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)
“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.
I wish I was somewhere far away on the side of a mountain—sleeping on the floor with a couple of blankets & a bowl of rice—distance—the kiss of the new encounter—aroma of a different egg & leg—so tired of getting’ up & goin’ to school everyday—’til the juice is sucked out of every orange leaving only freeze dried tomatoes—the stranger with a brand new three minute relationship—up all night & wandering to break the spell again—they wanted him in office to throw a wrench in the system—the dog’s been asleep on the floor for hours—but shying away from the broken plans, shattered marriages, the violence of domestic change—out the front door in the mist of early dawn & down the street in the sunlight “bound & determined” ha ha—throw over the sure things, the subscribed, the drills, the calisthenics of boredom, whats the point of living forever in a grind—my back is sore from a chair, my hands ache, the cuppa tea, the same old boring pajama game, throw it over, break out, like never before, “I’ll try something new” sang Smokey, tears are a good sign, shivers another, blood red inspiration, the image that won’t quit, the obsession you live with ’til its in tatters, talk about something new.
patient & strong grey bristle-haired & cute, stubborn according to legend, silent in speech except for their call, the horn-like voice, four feet on the ground, straw bound and watching always watching—swishing flies with their broom-like tails—the soft snoot the adjustable & attenuated pointed twitching ears, the huge forward teeth in rows chewing corn, hay, carrots—the silky muzzle—the forbearance of the animal—here in all being but a passenger amongst humans—no they’ve been passengered but carry men women & children on their backs—the odors of dirt & manure—hay & the dry breeze—in their little barn over the hill & dale of Caulkins’ farm—which was really just a place, a home, with donkeys—four of them that we’d visit—Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, the Kings enters on a donkey’s back, greeted by seismic crowds, waving palm fronds—was the little animal frightened? Did jesus ride side-saddle? Was the donkey rewarded in Heaven or on Earth? The wild burros of Hawaii, on the big island, wandering the black volcanic ash & fields by the blue ocean—life of a donkey equals low man on the totem pole—the respect and trust of Balthazar—traded & whipped from town to town—credited as living brick but a donkey can feel, is sensitive, crys big tears, freedom tastes sweet, Platero—if they want they will but if they dig in forget it—are you like that donkey?
After a long day worn out with the guys, rehearsing, yelling, working angles on each other and watching them develop, ducking figurative (and sometimes literal) punches, conforming and rebelling in equally stressed measure to the group think, my head doesn’t ache but my scalp is tight, my face hurts, I’m ready to go back to the second floor motel room I call home—a block and a half from the Capital Records tower—I go in and turn on the black & white—white plastic magnavox TV with the green tube & wobbly knobs—the tube flickers up to life growing from a dot, and reveals, Abbott & Costello fighting the mob, black & white & shades of grey, the actors beat looking adults, they’ll always seem older than me, slicked back hair and pugnacious expressions with vaudeville timing, my mother told me once she’d seen them go by in Buffalo, a sighting she took seriously, wonder—stars—but—the safety, the comfort, of the late night movies—the plot creeps between used car ads—“come see Cal and his dog Spot!”—and Spot was a lion—a dream link—daydreams at night—relief—a dark room flickered and ghosted by Boston Blackie, the Mob, Detectives, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Natalie Wood, feet up, life suspended, the ache peels off like onion skin.
