Part 4 - More Spark and Spice

 

Obviously not every song is a love song, but the same principles we discussed last time apply.

Take the spark and add narrative spice.

In A Prologue, I have a song that features a killer on a journey to dispose of a dead body in the back seat of his car. Ok, that's an idea, but I like to think it becomes interesting by adding the spice that the killer has no memory of how this morbid situation came to pass.

 

An easy way of finding a bit of spice to add to a song is to grab that folder of notes, or stack of videos and grab a couple of examples at random. Maybe one idea is a riff on train travel and the other idea is about gardening. Great, how could you combine them into something that fires the imagination? What about looking out of a train window and seeing how a garden changes over the seasons? Ok, that gives us a nice time-passing idea. What else is in the folder? Perhaps it's a rant about quitting work. Fine, that gives us the impetus for change. Is it a song about freedom? Is it a song about losing a job? Is it a song about secretly having a crush on your a-hole of a boss? They're all options to add a bit of spice.

 

There is another very powerful and not exactly uncommon, but certainly a bit rarer, method to add some spice to a song.

Make it not make sense.

As human beings we're all natural storytellers and we also excel at pattern recognition. Which means if you paint the outlines of picture we'll happily fill in the gaps with our own interpretations.

Many of my favourite songs take this approach, I mean, Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill is one of my 'all-time-great' songs, but I haven't got a clue what it's about. "Eagle flew out of the night." Well, eagles aren't night flyers and how would you accurately identify it in the dark? Just for starters...

Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum falls into this category for me as well.

Similarly have a read of the lyrics to almost anything from Bon Iver's album 22 A million and see if you can find any literal sense there. 8 Circle takes me on an emotional journey every time but the sentences don't even make sense in themselves.

Get this right and you're bypassing the whole frontal lobe and going straight for the emotional triggers in the limbic system. Hugely powerful.

But it is very difficult to do. I've sort of attempted it a couple of times with mixed success. I find it a bit too easy to get pulled into a more narrative approach. The closest I've come might appear to be a song called Cirencester, but there's actually a logical story behind it even if it's not clear to the listener.

So it's on my to do list. And I definitely recommend it as an exercise. Give it a try, see what you come up with.

 

This has been very lyric focused so far, but in a way it still applies to instrumental music too. For me instrumental pieces work best when they too tell a story, and when they're joined by a bit of spark as well. An unexpected instrument, a counter melody that takes things in a different direction, a bit of poly-rhythm perhaps.

We'll come back to this idea later but in terms of how we can use these ideas in conventional songs.

 

Right. That's been a lot of writing, we'll be a bit more creative in the next posts but really when you're talking about words, then words are the things to use.

So your homework is to go have a listen to all the linked songs, even if you know them pretty well already, and cast your ear over them with that spark and spice analysis.

 

Next time we'll be looking at song construction, story arcs, tension and release and generally all manner of things that will take us beyond verse and chorus.

But before we leave the concept of spark and spice let me leave you with an analogy from the world of photography. 

Let's say you've been lucky enough to find yourself down at the beach around sundown. The crowds have gone home, the sky is lighting up in beautiful pinks and reds, the tide is far enough out to give you a decent stretch of beach and there's enough wind to form some small waves.

You fish out your phone and take a photo. You know you won't capture the real colours on show but even so, there's something a bit flat and uninspiring about the picture.

You've got your spark - the coast at sunset - but there's no spice.

A bit further along the beach there's a set of groynes heading out into the sea, and on one of them is sat a chap doing some sea-fishing.

You fish out your phone again and this time the photo comes alive. You have all the natural beauty of the first shot but now there's a focal point of interest for the observer to build their own narrative.

Obviously if you just point your phone at the dude fishing you might not get a great shot, there's a lot more to photography than that, but that's where we extend our analogy into composition - for music and photography - and we'll come back to that later.

 

Until then, please comment below if you've got any questions or disagree with anything I've said. And hit follow if you've found it interesting.