Shut Up and Write Some Lyrics

Twenty years ago, I was an English literature major in college. I read lots of books, but found the academic climate stifling. Endless, soulless analysis nearly killed my love of literature, so I switched to media studies instead. Good thing, too. I would have made a lousy English teacher.

Over the years, I've tried to give the lyrics to my songs a certain fluidity and muscle that defies conventional rock song writing. Not to be a fancy pants, but because I wanted both the words and music to be equally engaging to those who cared to listen closely enough to hear them, yet remain unobtrusive enough to those who just wanted to hear the overall sound. And of course, I had a few things I wanted to say.

Many years ago, my bandmates would rib me about the complex lyrics in the songs I wrote for the songs we played. They knew I worked hard to come up with original lyrics that were consistently good and they appreciated it. But one day, they said, "Hey, Ken--did you ever think of writing normal stuff like, 'Oooh mama mama, gonna rock you all night long'?" Believe me, some days when I'm beating my head against the wall trying to put the right words to the right notes, I wish I could.

I don't make these stringent demands of the lyrical content of the music I like. I can barely be bothered with lyrics when engaged in recreational listening most of the time. I'm listening for an overall sound experience. If the lyrics are really amazing, that will leap out at me eventually. If not, I'm not too disappointed if the music and the vibe is really good. In that respect, I can utterly relate to the average listener because I'm not much different. If the lyrics of a particular piece turn out to be profound, it increases my enjoyment. But I don't come to new music expecting it. And thus, i am rarely disappointed. I like a little "oooh, mama mama" myself now an again.

The thing about writing lyrics is that you're treading a fine line between the desire to be autobiographical and the desire to relate and share common experience. In rock songs, personal obsessions become magnified to 70 millimeter Super Panavision Technicolor scale, and this increases the likelihood of appearing self involved to the point of ridiculousness. I'll be the first to admit that I sometimes cloak raw emotion in wordy cleverness, but that's only attributable to personal taste. My hope is that the gestalt of the whole thing will leave some sort of emotional impression on the listener. I don't mind heart-on-the-sleeve emotionalism when somebody else is doing it. In fact, I live vicariously through the work of performers whose ability to express themselves without restraint knows no limits. I admire and envy them.

The process of writing the lyrics for the album is underway. I've had a few ideas in my head as I wrote and recorded the music which I managed to write down. Through repeated listenings, certain vocal sounds came to mind--the babble of infants that sounds like words but are really inarticulate expressions of emotions not yet fully formed into ideas. I know at least what the words should sound like, if not what they actually say or mean. But as I sit down to write, the droll sounds typically from the mouths of babes mature into something intelligible. I try to write equally for sound and meaning.

True to my lit major roots, I often go back to the classic poets of past centuries to rekindle the feeling I get from reading something really good by someone who is unfathomably gifted at what they do. I always had somewhat catholic tastes in literature. I might even read the odd novel or two during this period to get a feel for unfolding drama.

I work in silence for hours, uninterrupted until I get what I'm looking for that day. Some days it never comes. Some days, inspiration comes in torrents. If I get stuck, I go on to another song and wrestle with that one for awhile. I used to keep dictionaries nearby--standard, thesaurus and rhyming dictionaries--but they're al online now, so that makes things a bit easier. I work exclusively at the computer. My eyes will no longer tolerate writing things by hand as they once did. I will write down the odd line if I'm away from home. Sometimes I send myself voice mails with a particularly good line. Any way that works.

I'm working on all the songs simultaneously. if an idea comes into my head for a particular song, I just open up the file for that song and start grinding away. I don't wait to finish one before I start another. I'm interested to see how this way of working will help the album become unified in theme as it is in music. Ideally, I'd love for the songs to have a running dialogue with one another, to let the themes stretch out over the eleven or twelve tracks. We'll see.

I'll let you know how things turn out...

Milestone: Getting Ready to Sing

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the process of flying is described as aiming at the ground and missing. One has to transcend the improbability of defying the laws of physics and gravity. It's an attitude, a mindset that enables you to overcome self-doubt. The moment you get the idea into your head that you're actually flying is the moment you go into a tailspin and crash. Of course, he didn't come up with this idea entirely on his own. Hindu and Buddhist traditions have taught this for centuries. But a steady diet of Douglas Adams in my teens and a steady practice and study of meditation as an adult have enabled me to put this strategy to work in the making of the album.

