 I remember saying to an English teacher once, “Could you just show me a term paper that was written the way you want to look and sound and I promise I can do that”. Sometimes you just want someone to say “This is how I do things”. As far as the songwriting process, you don't have to do it the way I do it. Here is a way to do what you're trying to do. That's what this post is about. I'm going to try to explain the choices I made in creating a song I wrote called “The Kid”. I know it resembles more of a “chapter” rather than a post – but writing a song is multi-step process involving lots of options and decisions. The Song     Background I needed a song for a holiday program for an elementary school holiday program. It would be the closer. It wasn't going to be upbeat. I wanted it to be more slow and sincere, as if the children were actually stating the message of the song directly to their parents. As you can see, I had a lot of variables in place that my writing had to conform to. The song had to be on the slower side of things and feature lots of vowels. The lyric had to be had to be direct, like an open letter. The Title I wanted a title with an “everyman” quality about it. I thought of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid”, an iconic movie from the silent era. It’s one of my favorites. The pathos created between Chaplin and young Jackie Coogan created mass hysteria when it was released. By the way, titles can not be copyrighted. Form and Chorus Melody When I first started writing this, I had an eight-bar melody and chords to the chorus. I came up with them while washing the dishes in my kitchen, simply scatting a melody on the syllable “doo” and hearing in my head the chord progression that would ungird it. It took less than a minute to do. I decided that I would use a simple ABABBC form with A being the verse, B being the chorus, and C being the coda. What I now needed was a melody for the verse – I already had a chorus. Lyrics As I dried the dishes, I started kicking around ideas for the lyric content in the verse. I decided to do a list song. “I'm the kid who . . . . .” would be the sentence starter for my list. I also wanted the first few lines to state the obvious and then go toward a little bit of pathos so I started with “I'm the kid who's on the stage, can you see me over here?”. Of course, every parent has their eyes glued on their kid so it seems like a silly line but it was embellished with some hand motions by all the kids. In rehearsal I told them that when they sang “Can you see me over here?”, they should all all to wave at their parents, to which they all quickly responded, “But you told us to never wave to anyone in the audience when we are on stage”. My answer was simple but profoundly basic in the world of music. “Yes, I've told you never to wave from the stage, but there's a right time in the right place to break the rules and this is one of them. Wave.” That opening line is followed up with the line “I'm standing by another kid whose fighting back his fears”. Alliteration works here. That's where the pathos comes in because many kids do get frightened when they have to stand on stage. The next part was simple autobiographical writing. “I'm not the kid who was the star, I might have missed a line, I'm not the kid who's always doing fine.” That's rounds up my elementary school experience, constantly in trouble, at war with my teachers. Love The payoff to the list is in the chorus and I knew that it wanted to end with some version of love. The word “love” can be problematic with kids. They are often squeamish about singing the word “love” and it always tends to be more hassle than it's worth in a lyric with little kids. So I had that to work around. I decided that I'd get the word “love’ out of the way early in the chorus, not make it a long sound, and have the following lyrics exemplify and expand on the concept of love. Point of View I started the chorus with “I'm just the kid who loves you so much”. “Just” is one of those words many songwriters stay away from. It’s seen as sound filler and not worthy of lyric content. But I used it any way. I'm playing one point of view off of another with the self-effacing kid saying “I'm just the kid who loves you so much” in an almost self-deprecating way, as if their love is all they have to offer. The word “just” sets up that emotion. I know the line will have emotional content from the point of view of the parents because that's all parents want to hear from their kid is that they're loved and it's no small issue to them. The part about “waiting by the door, looking for your face”, is also an autobiographical bit. I'm told that when I was three or four, I would sit in a chair looking out my grandmother's front window at about five in the afternoon, waiting for my father to walk down North Broom Street on his way home from work. We couldn’t afford a car; my father took the bus to and from work. I knew most other fathers drove to work. When the weather was bad, I would sit in that chair, get very sad, and say to no one in particular “Poor my dad” because he had to walk in the rain. The second verse continues with a list that's more like quick-cut scenes in a movie. Parents always remember the day they brought their child home from the hospital. I took that pivotal moment and juxtaposed it with a family holiday diner scene when the child spills the gravy at a dinner on the table cloth. (image association: gravy goes with turkey, turkey goes with holiday, holiday goes with large family gathering, and spilling the gravy on a special holiday table cloth is a serious offense.) Spilling the gravy was something a parent would quickly forget but guilt a child could carry for a while. The part about the card with a misspelled name it's something I once observed a kid do with school. A child made a card and I believe they wrote “Mommmy”. I remember fighting the urge to make them correct it because I knew the fact that they attempted to write the word on their own would mean much more to their Mom than having the word spelled correctly and would make the card special in years to come. Verse Melody I decided to start the verse with a dominant seven chord, something I had never done in a song before. I started vamping a I-IV-V7 