How to Write Songs

I didn’t write my first song until about a year and a half ago. I had thought of myself as someone who had no talent for songwriting for so long that I didn’t even realize that I had written a song until two months after the fact. People kept asking me, “who wrote that song?” and I would say, “oh, this friend of mine helped put the music together, and then I put some words over that.” And then they’d say, “so, you wrote it,” and I’d say, “oh no no no, I just took the words from this old fairy tale and rewrote them a bit.” Finally a musician friend of mine told me that this COUNTS AS SONG WRITING.

And so it started to dawn on me that I could write songs.

Like every other person my age, I can play 3 chords on the guitar and had tried my hand at writing songs before. They always sounded clumsy and too rhyme-y and embarrassingly sappy so I decided I didn’t have a talent for putting words to music.

But this was different. I’d set out to cover songs and make a weird performance piece – and somehow because I wasn’t trying to write a song, a song emerged.

Once I’d done that I realized that it was in fact quite easy to write a song. My favorite method – since it’s what got me started – is to take a line from a poem or song you love. Let it worm its way in your brain out of context, like a mantra. In my case it was this line, from the German fairy tale I was basing my performance on: where did you come from, enchanted girl?

So, I wrote a whole song called, “Enchanted Girl” with that line as its chorus. I stole all the words from the crazy fairy tale. I took the trippiest phrases and mashed them up out of context and changed things around to make it rhyme and work rhythmically with the music. Voila! A song. Turns out that’s totally legitimate!

Here's a picture from the book, by Heinrich de la Motte Fouque, illustrated by Arthur Rackham:



And here's a picture from my show. I'm just giving you some visuals here so you don't get too bored by all the blathering on about songs.



In general, I find copying a song you love to be a great place to start. Here is the great paradox: if you set out to make something original, it’s going to sound like a copy of someone who did it better anyway. But if you SET OUT to copy someone, people will notice your originality. Or compare you to someone you didn’t even know you were copying.

In my case, people keep talking about the influence of Bjork and PJ Harvey on my songs when here I thought I was ripping off Stevie Nicks. And to be perfectly honest PJ Harvey wasn’t really on my radar before people started comparing me to her. Then I had to find out so I wouldn’t sound like an idiot who didn’t even know which album I was ripping off.

Another thing I’ve learned: the less words, the better. Words in songs are a blunt force. They just need to grab you. For years I thought a song had to be all complicated but if you start with the most basic, simple point – say, I AM FEELING SAD TODAY – or maybe WE WILL ROCK YOU – it will get more complicated and nuanced the more you work on it. Usually. Or if it doesn’t you can keep it to yourself. I wrote a song, "Black Valley," which I thought was blunt and powerful but finally realized was only powerful to me. To everyone else it was just repetitive and boring. So I stopped performing it.

Anyway. Point is: I wish song writing weren’t so shrouded in mystery and that more people talked about how to do it.

Though it’s ironic that I’m writing about how easy song writing is today because at the moment I am struggling mightily with a song I’m trying to write for the new Hand2Mouth show, Everyone Who Looks Like You. It’s an attempt to capture the kind of frustrated yelling that comes out of a family fight. In, you know, song form. We’re calling it the Yelling song or the Screaming song but unfortunately right now it sounds more like the Groaning Zombie song or the Polish Funeral song. And all I can think about is how impossible it is and how little skill and experience I have as a songwriter. So… yeah.