1. This method of fishing for lyrics by singing nonsense syllables is a time-tested yet mysterious tradition. John Linnell of They Might Be Giants described it thusly in a recent podcast interview: "A lot of ideas come from the sounds of the syllables of the words... You usually start with a melody, and then the melody suggests a set of syllables that work with those particular notes... Often, you let the song write itself in that way."
2. Dated October 20, 2020, as it happens. There’s something to say for writing longhand, and I probably was more prolific when I carried a Moleskine around for song ideas, but it is sort of nice to be able to go back and see revisions automatically.
3. It would have been nice to include this as a nod to Gilbert O’Sullivan, but it was not to be.
4. Changed in the final draft to “it’s been a real good time.” a line whose grammar would not impress Dorothy Zbornak, but included as a nod to “Real Cool Time” by Ramones and “Real Real Good Time” by Parasites.
5. I’m not sure whether to call this bit a bridge or a chorus. Actually, I think what I have been referring to as “verses” here could be a variation on what Andy Partridge calls a “vhorus” – a hybrid of a verse and a chorus which prominently features the title line.

[posted on a Friday, a week late, after the damn site ate the entire post]

There's this predictable phenomenon that happens every time a legislative or judicial shift threatens reproductive rights. It started happening last week on Twitter and has made it to Facebook by now. People talk about their abortions—especially the terminations of wanted but life-threatening pregnancies, but also the terminations of pregnancies resulting from rape or abusive relationships—laying their trauma bare in public to demonstrate why reproductive rights are necessary. And I get the reasoning behind it. But I also question its effectiveness as a tactic. The minority who want to ban abortion are manifestly not moved by the pain of pregnant people.

Silvia Federici, who has written extensively about the correlation between reproductive restrictions and the rise of colonial capitalism, also discusses the way Enlightenment beliefs were complicit in justifying this oppression. Descartes, she notes, was convinced that animals, lacking reason, could not feel pain. He thus performed a number of vivisections without any pangs of conscience.

Which is to say: showing that you're suffering is not always enough to convince your oppressors and tormentors to stop oppressing and tormenting you, especially when they have a vested interest in ignoring your pain.

I mention this because it's a mistake I've made as a lyricist a few times. My default reaction, when legislation threatens, seems to be to write a tragic protest song. "South Dakota Blues" is a representative title, and no, I will not be posting that notebook page here; it's a horrible song, humorless and heavy, trying for tragedy and landing instead on melodrama. In short: trying to lay bare the pain of a pregnant protagonist for a world that is manifestly unmoved by pain.

So then: how does a good song about abortion work? 

"Brick" is one of the first that comes to mind. I would say it works in much the same way as "Hills Like White Elephants"—by not actually mentioning abortion directly. "The Freshman" is another one that never mentions it directly; apparently plenty of listeners don't know that's what the song is about. "Sally's Pigeons" is more direct (it mentions the back alley), but still firmly in the tragic mode (Sally dies).  Sad, oblique literary melancholy. It works for these songs—I don't think it's necessarily a bad way to tell these stories—but why is this the only way we tell them?

What I am getting at, I guess, is that I am looking now for a song that works differently, and particularly one that doesn't paint abortion solely as a woman's problem. Because pain and tragedy are clearly insufficient as activism, and if people keep feeling they have no choice but to publicize their trauma I will just go numb with mute fury. It's a whole person who gets pregnant—not a walking womb—and that's a person with the full range of feelings, not just Oh No Sad Tragedy. Sometimes abortion isn't tragic at all. Sometimes it's not that big a deal. Sometimes it sucks, but it's the right call. But! Also! There's an unspoken story of reproductive rights to every song about getting it on, getting off, meeting someone's eyes across the room, saying hi like a spider to a fly, having your back against the record machine, being all right in a kind of a limited way for an off night. The flamboyant sexual freedom of rock and pop music is entirely—and silently—dependent on reproductive healthcare. I'm looking for the songs that acknowledge that. And if I can't find them, I have to figure out how to write one.

At the last Baguettes session, we took a break for pie (as we do) and fell into a discussion about songwriting. We've collaborated on songwriting in the past, just not for this band. Maybe because it started as my side project, incorporating the personnel of the Loudness War? Maybe because I like to work from a thematic sense of a whole album? I dunno. But it makes sense to collaborate more. We work in different ways (starting from music, starting from lyrics, seat-of-the-pants improvising), and if you do it right, that combination of approaches can be a strength.

But also: If you've been writing songs solo for years, and if you are the sort of person who puts everything through several drafts before sharing it with anyone, opening up the process can be terrifying.

