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The Five Percent Rule, or They Can't All Be Bangers

1/21/2021

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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.
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Alt text: It's Christmas Eve eve and I'm thinking of taking up smoking Found God all lit up on the neighbors' lawn
I love that first line, but what's left to say after that?
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Alt text: Water-stained notebook with lyrics
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.)
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Alt text: Notebook with lyrics labeled "Lesson #1" Learn it by heart, by heart Learn it by heart No one owes you anything
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.
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Notebook Thursday: That was so long ago

1/14/2021

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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.
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In my Taos residency, as the world began to lock down and the year began to look extremely dark, I set about finishing a lot of old song ideas. And it turned out that possibly this wasn't about a breakup at all, but an end-of-life pact. (I still think it mostly works as a breakup song, and if you prefer to interpret it that way, go for it. All the stuff about crumbling bones, etc., can be taken as metaphor.)

I tend to let lyrics suggest melody, not the other way around, so the completion of the verses pushed the structure of the song. Thomas, by contrast, tends to operate in terms of chord progression, so the key shifting turned out to be His Thing when I shared the songs with the band. (For the record, that's G Em C D for the "sugartooth" refrains; Am C#m D E for the intervening verses, with a C D to take us back to G; and B F# E F# for the bridge, which—via another E—takes us to the final progression: A F#m D E, the "sugartooth" refrain taken up a whole step. On the left side of the notebook spread, you can see an earlier idea for a progression, from the first attempt at writing the song.)

​This sparked one of the longer music-theory text chains I've ever had:
For those who are curious, here's Thomas again on the mechanics of chord progression (and also demonstrating his superior mastery of self-promotion):
Explaining Chord Progression Using the Greatest Band of All Time

1. All pop songs consists of three major chords: the root chord, and two chords, each a perfect fifth in either direction. (The Midway, Liz + the Baguettes - A D E)

2. In a few rare cases, a mediant chord will substitute for its relative major chords. (Like, Liz + the Baguettes - A D/F#m E)

3. In even fewer, rarer cases, a related minor chord will be included as part of the progression, with four distinct parts rather than three (The Alchemists, Liz + the Baguettes - G Em C D / A C#m D E)

2 and 3 are both used to create and manipulate tension between the glorious even nature of those three major chords. Any smarty pants who breaks these rules (with a suspended chord or the like) is still using this technique, just with less respect for the law.

Anyway.

It wasn't until well after I'd put up all the Taos demos as 
The Quarantine Tapes (still available as a free download) that I realized how many songs echoed each other. I had known that ghosts and memories were themes, but there were a lot of others. And I had used the line "That was so long ago" twice, both times referring to lost chances. ​

Maybe one time, this song really could have been about a breakup and nothing more. But that was so long ago.

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Notebook Thursday: The Ashes in Your Eyes (Guest Post)

11/19/2020

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​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.
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It’s one thing to have the implacable cursor of a blank page blinking its way through your fragile artist ego--that’s something we’ve all experienced as songwriters. It’s another thing to have the spectre of a genius watching over your shoulder with disapproval. That’s a whole new level of hell.

Bit of background: I’ve been engaged in a taking-way-too-long project with a songwriting partner of mine, wherein we place the names of artists we respect in a hat and then draw out two names at a time. We then try to write a song that represents what we imagine it would sound like if those two artists collaborated. Fun, right?

The hat has included literary heavyweights (Leonard Cohen), lyrical pucks (Elvis Costello), and straight-up songwriting badasses (Tom Waits). And yet, no name plucked from that hat filled me with nearly the dread as when I drew Smokey Robinson.

Why? Because there is absolutely no fat on a Smokey Robinson song. Every stanza, every syllable is fashioned with impeccable, intuitive craftsmanship. You don’t fake that. You can’t. You can indulge a bit of purple prose with Cohen, a too-clever twist of a phrase from Costello. But any pyrite in the mix of a Robison tune is going to hit the ear badly. It’s a hit or it isn’t--there’s no room for error.

I should probably mention, the other half of this randomly-chosen imagined collaboration was The Postal Service. And so, as with all of these tracks, the first step was to determine the Venn diagram thematic overlap. What do both Smokey Robinson and The Postal Service sing about? Love gone bad. Great, now we at least know what we’re writing about.

But where do we start from there? With prior tracks, I’ve used the names of the artists as a jumping-off point to create the hook. (In fact, several of the tracks, including Willie Folds, Prince of Beirut, and Waitin’ on Your Stripes are straight-up just the names of the artists mashed together.) Using this conceit, I tried--rather awkwardly--to fashion something from the concept of a misbegotten love letter (Postal Service) being burned in the fireplace (Smokey) of an ex-lover. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and, frankly, none of it was very good.

Part of the process, though--and this is something it’s taken me a long time to get comfortable with--is allowing yourself to suck long enough to provide an opportunity to pick through the bones and find something worth building from. And poking amongst the scraps, there was one lonely phrase that jumped out--“the ashes in your eyes”--and made me think, “Huh. Maybe there’s something there worth working with.”

Long story short, we proceeded to build a hook outward from that phrase, doing our best to keep the lyrics simple and universal until we had something substantial. Is the result Smokey? Hell no; I’m not that delusional. But being able to salvage it into something I’m not embarrassed by is all the victory I require.
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Notebook Thursday: I Don't Even Know What This Song Is Called

11/12/2020

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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.
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Notebook Thursday: Bourbon Trail

10/29/2020

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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.
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Notebook Thursday: NEOWISE

10/22/2020

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Sometimes you need to give a song space. This one needed literal space—the drafting process shifted from my pocket notebook to the much larger B5 cahier. The switch to bigger paper let me complete the song almost immediately. There was a gap for verse 3, and a pre-chorus line I wound up cutting the next day, but rewriting and reordering longhand has a lovely way of clarifying which ideas matter.
The song itself is destined for Posthistoric. I guess it's a pandemic love song? As much as anything I write is a love song right now?

