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Notebook Thursday: Margins, Brackets, Tricks

5/27/2022

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Vanessa Chan recently started a Twitter thread inviting writers to share "the most chaotic thing" about their writing practices. I don't know that I can rank that chaotic-ness of my practices—writing is innately chaotic, writing in multiple forms more so, starting longhand almost perversely so—but I replied with the one that would be most likely to baffle an uninitiated reader. I often work in a cramped, narrow column down the side of the page, continuing down the outside of the other page across the spread. Later I come back and write in the middle parts of the spread. It results in pages that look like a ragged teacher's edition, with stories meandering down the margins and (often) day-to-day journal content in the middle:
Picture
Chaos. (Extra chaotic thanks to this being the first time I've attempted to redact a photo on this phone: this is what it looks like when you find the highlighter before the marker.) (Also I am terrified that some random part of my journal will still be legible somehow, and the incriminating words the rain stops--or whatever—will haunt me forever.) But yes, for some reason, working in the margins turns off the part of my brain that gets scared by the tyranny of the blank page.

Another writer replied, "This is a glorious hack," and until that moment I hadn't thought of it as anything but kind of shameful—like, am I broken? Why can't I just work straight across the page? But process is process, and as long as you're not hurting anyone else, it doesn't matter.


Brackets are another of my longstanding systems, though these are less chaotic. If I'm not sure about a word or phrase, I'll frame it in curly brackets:
   we {flail} for what to do
If I can think of several ways I might say it, I'll write each of those ways in adjacent sets of curly brackets:
   thought I'd spend my life surviving {you} {my life}
If there's something I need to look up—say, for fact-checking or consistency with something established elsewhere in the story—I'll frame it in square brackets:
   born in [1840].

This system lets me write first drafts without turning on the editorial brain—the editorial brain being, obviously, quite useful, but deadly to the flow state of early work. Later I can go back and fix things. If I've written lyrics without having a full melody, the bracketed alternatives are often what suggests some important change or rhythm. (In the top example, flail became fumble to suit the song's rhythm better. In the middle example, from a song I'm finishing up now, both versions of the line appear, framing the rest of the verses.)

Another favorite trick is to change the writing implement. Working in different colors can be useful for tracking the layers of revision, as well as just making certain ideas hit your eye differently. I resorted to crayon once, on a very stuck piece of fiction. (In retrospect, that one should have stayed stuck. I never even tried to publish it. But the crayons did unstick the writing for the day.)

I suppose all of these boil down to interacting with the writing as a physical, tactile thing. Maybe they work because we're all in the process of creating things out of nothing, and the physical form gives me a little more thinginess to work with? I don't know. I only know that keeping it too abstract, too digital, too deletable, does me no favors.
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Notebook Thursday: Please Don’t Waste My Time (Guest Post)

5/19/2022

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Charlie O'Brien is the guitarist and cofounder of Sheffield power-poppers The Unswept. "Please Don't Waste My Time" appears on their most recent album, ​Fast Casual.

Editor's note: Charlie's pants are much fancier than ours, and he wrote with numbered endnotes, which this blog does not support. This blog does not even let you superscript numbers, which we did not know until we tried to format things manually. A small blue-green numeral follows Charlie's annotated thoughts, like so: 1. Tragically, you cannot mouse over the number to see the annotation, but the notes appear at the bottom of this post. If you are a Weebly/Square customer, please let them know that the people demand annotation.

There are two popular schools of thought about songwriting:


  1. Fully-finished songs are sitting out there in the ether, waiting for a musician to tune into the right wavelength by which they can become the conduit through which the song flows, or…
  2. Songwriters are crafters who hone their skill with carefully considered musical and lyrical ‘tricks’ to laboriously create the illusion of a piece of music that has always existed.

But I’m sure that the reality falls somewhere between those two extremes. Everyone who writes a song has to strike their own balance between capturing the raw, mysterious inspiration and honing in on something that’s “finished.” The scare quotes are there because, for me, the most surprising part of working on a song is deciding that it’s done. This was certainly the case for “Please Don’t Waste My Time,” a song that appears on the Unswept’s fourth LP Fast Casual.

