I want to write about what it feels like to write a song. It’s not as if your eyes roll back into your head and you enter a trance state, but you definitely go someplace where you are unreachable. It’s happening right now, and it’s a fleeting thing as I’m writing what may be the last part of the last song on a new album. Once I go into recording and performance mode, this feeling will become more distant.
I mentioned this song called Magical Thinking in a previous post. I started writing it as we left LA during the fires, and it’s a direct reaction to our environment. It’s about how we haven’t evolved much since the days of sacrificing something to the volcano in the hopes of being spared the wrath of the gods, i.e, nature. The verses slowly build to this cathartic chorus, and it felt incomplete like one long < crescendo, but then what? I don’t want to just restate the first verse, that seems a bit wrote. Then last night I started hearing a new melody, and it took me a while to realize that it’s a transmutation of the chords of this song, but the phrase is condensed.
Remember the coda in Opposite Day? “But if you think there’s something else...” I imagine it’s something like that, something that offers a way forward, like here’s what getting it right looks like. I still get these delusions of grandeur that maybe this melody and the words now forming could get us all singing the same tune, so to speak.
I can only describe it as sinking into yourself to access a stream of vowels and consonants. Describing this is a bit like trying to be conscious for the moment you fall asleep. Everything is very liquid as words swim by. First, I’m speaking in tongues to see what kind of language fits this melody. You want to get as far as you can in this irrational, playful mode because it’s where the really interesting stuff happens. When you get too far from the shore, you jump over to the lobe that’s trying to stay on topic. The voice that asks, “What am I trying to say here?” can be a buzzkill, but worth checking in with periodically. When the message is the main driver, it leads to clunky explanatory stuff. If I’m trying to say what I mean, I’d use a word like “ideology,” but that’s the last word we want to hear in a song. Then there’s the rhyme scheme, which can feel like a crossword puzzle/problem-solving part of the brain. Right now, I’m playing with “bringing a butter knife to a gunfight / tell me what it looks like if we get it right.” I’m thinking of swapping the knife with the night-light. Maybe none of this will end up in the final, but once you crack it open, it will grind forward till it’s something.
During the pandemic, I found myself going to bed early, knowing I won’t fall asleep for a while just so I can have this time in my head to mess around with different ways of phrasing a lyric, then wake up at 3 AM and open up that song file, banging on it some more. The most important thing for me is that the melody doesn’t start making compromises to the words and that it resonates in my mouth in a way that you can’t imagine it being anything else.
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