The title, "Neowise," tells you when I started drafting this (though I did not know until just now, when I found that link, that NEOWISE is actually an acronym, so I guess I'll be capping it from now on). The comet's visibility coincided with my recovery from the kitchen accident that removed a tiny part of my left index finger; I was still playing guitar around a bandage when I wrote the pages on the left. Thus the "scissor off my fingertips" line in the bridge. I am, as you may know, deeply phobic about hand trauma. Despite that—or perhaps because of it—this is my favorite bridge in a long while.

The recording isn't done on this one yet. We tend to get a lot of arrangement ideas spontaneously in the rehearsal room, and being apart is slowing that down. But I like where it's going.
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Notebook Thursday: Face Down in the Canoe Shed (Guest Post)

10/15/2020

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​Thomas Zeitner is the bassist for the Baguettes and the founder of the Loudness War, which means he's also the reason we all know each other.
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Homer: Hmm. I wonder why he's so eager to go to the canoe shed.

Moe: The canoe shed? Hey, fellas, the canoe shed! Ooh, la-di-da, Mr. French Man!
Homer: Well, what do you call it?
Moe: A boathouse.

-The Simpsons, Season 6, episode 23; The Springfield Connection

I had never heard the phrase "canoe shed" before it came up in a podcast i was listening to, but it's a real thing according to Google. Good enough. Let's go!
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"Canoe shed" makes me think of a summer camp, and Jason Voorhees. "Minutiae" reminds me of Dave Byrne, who's said in interviews that he likes to write about "small things."  Well, I guess now I'm writing a Fake Talking Heads Song. 

Writing a Fake Talking Heads song gives you superpowers. Ordinarily, you might stay in one key for consistency, or use minor chords where appropriate. We are now free of these rules.

The chorus lyrics come pretty fast, before I write anything down. I use an accordion to try a couple different progressions in C. I really like G F Dm, which becomes G F D, for further Talking Cred (and to give a backing vocalist something to do). Teasing out where the verse goes, I jump to E and just let the chords drone.

I realize the first verse takes place in the cafeteria and the chorus is in the titular canoe shed, so I leave a big space for a second verse, or a possible prechorus, to get our poor protagonist from A to C.
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Notebook Thursday: Makot Mitzrayim (Guest Post)

10/8/2020

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Mae Shults has been releasing music as Everson Poe for over 10 years. As a queer & trans/non-binary individual, they incorporate themes of gender identity and mental health into nearly all of their songs, filtered through lenses inspired by various forms of pop culture, or simply their own imaginative storytelling.
​"When I write lyrics, I often write in a semi-stream-of-consciousness style. I don't necessarily have a clear idea and so I don't always end up with something cohesive. In this case, what started out as a song about gender dysphoria & body dysmorphia—issues that have plagued me for 25 years—took a turn to condemn racism. From there, it branched off to discuss the Pharaoh's persecution of the Jews in Egypt, according to the stories of Passover. Then it jumps forward in time to discuss the KKK's appropriation of mythological and fantasy concepts as fodder for their internal structure. And then it brings the ten plagues of Egypt to the real world; a plea for god to strike down those who seek nothing but the destruction of those who are different from them. Somehow, I feel like it all works together. And also, as an atheist Jew who doesn't even remotely take the Torah or the bible literally, I'm not actually wishing death upon anyone. Merely telling a story, as I always do."

The song is called "Makot Miztrayim," the Hebrew term for the ten plagues of Egypt. It is due to release on Halloween.
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Notebook Thursday: Lie

9/24/2020

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If memory serves, we debuted this song last January at Theater Wit, after a circus variety show, and I think it was a part of every live set last year. It's a fun one live, with a sort of stealthy groove. We don't have a studio recording of it yet, though, and I'm honestly not sure where such a recording would go. It could be on the expanded Highway Gothic LP—I wrote this more or less while Charlie was mixing and mastering that album—or it could wind up on Posthistoric. Whatever. That's a problem for Future Liz.

Anyway, this is one of those rare triumphs in which you find a home for a stray line. (Cue Sarah McLachlan: "Most stray lines expire, neglected, forgotten, starving...") I originally wrote the line about the room with the pill-bottle smell in 2017, I think, at least a year before the rest of the song—not even in this notebook. By the time I wrote this, I had already tried to shoehorn that line into something else and tried to build a melody around it; neither worked. (There are vestiges of that melody in the do-re-mi-re-do-ti that ends the first and second lines of these verses.) But when the idea for this song arrived, it was almost immediately clear that the pill-bottle room had found its place.

The spark for this one was what turned out to be the chorus: 
You say you'll get better
You say you'll get better
I'm bored with this story
Tell me more.

It has evolved into "these stories" but is otherwise intact. The position of those lyrics on the recto page, scrawly and spaced out, is the tell. Now that I've had to start working in different notebooks, I usually write the spark ideas on the verso, to preserve the staff paper for actual music. I'm still not convinced that approach is working. But that's another problem for Future Liz.
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Notebook Thursday: Written in Water

9/17/2020

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Just a scrap today. This isn't part of the song "Posthistoric"—that's done, I think, at least on the lyrics front—but it's very much of a piece with that writing process, and probably has a place on the album. Somewhere. It's hard to know. It's hard to know much of anything these days, innit?
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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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