This song’s vocal melody arrived with little fanfare – I don’t think I was even playing an instrument, the tune just appeared in my head. Once I found time to sit down with a guitar, I strummed a simple chord pattern (a variation on the reliable old Pachelbel Canon in D chord sequence) and the basic structure of the song was in place shortly thereafter. But there were no lyrics – just boo-doo-boo vocalization,1 culminating in the line “please don’t waste my time.”

I’m not sure where that line initially came from (it’s possible I subconsciously cribbed it from the bridge of “Sleeping With The Television On,” one of the only Billy Joel songs I really love), and I couldn’t figure out what the implications were for the rest of the lyrics. It’s sort of a harsh and argumentative phrase, but I had a vague feeling that the song was pulling in a more romantic direction. Also, the melody leading up to the line implied a rhyme scheme that demanded a lot of rhymes for “time.” So I opened up a Google Doc2 and started free-associating phrases and words hoping that a topic or focus would reveal itself…
Friend of mine
Give me a sign
Mountains left to climb
Guitars chime
Nothing rhymed3 
In a bind
I feel somewhat disinclined
Is that such a crime
Miss all the warning signs
So unkind
Some of those lines made it into the final draft, but I was mainly just searching for a lyrical hook that would sing well, and which also had enough details to suggest a plot or situation to give the song focus. But I couldn’t immediately find it, so I set it aside for several months, when I returned to it and wrote these 2 verses:
You’ve known lots of guys before me
I’m aware, and I don’t mind
Cuz I fell for you and you fell for me
And we had some good times4

But I don’t like feeling cut down
By someone who’s a friend of mine
I get sad and then I shut down
Please don’t waste my time
These lines acted as a Rosetta Stone for the rest of the lyrics – it introduces the characters (“me” and “you” – the Dramatis Personae for most pop music), establishes an alternating rhyme scheme (with the first line of each verse featuring a rhyme spread between two words), and suggests a plot for the rest of the lyrics to follow (which threads the needle between celebrating a romantic relationship and worrying about the factors that could harm it). That’s a lot of boxes to check off, and for the next few months I continued adding lines and phrases that fit those requirements.

The lyrics in the b-section of the song5 came from following the logic of “wasting one’s time” to its logical conclusion: time is all we have, and you can’t get it back once it’s gone. I briefly toyed with the idea of doubling up on the b-section at the end and adding these lyrics:
Don't you lead me on
I'd never do you wrong
And don't you close that door
Treat me like you did the night before
But even though there’s never a bad reason for a blatant Beatle lift, these lines seemed surplus to requirements, so they were shitcanned. (Although reading them now, maybe it would have been cool to pair them with an upward key change? Is it too late to pull a Kanye and take the song off the record while I rework it?)
​
The final verse was inspired by binging through the entirety of
Call The Midwife – the phrases “for all’s sake” and “I must implore you” popped up around Season 5, and both sets of words seemed to share the “emotionally exasperated yet politely restrained” tone of the rest of the song:

You should know I still adore you
But I cannot read your mind
For all’s sake, I must implore you
Please stop wasting time – either yours or mine
By this point (October of 2021), there were enough lyrics in my Google Doc with which to assemble a song of reasonable length. Which took me by surprise – I’d been accumulating lines for a little over a year at that point, but the song seemed like it was going to remain perpetually unfinished. I knocked out a quick demo on acoustic guitar and sent it out to The Unswept, who confirmed my suspicion – it sounded like a finished song! (We actually used the acoustic guitar track from my original demo as the basis for our version.) Once the arrangement started to fill in (with Liz’s bass line and harmony vocals, percussion from Ryan and an all-in group handclap track), I started to forget the prolonged, solitary process of writing and began to accept it as a finished piece of work – one that didn’t necessarily belong to me 100%.

I suppose songwriting is a little like writing a good joke, in that comedians tend to start with a solid punchline, and then work backwards to set it up so that the punchline has maximum impact. But the magic doesn’t really happen until you say the joke in front of people and they laugh at it. With songs, you can have a great melody or great lyrics written on a page (or saved on a word processing document), but it’s not really a great song until you play it for somebody else and they react to it. So much the better if you have musical collaborators who are willing to add their own ideas and play it alongside you.
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.

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Notebook Thursday: What We Talk About When We Talk About Songs About Abortion

5/13/2022

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[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.
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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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