Dana's Thoughts - (always under construction!)


Song Writing - Part I
-September 19th, 2003

I have been writing songs for many years now, in many different styles and I have pondered this at great length so I thought I would share some of my thoughts with you. Please note, I am not claiming to be an expert! This is not a cookie cutter approach, where I will give you a magic songwriting solution. And if you write with a different set of ideas that I do, thats great. I am only trying to give you some ideas that you may not have come across. One caveat: I don't follow a set of rules with any piece, and how I write changes with each piece. Nothing should be written in stone, unless you are making exactly the kind of music you want and never want to change or grow in your craft, or you are selling millions of CDs, in which case please email me privately and let me know the secret.

One last caveat: I am writing this in no particular order nor am I assuming that you know anything at all about songwriting. If you do some of this may be too basic for you, but I can't assume anything at this point. Hopefully you will find something in here, no matter how much expericence you have, that will spark you to create something new.

Also through this piece I will write down some concepts that I keep in mind when I am writing. I will summarize these at the end, but note them plainly when I get to them, not that I think you arent paying attention, but because it is nice to have a simple list to look at, if you dont want to invest the time in reading this whole article.

There are probably as many different ways to write a piece as there are musicians, and it really depends I suppose on what audience you are trying to please. Or you may just be trying to please yourself, which I think is actually the best thing in the long run.

Back in the days of my first bands of the end of the 70's and 80's I was, like so many people, obsessed with writing the perfect pop song. When I say pop song, I mean something on the order of a great Blondie tune, or some priceless little B52s, or a Ramones or Sex Pistols or even Kraftwerk.....the list could go on. I wanted that perfect catchy beat, something irresistible with lots of punch. I also wanted funny, or at least ironic, or angry. Angry was always a good one. I am still angry about a lot of things, not the least of which is the sickening, mindless pop music that is everywhere, but that is for another time.

You can break down a piece of music into something as simple as time punctuated by sound, but lets make this a bit more traditional: In most music you have rhythms, themes (melodies if you will), and the structure of the piece itself (chord progressions for instance). Let us consider structure:

Here is your basic pop/rock song format: verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus - or as you would technically make this sections A-B-A-B-C-A-B. I must have written at least 100 songs like that, each one I hoped with something that would make it unique. Obviously the formula works, there are thousands of songs that you have heard in your life based on this simple formula, or some small variant of it.

It is not just pop music that is based on this: listen carefully to say classical music, you can hear the same structure, magnified and twisted in a million ways. Certainly I am not saying that all classical music is this simple, but you can find it. It is because the human ear seems to like repetition. Not that this in itself is such a bad thing, and really if you wanted to do away with all repetition - well, of course that has already been done, with serialism. Fascinating when there are no repeats of any kind in a piece of music - but hard to listen to, and you have to listen with intent, what I call deep listening, and most times that is just not possible. After all, you listen to music for the pleasure of it, not as a textbook exercise (unless you are obsessive like me for instance).

As I said, I have written so many songs with this basic structure, and when I started writing music by myself, with no band members, I decided to try and break away from this formula. At the same time I wanted to make music that wasn't so abstract that no one at all would be interested in listening to it. I experimented with trying to do away with all repeating melodies, and just have sections of music that were laid out sequentially, like A-B-C-D etc. . Its pretty hard to do this, although I will say I never completely got rid of themes or melodies, or maybe themes and variants that would serve to tie the piece together. This does not by any means preclude using patterns or sequences. Again, this is not new, western composers have been using patterns for centuries, but now, as is now the case, with the help of machines. More on that later.

One other part of this situation was not to write lyrics, but just do totally instrumental music. There are many reasons for this: one of the things I enjoy about electronic music, as with much classical music, is that when you have no words, the music itself has to carry all the emotional content of the piece. This can have the effect of divorcing the music from any external stimuli - such as is the singer a beautiful woman, does the band look cool, etc. I find this to be liberating in instrumental music, very appealing to me.