Rough to Release

  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 a...

  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 the...