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Notebook Thursday: St. Jerome Success Stories (Guest Post)

6/2/2022

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Thomas Zeitner is one-fifth of the Baguettes and one-fourth of the Loudness War. Scott Tribble is his longtime songwriting partner.

Songwriting is already hard, and everyone does it differently. Collaborative songwriting is the art of dropping two unique processes on top of each other and hoping they mesh. I’ve had the most success co-writing with Scott Tribble, published author/rhythm guitarist. We played together in a band that went through multiple names and roster changes, a la Spinal Tap, from 2000 to 2007. Scott moved out of state, but wanted to keep writing, so we would meet for the odd weekend to try recording new material.


You need to devote serious time to collaboration. Our songwriting sessions were mostly periods of throat-clearing and empty space, while we waited for our brains to hit the same record groove. One thing we had to our advantage was that we had different strengths. Scott’s end was arrangement. Mine was lyrics. We basically pitched half-formed ideas until something lit up on the other side. It works, but it takes a long time for the flint to spark. Not everyone writes “Get Back” on a smoke break.

“Make It Home Alive” had two sonic parents: an orphaned, Gin Blossoms-style chorus that came to me while practicing, and a melody line that Scott had recorded and sent to me, like a voice memo.  Both were at least a year old when we got together in 2008 to record what we labeled the "Tap Sessions." Looking at what we demo’ed that weekend, it was a productive session, but I remember feeling we were losing steam toward the end. Time was of the essence, since logistically our in-person collaborations were few and far between. It might be why Scott decided to revisit his existing melody line (labeled “Honesty” in my iTunes). 

I had heard that piece dozens of times, especially because I played all of his tracks in anticipation of the weekend. But there was nothing there until that moment. I overuse the metaphor of fires of creation, but I promise you, dear reader: on a good day, songwriting is more light than sound. And the room was glowing.

The melody repeats itself a little, which inspired an internal rhyme. “Your dad’s saying that you tricked him. Your mom’s playing the victim/But it’s all a trap for you.” Great. Now we had half a verse. All I needed is another internal rhyme and something that rhymes with “you.” Easy.

Scott, meanwhile, saw that I had something, and was willing to just play the same four chords over and over until I figured it out. “We did nothing ‘gainst the law but I’m the only one they saw/So I’m going to take the rap for you.” There’s a good chance that we might have stalled out there, but Scott was playing in A major, which gave me a segue to the chorus I already had in my pocket. I just needed to slow it down to the mellow tempo, which had an alt-country vibe—like a Wilco or Old 97s ballad.

“It’s all right. It’s okay. It’s better it happened this way/And I don’t think I’m gonna make it home alive./You can call the police. They couldn’t catch a disease/And I don’t think I’m gonna make it home alive.” I sang, muttering chord changes to Scott in between words.  After two hours of nothing, we had one third of a song written in about two minutes. It only took a year!

We paused long enough for me to write everything down. (I’m pretty sure “gainst” was a deliberate choice from the very beginning but there’s a lot of editing on the fly.) It was a strong template. Unless we did something really bizarre for a bridge, the piece was four chords total. Scott kept playing. His part was done. Now we were just painting the house.

I focused on the ambiguity of the first verse. It evoked rumors and innuendo. Details would only pin down two unnamed souls who already had enough working against (‘gainst) them. I somewhat regret using “we’re not here and we’re not proud” as it’s more explicit than anything else in the song. Is “Make It Home Alive” about coming out in a very conservative community? Yes. It’s also about abortion rights, manslaughter, and John Grisham’s “The Client.” The salient issue is that young people have problems they’re not prepared for.
 
Even with internal rhyming, ABCB is one of the most forgiving schemes to write within. The rest of the lyrics were finished in less than an hour.  We recorded a rough, ROUGH demo, adding some country-fried lead fills to temporarily cover some of the musical gaps. The song was much slower than the chorus I started with, and it’s apparent when I hear myself trying to hold a melancholy note long enough. Rough performance aside, it’s a solid song, and a great example of collaboration as a synthesis of two parts.

At some point, we remotely re-recorded it in a faster "Hey Jealousy" style, with me valiantly and painstakingly adding GarageBand drumbeats to propel the song. But it definitely needed the energy of a full band together in the same room. I eventually started a new project in Chicago and brought the song to the group as something that our guitarist Charlie could sing. We maintained the faster tempo, and it worked beautifully. Our original country weeper was no more, but, hey, we can always include it when we release our Basement Tapes, right?
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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:
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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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St. Jerome's Charitable Home for Orphaned & Misbegotten Lyrics

4/28/2022

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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:
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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?"
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Guest Post: Juicy Words

4/21/2022

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Today's guest is Ryan O'Brien, of The Unswept.
I took a songwriting workshop with the great Rhett Miller, and he used the term “juicy words,” as in words that paint a picture in and of themselves, that help a story sink in.

In this song from our new album, “Fast Casual,”  I tried to make the listener see the girl the narrator has a huge crush on, to put them right there in the restaurant:

You set ‘em down with a grin / So pretty and thin
Fingertips stained from cigarettes
You bring the bill with a smile / I linger a while
To catch a glimpse of your heart-shaped barrette

​And we know what she’s all about.
​

"You Keep Me Company" appears on Fast Casual, due out on April 22 from ButterBean Records. Album release show: April 23 at Montrose Saloon, as part of International Pop Overthrow. 
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Notebook "Thursday": Miscellany

3/5/2021

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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