thing in the key of C major to get in the mood. I said the first few lines over the V7, moved the harmony to a IV, and did a plagal cadence to the I, with a Floyd Crammer piano embellishment of the second sliding up to the third in the right hand. It immediately had a country feel to it and I improvised a melody starting on D ( a chord tone in the V7 chord) and put a little bit of a Garth Brooks twang to it, including a lower neighbor note sliding up to the word “here” (m. 4). As I vocally tried each line during the writing process, I kept the twang and tried to envision a Garth or a Toby Keith singing it. The chord over the “fear” (m.8) was originally a vi (A minor). I wanted to add some mystery and unresolved tension so I changed it to a V/vi (G/A is a G major chord over an A bass). Each of the four phrases in the verse have the same starting pattern: V-IV progression so that became my respective glue. The chorus contains a melodic descending sequence that dictated the harmony that rests for a moment on a secondary dominant. The high note in the song rises to the tonic note on the word “proud” with a dramatic octave leap down. Keys I started writing this in C but moved to D to make that high D stand out. The kids had some special understanding of high Eb, though. Anytime they hit that note in other songs, it seemed to ring like a bell, unlike a D or an E. I decided to build drama - I would do the song in D and repeat the chorus at the end in Eb. The coda contains a pretty simple, commonplace harmonic turnaround (iii7-vi7-ii7-V7- V/IV). I had the kids put out their hands palms up on the word “proud”. Each time they sang the word “proud” (m. 58, 63, and 66) they were to gesture a little bit more forcefully with their arms, palms up. When they sang the word “I'm” (m. 68, beats 1 and 2) they pointed to themselves. when they sang “your” (measure 68 beats 3 and 4), they pointed to their parents. and when they sang “kid” (m. 69), did their arms out/palms up movement. Conclusion The song was successful. Parents and kids still tell me about remembering it. Note how many of the words are single-syllable words.  This lead sheet was created with Avid Sibelius. Back when I composed it, the first versions were in pencil or osmiroid pen.
 In a previous post, I focused on melodic rhythm and how understanding it in your lyrics can help propel your work. I’ve also emphasized how the shorthand system of notation called a lead sheet is, as they say in advertising work, a “fast and dirty” way to get your ideas on paper. Here is a morphing of these two ideas: a Morse Code system to visualize your lyric’s rhythms. As you might now, Morse Code is a way of using “dots” (short sounds/symbols) and “dashes” (long sounds and symbols) to represent letters of the alphabet. As a kid, I was way into scouting, electronics, and Morse Code. I saved my pennies and mail ordered a Heath Kit Morse Code oscilloscope that I assembled with a soldering iron. It was a practice device and didn’t send the code anywhere other than the four walls of my bedroom. I became proficient in using the code, loved sending messages into the either, and fantasized about tapping coded communiqués from behind enemy lines and saving the day. Yeah, I was that kid. In any case, I lived in a world of notes, dots, and dashes. Years later, as I worked on my own melodic rhythms, I noticed the parallels between the code and the aspect of short and long notes. If you analyze most melodic rhythms, there’s nothing fancy. It usually boils down to short sounds and long sounds, with a few gradations in-between. One day, I decided not to write my melodic notations in traditional rhythmic notation on manuscript paper but rather just put down the dots and dashes on blank paper reflecting the relative length of the notes. Several things happened. I realized that notation is small and my dots and dashes on a 8.5x11 inch pages were big. I thought back to stories about the quirky American composer Charles Ruggles who coined the term "dissonant counterpoint ". When he composed, he often didn’t use conventional staff paper. Instead, he would horizontally paper the walls of his rooms ceiling to floor with rolls of huge manuscript shelving paper where the lines of the staff were an inch a part. I found that when it came to lyrics, I worked better with larger iconography rather than with tiny notes on a staff. (To this day, when I create PDFs of lyrics, I have tiny margins and enlarge the font as big as possible. I put as much of the page’s canvas into play. This also pays infinite dividends when giving lyrics to kids. Big is good.) I also realize I was turning my back on what I was taught to do- specifically use notation to get my ideas a sprecise and “correct” as possible. I was thinking less like a college graduate with a degree in music and more like a kid with a mail order Morse Code oscilloscope. Sometimes retrograde re-tooling is what’s called for. Did I have the musical chops to write out my rhythms? Of course. But sometimes the conventional approach is not the best for achieving flow and maximizing visualization. Here is an example of how I do it. These are the first few lines of a song of mine, “The Beast” with the prose on top and the code on the bottom.  I did this “dot and dash” drawing with the entire first verse after I nailed down the lyrics and melodic rhythm. Before I started the second verse, I put the first verse lyrics aside used the code to repeatedly scat the first verse’s rhythm, sometimes even tapping my finger on each dot and dash as I scatted. I wanted that rhythm to be as automatic that I didn’t have to think about it when I moved onto the next verses. As I worked on subsequent verses, I would quickly jot the dots and dashes on a blank page and write the next set of lyrics under the markings. I had established my rhyme scheme in the first verse so completing the next verses was easy. Here’s the complete lyric.  One note: I didn’t show you all the subsequent versions and editions I made for each verse. They were beautifully messy with lots of cross outs and arrows pointing to different words. What I have supplied you with is a basic idea, the slightest of suggestions that you can develop in ways that resonate specifically with you and your work habits.
