“When the race starts close to the finish line…”

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

“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”    -Marianne Moore

Woody Guthrie: “Just the idea of the title for your song is more than half the battle to catch your ballad. I’ve got thousands of titles laid away like postal saving bonds. I spend hours & hours just writing down my ideas for titles to my songs. I jump up late of nights & grab somebody’s pencil & somebody’s paper & write down just the titleline to some balladsong on the upper end of a blank sheet of paper & jump out of some other bed several years later and set down the the words to that ballad idea that hit me several beds ago. You’ve got to be financially able to pay for a large number of beds if you have the least notion of ever being any kind of a  balladsong maker.”

‘ Just the right phrase can go a long way.’  -Chris Rock

Start a song notebook. Carry it with you, & use it.

Titles : collect them : make a list of 25

Phrases you hear, or that pop into your head and demand attention.  Write them down and use them in songs.

Alliteration, vowels, long & short tones, contrast:

LOVE ME DO 

by Lennon & McCartney

This is the one that kicked it all off for the Beatles

intro figure: (played on harmonica)

G             C

Love love me do

G             C

You know I love you

G            C

I’ll always be true

NC

So pleeeease  love me do

repeat figure

G             C

Love love me do

G             C

You know I love you

G            C

I’ll always be true

NC

So pleeeease  love me do

 

(play figure 1 again)

D                  C        G

Someone to love    Somebody new

D                  C            G

Someone to love    Someone like you

G             C

Love love me do

G             C

You know I love you

G            C

I’ll always be true

NC

So pleeeease  love me do

(play figure 1 again)

G             C

Love love me do

G             C

You know I love you

G            C

I’ll always be true

NC

So pleeeease  love me do

DARK AS A DUNGEON

As Recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford

Words and music by Merle Travis

[G] Come listen you fellers so [C] young and [D] fine

Oh [Em] seek not your [G] fortune in the [C] dark dreary [G] mine

It will form as a habit and [C] seep in your [D] soul

Till the [Em] stream of your [G] blood is as [C] black as the [G] coal.

Refrain:

It’s [D] dark as a dungeon and [C] damp as the [G] dew

Where [D] danger is double and [C] pleasures are [G] few

Where the rain never falls and the [C] sun never [D] shines

It’s [Em] dark as a [G] dungeon way [C] down in the [G] mines.

It’s many a man I’ve known in my day

Who lived just to labor his whole life away

Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine

A man will have lust for the lure of the mine.

Refrain

The midnight, the morning, or the middle of the day

It’s the same to the miner who labors away

Where the demons of death often come by surprise

One fall of the slate and you’re buried alive.

Refrain

I hope when I’m dead and the ages shall roll

My body will blacken and turn into coal

Then I’ll look from the door of my heavenly home

And pity the miner a-diggin’ my bones.

A friend of mine 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.

As a singer/songwriter, don’t forget the “singer” part of the deal. work on your singing.

Turn your secrets into songs. If you sing them for strangers. tell everybody you just make them up out of the blue.

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 your biggest influences are.  What do you love about their work? Make a list. Then make a point of putting these things you love directly into your songs immediately. Eventuallu, figure out what about their work you would improve on if you could. then set to work at doing it.

If you ever get stuck, move on.

Sometimes, if you are stuck in your writing, just try to put down one honest line. Or put down the exact OPPOSITE of the truth, and work from there.

( This suggestion os for the six week classes) Play with the techniques we’ve studied: reversals; haiku; american sentences; setting Blake and other well written poetry to music; nonsense; desire; people-place and time writing, kerouac sketching;  collecting and writing from titles; song portraits; list songs;

Learn 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.”

If you don’t get it right the first time, try writing the song again, as a new song. Do this as many times as you need.

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.

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.”

Bob Dylan–“I always try to turn a song on it’s head. Otherwise, I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time.”

Some great phrases of Jax-Pierre:

winters ragged hand

these poor rude lives

fortune & men’s eyes

flatter the mountain tops

my storm-beaten face

their rotten smoke

gentle thief

jump both sea & land

millions of strange shadows

captain jewels

hungry eyes

ages cruel knife

roses of shadow

the ambush of young days

beauty lived & died

a crow that flies

bare ruined choirs

arrest without bail

crooked eclipses

——

59 winters

summer’s green all girded

up in sheaves

astronomy

fresh numbers

eternal summer

men of less truth than tongue

gold candles

ages full hand

summer’s honey breath

marigold at the sun’s eye

a journey in my head

fairest créatures

beauty’s rose

the world’s fresh ornament

herald

dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field

youth’s proud livery

a tatter’d weed

treasure

deep sunken eyes

all-eating shame

fresh repair

unless some mother

the lovely april of her prime

thy mothers glass

a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass

——

“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 Bolano

——

1. Look at problems in many different ways, find new ways to see them.

To gain knowledge about the form of a problem, restructure it in different ways. The first way we looked at a problem was too biased. Often, the problem itself is reconstructed and becomes a new one.

2. Visualize.

Look at the subject in as many different ways as possible, including using diagrams.  Put it down on paper: writing is a magical act. Visualized solution.

3. Produce. A distinguishing characteristic of genius is productivity.

In a study of scientists throughout history, it was found that  “most respected scientists produced not only great works, but also many “bad” ones. They weren’t afraid to fail, or to produce mediocre in order to arrive at excellence.

4. Make novel combinations. Combine, and recombine, ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter how incongruent or unusual.

discuss: The file card method.

5. Form relationships; make connections between dissimilar subjects.

This is a habit of thought, paying attention, making connections for kicks.

Da Vinci forced a relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone hitting water. This enabled him to make the connection that sound travels in waves. Samuel Morse invented relay stations for telegraphic signals when observing relay stations for horses.

6. Think in opposites.

Physicist Niels Bohr believed, that if you held opposites together, then you suspend your thought, and your mind moves to a new level. His ability to imagine light as both a particle and a wave led to his conception of the principle of complementarity. Suspending thought (logic) may allow your mind to create a new form.

7. Think metaphorically.

Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of genius; the ability to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together.

8. Prepare yourself for chance.

Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. That is the first principle of creative accident. Failure can be productive only if we do not focus on it as an unproductive result.

Instead: analyze the process, its components, and how you can change them, to arrive at other results. Do not ask the question “Why have I failed?”, but rather “What have I done?”

And remember, sometimes you have to discover yourself, see what you’ve done for what it really is, see it with new eyes, etc.  suspending expectations. How would you hear this if you heard it on a radio, or just walked into a room and someone else was doing it?

Clamping the mind down on details. some exercises and then a song, or two.

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 Wayne Kramer 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 students 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 … a play on Whitmanesque lines,

“I saw in Louisiana a Live-oak Growing” rather than proper

formal English, which begin with prep phrase, “In Louisiana, I saw…”

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…

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…

–narratives

Next lesson, nailing People, Place, and Time. As we know, narratives do not

stem from vacuums, they come from environments, even latent and subtle, but

always from a sense of PP and T.

We create one-line sentences that frame the sense of PP and T for

their exposition, the first section of their narratives, or first stanza of poem/song etc.

Not unlike M. Gilmore who once wrote, tell stories like you are describing the

rooms you used to live in, like a walking tour. Immerse. Root.

Then I’ll  write 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,…”

“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does. ~ Allen Ginsberg

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

try song sketches

candle burning on my little table

coffee: black, & lemonade

bittersweet, just like the twilight

evening fall lights early fade

peppermints & cherry cough drops

coffee cups & candy bars

midnight drives & miles of music

for lonely men who live in cars.