memory, all five, one by one, silently, in our active brain, then we pop the lights on, and scribble first thoughts best thoughts regarding images/sensations we recall, on notepads we write the two haiku based on those impressions and scribbles…
Here’s a few of my favorites from Jack Kerouac’s Book of Haikus:
The windmills of
Oklahoma look
in every direction
Iowa clouds
following each other
into Eternity
Two cars passing
on the freeway
– Husband and wife
Windows rattling
in the wind
I’m a lousy lover
Two clouds kissing
backed up to look
At each other
Next lesson, for our notebook use, nailing People, Place, and Time. As we know, songs do not stem from vacuums, they come from environments, even latent and subtle, but always from a sense of PP and T.
Exercise:
We create phrases and one-line sentences that frame the sense of PP and T for
their exposition, the first stanza of poem/song etc.
Not unlike Mikal Gilmore who once wrote, tell stories like you are describing the
rooms you used to live in, like a walking tour. Immerse. Root.
I wrote my own as the class scribbles, and last time it was something akin to:
Rockford: IL, a rust belt city where the guys walked around with stumpy fingers
flicking ash into the beer cans from endless cigarettes, or committed suicide
in garages with pulled-down pretty painted doors, or road motorcycles into Yield signs,
pummeling their faces.
The Ensmingers: The kind of family that bought old 1960’s Mustang with rust-eaten holes in the floorboards,planted peanuts and pear trees in the backyard with bird baths and and dead buried guinea pigs, and played basketball on the warm drive-way until dusk awakened swarms of eager mosquitoes.
1989: The sound of metal “hair band” ballads swooning across the FM airwaves in hair-spray glitter and excess spun from Hollywood boulevard nights until Nirvana let loose flannel shirts, duct-taped drum sets, and teenage spirit, sweeping the spandex under the rug.
Imperfect, no doubt, but at least I give them a literal and figurative rootedness, a sense of immersion, so when I craft my song or story, these elements may persist and leak over into the narrative, providing context and a field of association…
–from david ensminger
–Kerouac Sketches
“Change now to
Dungaree shorts, gaudy
Green sandals, blue vest
With white borders & a
Little festive lovegirl ribbon
In her hair Carolyn prepares
The supper- ….
She prepares the aluminum
Silex for coffee – never
Puts an extra scoop for
The pot – makes weak
American housewife coffee
–but who’s to
Notice, the Pres. Of the
Waldorf Astoria? – She
Slams a frying pan on a
Burner – singing “I hadn’t
Anyone till you….”
“-The
gray sky above has
a hurting luminosity to the
eye & also rains with
tiny nameless annoying
flips & orgones –
life dusts of Time –
beyond is the vast
aecidium green Erie
pier, a piece of it,
with you sense the
scummy river beyond-”
So there is NYC…go find it still.
Or if you be in Colorado:
“…the one skinny
revolving windmill in
the Vast, – lavender
bodies of the distance
where earth sighs to
round – the clouds
of Colorado hang blank
& beautiful upon the
land divide-…”
And then, for Jack, a family home:
“…a pink-tinged pastel,
the No Carolina afternoon
aureates through the
white Venetian blinds
& through the red-pink
plastic curtains & falls
upon the plaster, with
soft delicate shades – here,…”
Exercise:
Try doing sketches in a pocket notebook, each one just filling up a page. paint the picture you are viewing in words. They don’t have to rhyme, or be complete sentences, but they need to express the senses.
Exercise: Object Writing (be sure to check this out, it’s very useful)
Generate Ideas Through “Object Writing”
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does. ~ Allen Ginsberg
And that’s what our songs can do —PC
Another exercise, for kicks:
- Disclosure from Kenneth Koch
Use a two-line repeating form: I seem to be/I really am.
- For example:
- I seem to be a man in the flying trapeze. But I am a man in the garbage can.
I seem to be an eagle taking a path of clouds. But I am a devil taking baths of fire.
I seem to be a crocodile. But I am a fish being stretched into a whale.
I seem to a pretty color—maybe ruby. But I am a word that means gone.
The upshot of this work is, you can mine it for phrases to use (sometimes with tailoring, or not.)
The next thing to study is the basic rhythm of lines, the stresses and number of syllables.
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.
Hi everybody! I’m back home in San Francisco after nearly five weeks on the road. That may or may not sound like much, but it was a trip, forty-five hundred miles in my pal Paul Luc’s Jeep, also plane flights, and an additional five hundred miles on the roads down in Louisiana for the South Louisiana Songwriter’s Festival, which was a blast. Let’s see,first, the gigs: Saint Louis at the new Stage at KDHX, a fun gig, a fresh venue, a good audience and a recently tuned piano. I ended the set with an instrumental, a version of John Coltrane’s Naima, which became a fixture of the show as the tour progressed. It’s the first time ever for me to feature an instrumental. It’s a beautiful tune, and reminded some listeners of of Jimi Hendrix’s more lyrical jams. Coltrane, people, “Listen to more Coltrane!”