So that's fun.  

Eventually the desire to complete a stalled backlog of songs overcame the cringe factor. I went through my past few notebooks and pulled lyrics I liked, and combined them into a Google Doc. I didn't insert page breaks between ideas. Instead there's a little row of hyphens, like this:
---
—because sometimes you get lyrics at separate times without realizing they're part of the same song. Seeing them sharing a screen can help. I saved it as St. Jerome's Charitable Home for Orphaned & Misbegotten Lyrics—Jerome being the patron of both orphans and libraries—and shared it with the band.

Here's what I've learned so far:

1. Culling lyrics for people whose opinions you value is a really good exercise. You don't want to waste their time. (Especially Charlie's.) 
2. The act of typing things into an unwonted format helped me figure out a couple of things almost immediately. The first thing I typed was a couplet-chorus combination I've been kicking around since my last summer in Asheville, always feeling like the chorus was a weird letdown for that particular verse. Not until seeing it in the doc did I realize it was actually two songs, setting up different promises (and premises). As soon as I split them up, I figured out new verses for each one and spotted the marginal note that would become the real chorus for song #1. 
3. Sharing the document, with all its stupid vulnerability, has cracked something open in a process that has been blocked for a year. It might be too soon to say exactly how it has changed the process; it's certainly too soon to judge the results. But it feels as though I'm approaching songs with better focus and steadier work than before.
4. I'm used to the way my day-gig editorial teams work in shared docs. Bandmates generally do not insert comments replying to your comments or querying "Errata?" or noting an inconsistency. It took several days before I realized this was not a referendum on my work.
5. I have been misquoting this Simpsons line for years:

I put "Three Walls Are Not Enough" at the top of the document. WRONG. SO WRONG. In my defense, my version provides important context; in songwriting, three is often exactly enough, so the correct quote might have been misleading. But my conscience might feel better if I added an "Errata?"

Sometimes it's nearly midnight and you've spent a very long time on day-gig stuff and you haul yourself back to the computer for the blog post and then your web editor won't let you log in. Sometimes your fingertips soften because you've been washing dishes instead of practicing guitar. Both of those things were true last night.

I've come to the last page of the little Roterfaden music notebook—which I guess proves I can use it for songwriting, though I still miss the Moleskine pocket staff-paper books. It ends with a lie.

Not thinking about someone is a paradoxical goal, one that leaves you curled up around absence like a negative-space drawing. Thinking about whether you're not thinking about someone makes it even worse. Writing a song about not thinking about someone is just pressing on the bruise. Ba ba ba ba.

But coming to the end of a notebook was what prompted the harvest of song ideas for The Quarantine Tapes last year, and this notebook contains a similar number of unfinished ideas I like every time I leaf past them. So there's that.

I've been focusing on guitar skills lately, dishwater hands notwithstanding. (It would be entirely typical for me to finally feel confident with soloing just as the American live-music industry collapses.) Here's a different notebook page from some of that work, looking at closed-form modes that can be taken up or down the neck. I don't fully know what the end goal is with the modes—I am probably not going to veer off into experimental modal composition—but Dorian and Mixolydian are both more interesting to my ear than natural minor, which tends to grind on a bit if used for a whole song. And there are other aspects of modal play that hit me as completely alien, and that sort of discomfort can be instructive too.

The notebook in question—pardon the slightly blurry image—is a Moleskine cahier (cruelly proving that they still carry staff paper, they just don't bind it in pocket size any more). It lends itself well to creating tablature, if you're willing to take a moment to add the sixth line with a ruler.

My sister's lab professor used to tell her, "If more than 5 percent of your experiments turn out as expected, you're not thinking creatively enough." I don't think that's too far off from the percentage in songwriting. When I look at the total page count in my music notebooks, and add in all the other places I have scrawled song ideas (journal, planner, margins of editorial MSs, Post-It notes in freelance cubicles), and compare that number to the number of finished songs I have out in the world, 5 percent seems generous.

That ratio would be demoralizing if it happened steadily, but—for me, anyway—it tends to reflect long fallow periods where I'm sort of bumbling about in the dark trying to get a handle on anything, and then streaks where I know exactly what I want to do and the clarity of purpose shapes the songs. Looking back at the notebook from 2013–2014, there's a stretch of nascent ideas, and then, in immediate succession, "Everything I Think I Know Is Wrong," "Sleepwalker," "This Is Where I Get Off" (which never got past the demo, which is fine), and "<3." "Like" is a few pages after that.

Unfortunately you don't get to the streaks without bumbling about first. Or I don't, at least.

I love that first line, but what's left to say after that?