Once again, proof that there is more than just one way to get to the skinny and fat bar line at the end of the song.  If you don’t have several hundred songs under your belt, take a break from writing your own material and learn a few hundred songs.
Be able to do them vocal/piano or vocal/guitar in at least three different keys – and no capos for guitarists. And when I say “Do them” I mean sit down by yourself and run through the song enough times that you would feel comfortable performing it for someone. Not only is this respecting the successful work of those songwriters who came before you, it is connecting the dots of how successful people constructed songs. It’s taking the time to find out that there is much more that is the same in a hundred songs than there is that is different.  Stravinsky said, "Given an infinity of possibilities, I could do nothing".
When first starting out in songwriting, it seems like there are a million choices at one’s pencil tip. Hundreds of chords, thousands of words, and millions of ways to sing a melody. It seems so daunting. That’s the way it is any time and artist confronts a blank canvas. Why not be different. Be the artist who relishes the blank canvas, the one who can’t wait to get to the creative, constructive moment when you can fill that canvas with several simple statements that brazenly focuses on one emotion one moment in time, one fleeting feeling. If you ever feel there are too many choices, stop, take a moment, and realize that your song will probably end up with a melody that falls somewhere in the range of just one octave, will contain only a handful of chords, and should have lots of easy, single syllable words on a fourth grade reading level. And be about just one thing. The thing that is in the title.  Did you ever notice how many great lyrics are constructed with primarily single syllable words?
 So I know most of these songwriter posts have been geared to the tyro writer – here’s one for those of you who have a few good songs under your belt. Take one of your better songs and record it. Put it away for a few days and revisit it. If you were going to pick a famous artist/singer to do your song, who would sound good doing it? If it’s a Broadway-type of show tune, can you picture it being sung in a bravura fashion that Broadway is known for? If it more of a metal piece, how many thirds are in your accompaniment that soften the delivery of the melody? Are there more power chords than usual in what you wrote? These are all valid questions. The genetic code that comes with most great songs is that you can simultaneously here yourself singing it along with the artist who recorded it. If you can’t relate your inner voice to the song, you will likely skip it and move to a different song. Ok. After you pick someone who could have done your song, how would they improve on the original material to make it more communicative with their voice? Essentially, the mind trick is this: if you think the song is done, try to imagine how a successful songwriter would listen to it and edit your work to make it stronger. Is it in the best key, the key that would most evocatively project the artist’s personality and voice? Try it up a third, fourth, or maybe down a second. There is a famous story of how the producers kept raising the key to “Heard it on the Grapevine” on Marvin Gaye in the studio to push his strongest emotional performance. Can the groove and tempo be improved? Does the high point in the melody fit with the artist’s top of range, the place where they arouse the most emotion? Are the ending vowel sounds in your lyrics open and resemble the ending vowel sounds that the artist repeatedly uses in their songs? Are there words that don’t fit in the context of the majority of lyrics? Are there moments where you are forcing a rhyming pattern because the lyrics don’t really fit? Do your phrases include pauses where the listener can either internally repeat the past phrase or anticipate the next phrase? These are just a few of the ways you can revisit your completed songs to tighten them up and take them to the next level. They key is that editing is just as important as working the initial musical idea. I’m not asking you to copy someone else’s style but to rather recognize it for what it is. You will put your own stamp on the song by the way you add emotional content in the performance that is different than how the imagined artist would render the song. That way, no matter who ever you secretly imagined doing your song would not be able to the ultimate performance of it – because it is YOUR song!  If you learn and study the songs of the masters of Tin Pan Alley, you will develop an unusually strong understanding of songwriting harmony.
