Part 3 - Spark and Spice

 Wherein we actually talk about songwriting.

Let's start with the concept of Spark and Spice.

Spark is the idea behind the song. Pop music has traditionally been very frugal with the range of ideas that achieve widespread acceptance. Boy/girl meets boy/girl. Boy/girl loses boy/girl. Boy/girl has unrequited love for boy/girl. Etc etc.

I mean, obviously there are other themes in popular music, and certain acts definitely had a much broader range of stories to tell, from the Beatles, to They Might Be Giants, to Radiohead. But take a quick look at the charts and do a count up of the proportion of tracks that are, shall we say, relationship-based.

And yet, there are thousands of brilliant songs out there that somehow manage to mine this same vein and still extract new nuggets of gold. How does that work?

Well that's where the spice comes in.

If spark is the idea, spice is how you turn that into something interesting. And if you're familiar with the old idea that there are only seven plot-lines in story-telling, then spice is how you turn that into millions of novels, films, comics and, yes, songs.

 

Let's look at a couple of examples. You can either jump out to the songs as we cover them or pick them up as homework afterwards, either way will work.

For the purpose of this exercise we'll start with the humble love song. Some of the best songs ever written have been love songs; and as I've already intimated, it's a pretty congested field.

So how do you add something new?

Left-handed Kisses by Andrew Bird is an interesting angle. It's plainly a love song, but there are a couple of narrative shifts that give it some spice.

The first is a fourth-wall-breaking, self-mocking chorus that says "you've got me writing love songs with a common refrain like this one here". That's then reinforced by the duet line from Fiona Apple that is more cynicism and spikiness than the usual saccharine sweetness. But again, it's not just a typical brush off, it too plays back on the song-writing itself with "if you really loved me you'd risk more than a few 50c words".

The orchestration and arrangement is decidedly non-standard as well, but we'll come back to that.

 

Comments of the Inner Chorus, by Tunng, was probably my album of the year back in 2006/7 when it came out. It has beautiful track on it called Jenny Again. Which at a casual listen appears to be a fairly regular 'let's get old together' type track. But it's not. It's told from the perspective of the titular Jenny's ex-boyfriend. Ex, in this case, because he's been murdered by his replacement.

Lovely song.

 

Actually, the whole 'let's grow old together' is a fairly common way of spicing up the love song. Add a heavy dose of reality to juxtapose with the romanticism and you immediately have a more interesting story.

David Ford's Song For The Road, and Tom McRae's Let Me Grow Old With You are both good examples of this variant.

 

How else might you spice up the common, all-garden love song?

Well first up consider the participants. Boy meets boy or girl meets girl songs are becoming a bit more common but they're still pretty rare.

Or introduce a random third party to the picture, like, maybe, a motorbike - as Richard Thompson does with Vincent Black Lightening 1952. Gary Numan's Cars is a similar approach.

 

Or take your regular characters and put them in irregular situations. I have a song called Red which is based around the idea of clumsy small talk between two people, who just happen to be secret police.

 

Another approach might be to mix in a bit of reality in a different way. Take the idea of a holiday romance, constrain it in time and geography, and let Paul Simon yank your emotions every which way with Hearts and Bones.

 

Then of course you've got the whole barrel of love-gone-wrong songs (as Thomas Dolby would say). But again, this is such a regular theme you'll need to find a new angle. A good recent example might be Olivia Rodrigo's Driving Licence. It manages to add in both the immediately-relatable, everyday object, with the extra heart-break of taking what should have been a happy moment and flipping that on its head as well. It also provides a convenient trove of easy metaphors.

Lola, by The Kinks and First Day of My Life by Brighteyes are a couple of examples of using some of the 'spark' ideas suggested above.

We'll come back to this again next time.