I don't think this one ever had a title. I tried so hard to finish it for EITIKIW, but just couldn't get it into a shape I liked. I think it was going to be in 6/8, with drumbeats for the "..." in "I...need you, I...love you"; that might make it a good example of a song undermined by its own attempts at cleverness. (Which is too bad, as I can only think of two other rock songs about punctuation.)

I have not even the faintest memory of what this melody was supposed to be. I am fairly confident that the "Dh E" in the chord progression means there's a D with a hammer figure—not a Dh chord, whatever that would be—but I don't know what figure I meant either. "Handclaps, then chugging bass" remains a solid idea, though. Maybe I should start there.

You don't always know what you're writing about when you write it. Sometimes something nudges you to use a certain word a certain way and you do it for no other reason than liking it, leaning into the weirdness and seeing where it takes you. 

"The Alchemists" began life—I thought—as a breakup song. I had the first "Hey, sugartooth" refrain and a sense that it probably wanted a Breeders-y grunge sound and some key shifts, but little else. I remember playing through the progression once at a band rehearsal, maybe in 2018 or 2019. But it stalled out there, as a lot of song ideas do, and that was it.

​Jason Lord is one half of Griffo & Lord. Matt Griffo and Jason Lord met in Chicago while writing the minor cult hit Jersey Shore: the Musical. Finding ease in their musical partnership, they have collaborated on a number of projects since. The singles from their latest project, tentatively entitled Splice, will be released as an LP at some vanishing point in the future.

There are three draft titles at the upper right, and I was leaning toward "World on Fire" until I typed it out at the top of this post and saw how completely doom-apocalyptic it felt. (I never know how much my job needs to involve reminding people that we owe the world a good bit of panicky restitution, and how much it needs to involve giving people an emotional release valve from said panic. Always a tough call.)

​Anyway, this one is still very much in progress—it's an emotional subject, and I tend to play those rather close to the chest. (We can pretend that the focus problem in the photo represents my shifting emotional distance.) I suspect that finishing it is going to require two things: a drum loop and a shift into the bigger notebook, à la "NEOWISE." I also suspect that it's not going to be in 4/4 the whole way through, which makes the loop more challenging.

In this photo I can also see at least one line that I'll probably cut. Not saying which one.

A little over a year ago, I was en route to Asheville for the workshop of The Maenads with American Myth Center. I had a notebook full of songs and ideas for the score, and Darth Prius was full of musical instruments. The fall color was stealing over the land, through the gray shadows of recent rain. It was a happy drive. 

Then, in the evening, around the time I crossed into Kentucky, a storm hit. I couldn't tell you exactly where; I wouldn't even be able to recognize that stretch of highway. Everything got so black so quickly that every last landmark was obscured. I thought I was driving on a raised roadbed until I saw the taillights of a car that had skidded up the embankment to my right. A little later on, horrifyingly, I found myself facing the headlights of another car that had spun out onto the median. From time to time the lightning would crack through, nuclear-blast bright, and then everything would plunge back to darkness while my retinas tried to adjust. It was fully apocalyptic, as though God himself had finally arrived for vengeance on Mitch McConnell. The car rocked with the force of the wind and rain. I wanted desperately to pull over but couldn't see a place where it was even possible. On my phone's GPS display, the estimated time of arrival began ticking up and up, further contributing to the nightmare sensation of slipping backward.

When the headlights found an exit sign that promised a motel, I pulled off, not even caring where I was. In the parking lot I sat and shook.

Later, in my room, I scrawled out a few ideas for a song. That's the dark blue writing on the verso page. Between songs for The Maenads, I made a few more attempts; that's the wine-red writing. A month or two after that, not thinking it was related, I jotted the line that would become the final chorus. It wasn't until I was in Taos this spring—after another long, solitary drive through empty spaces—that everything coalesced into "Bourbon Trail."  That's the blue writing on the recto side of the spread.

The end version abandoned both the original chord progression and the early melody. The lyrics are so elliptical that I wasn't certain they'd work until I tried them over a percussion loop. (The loop, btw, is supposed to evoke the sound of windshield wipers, though I don't know if it does that for anyone but me.) That somewhat structureless structure might be as close as I can get to recreating the sense of having the world melt away into nothing even as I had to keep going forward. 

P.S. I think anyone who's driven through the heartland will recognize the Adult Superstore sign—the sort of disconcerting landmark that looks halfway familiar no matter where you are—and will also know that the correct name is Lion's Den. I changed it mainly for the scansion—though I like the lower-rent feeling of "Bob's." Bob, whoever you are, wherever you are, no disrespect intended.