Chord progressions are the raw material we often start with as songwriters, creating grooves that seemingly vamp forever in our hands and brains. Time for a little story. From the time I was a little kid, I loved songs from every genre – show tunes, pop, jazz, classical, rock. I just loved songs, picking out melodies on my grandmother’s piano. I sang all the time – that is, when I was alone. When I started playing trumpet in fourth grade, I learned fifty percent of my favorite melodies by ear and the other fifty percent by buying song folio books at the local music stores. Again, I played these songs all the time – when I was alone. I saw things at jazz workshops in junior high called “fake Books”. They were illegally produced lead sheet compilations of hundreds of standards. No one seemed to know where to buy them. The buzz was that if you were caught with one, you might be sent to jail! That only made me want to buy two of them, learn all of those songs, and be a REAL outlaw musician! While I knew a little music theory going into high school, I didn’t understand it’s applications to composition, orchestration, or song writing. Downbeat, the most popular jazz magazine, published several Buddy Rich arrangements from his album “Big Swing Face” in their end-of-year special issue when I was in high school. I took it upon myself to write out the sixteen-to-eighteen parts for the individual instruments for our jazz band, which required me to transpose from the C score into the key of the instruments in the brass and reed sections. Lots of transposition, paper, and pencils! And I started to see patterns in the music, patterns that would belie other larger architectural structures. I was also playing double bass in a weekly folk mass with two talented guitarists who were very knowledgeable with chords and chords substitutions. They couldn’t read music but buy, could they play it. They often used capos – more transposing for me! It didn’t bother them to play a song in D major at capo three but that put the song in F# major for me, not the easiest of keys for a young double bassist. Again, I started to recognize the patterns in song structure, harmonic rhythm, and melody in all the keys. In high school, we had a “dance band” because jazz was still a bit taboo in some areas - but it really was a jazz band. At our first rehearsal, I was given a box with over five-hundred arrangements in it – songs from the twenties to the present. We rehearsed every week and always had to sightread and learn new tunes. While I knew many of the melodies, the harmonies and counterpoint were exelierating and I would often check out my friend’s parts in the sax or trombone section to see how they were designed. All of this informed my songwriting that I started after I graduated from college and started working in an elementary general music gig. After taking the gig, I realized I had no knowledge of elementary lit or choral rep – so I started writing my own. By that point, I had so much raw material in the form of song structure, harmony, form, and melodic couture that my first songs were . . . only so so. I threw away at least twenty songs before I ever shared one with my students. I had purchased a guitar after graduating. Guitars in universities were like jazz bands in high school – not the establishment’s cup of tea. A co-teacher had a copy of the Beatle’s “Complete”, the first all-inclusive book with every Beatles song in it. We would run through songs, sing in harmony , pretend we were like John and Paul, and had a blast. But I had a gradual revelation. Almost all the chord progressions that the Beatles used could be found in the songs of Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, and George Gershwin of Tin Pan Alley fame. The chords remained the same – it was primarily the groves and lyric vernacular that changed. It hasn’t been widely discussed but all of the Beatles grew up in homes where songs of the Great American Song Book were listened to and sung around a piano. Those songs had a profound influence on their development as songwriters. Flash forward: I’m still learning songs. At this point, I have over 1,500 lyric PDFs in my music app. I have most of the music memorized and can play most of the songs in several keys. For example, I gigged for three hours straight Friday night in a casino restaurant – vocals and piano. The first two requests I got were for Patti Page’s “The Tennessee Waltz” and Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are”. While I probably played done “Tennessee Waltz” decades ago on a big band gig, I had never done it solo before – but I knew the melody and the chord progression. I dialed up the lyrics on AZ Lyrics and nailed the tune. I had the lyric for “Chances Are” (I actually had a request for it about five years ago) so that was no problem either. The point is this: Songwriting was not a “buy and guitar and write a song in the first hour” situation for me. There was no short path to create my flow in songwriting for me – and there might not be one for you, either. Mastering songwriting was the culmination of a ton of work, practice, experimentation, failure, over many years. The more raw material about songs that you have in your brain, the easier it will be to create flow and have your songs come to fruition. The Great American Song Book is a great place to start. There is a reason why those standards have remained standards and in the lexicon of popular music. The Beatles catalogue is another good place to build your knowledge of songs. For about every fifteen to twenty songs I know, I written one. So learn lots of songs. I mean like right now. Get off the internet and learn some songs! |
AuthorBoyd Holmes, the Writer Archives
February 2025
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