I've never spent a year on an album in my whole life. I've been adding to the woodpile since September of last year, determined to make an album but just a little bit dubious about pulling it off. And it's funny, because that nagging feeling that you won't come up with enough good material dissipates quite suddenly when you count up what you have and realize that secretly and without fanfare, you have reached one of your goals.

I now have the basic tracks for sixteen songs. My guess is that five of them won't make the final cut, not because they're bad, but because the other eleven songs sound like they work together very well. So that's eleven songs that need vocals and a few other overdubs.

Writing the lyrics, a source of strife and torment to me over the last decade, is starting to happen naturally. As I've said earlier in this blog, writing songs to me is like learning how to speak. The music comes first, and as my capacity to express myself grows and the music takes form, I learn what I'm trying to say. The music tells me what it's trying to express. That wasn't just bullshit. That's really what it's like. And true to form, the words and ideas are starting to flow. I expect to spend the rest of the year writing lyrics and recording all the vocals. Whew!

I had to break through a long period of writer's block to make this happen. The past ten years were tricky for me, and the drama of life left little room for being consistently creative. The making of this album has been a process of healing and learning how to speak again. And what brought me to this point was aiming at the ground and missing. I concentrate on what I'm doing and not why. That's a key thing there: Non-attachment to results gives me the freedom to concentrate on craft rather than what people will think.

When I find myself in self doubt, I stop thinking that way. When I find myself enjoying the music I'm making too much, I pause and breathe. When I find myself either worrying about what people will think of the music I'm creating or believing that everyone will love it, I distract myself. When I find myself getting overwhelmed at the amount of work there is yet to be done, I concentrate on the task at hand.When trying to fly, I aim at the ground and intentionally miss, forgetting the fact that I'm flying and just doing it.

So now it's time to sing and there's still much work to be done. The album isn't nearly finished, but it's a lot closer than I could have envisioned a year ago. Just writing this blog entry gives me a good feeling, and while a certain amount of closure is pretty healthy and necessary, I have to forget even that feeling of accomplishment so I can move on.

Stay tuned. Cutting the vocals will soon be underway.

Musical Dualism

Some of my best friends are critics. I used to be one too until the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously being a creative artist while criticizing the output of other creative artists made my head explode. I was always an artist first, and my time as a music writer was pretty short. I much prefer making music to writing about it. Writing about music forced me to classify, categorize and label. When you write about music, you sort of have to do that. Criticism has its place. I just can't do it.

I have no cultural ax to grind as far as music is concerned. There are people in this world who are all too willing to get themselves in an uproar about what kind of music people listen to. I'm not one of them, probably because throughout my life I have encountered a steady stream of people who told me that what I enjoyed wasn't up to scratch. I don't like the way that makes me feel, so I try not to do that to other people.

When people show displeasure for music that runs afoul of their own tastes, their faces get all squinched up, conveying the same displeasure usually reserved for when someone has just farted. Someone other than themselves, of course. That's why the sour face is immediately followed by a wry grin brimming with smug confidence. A hollow victory.

It's not that I'm not discriminating. I am. It's not that I don't have opinions about music. I do. I simply don't want my musical life to share the same dualistic traits so common to politics, religion, class, education and professional sports. I believe that music should be inclusive. Indeed, I believe that music is that way by its very nature.

As a songwriter and composer, I can't sort my influences into "cool" and "not cool" piles. Those who cling to such ideas of musical dualism would be shocked to find out just how uncool my uncool pile would be if I had one. Growing up, I was exposed to a wide variety of music that I came to truly love--music that is comprised of many opposing camps--and I impose no hierarchy upon those many and diverse influences. All the music I love, regardless of pedigree, gives me the same incredible feeling when I hear it. That visceral sensation doesn't ask where the music came from.

Snobbery is pervasive in all walks of life, and I love music too much to be snobby about it. I don't ever want to use music as an instrument (sorry) to beat someone with. We all have different life experiences, and using musical taste to make others feel bad is demeaning to all involved. It is pointless. It is petty. It accomplishes nothing. It's just music, OK? Relax. I don't get into a froth about what the other guy is into. If I don't like it, chances are it wasn't created with me in mind.

The generational myth about the declining quality of music is the most pervasive one, and it has been passed down since the beginning of time. I often ask myself if the quality of popular music has declined since I was a kid. I think that tracing a clear lineage of decline is damn near impossible since the sheer volume and breadth of music has increased sharply in my nearly forty one years. Who's to say? Saying so would be more a statement about my perception than about the real state of music. I won't presume to tell you how things are because I know that my view of it is very myopic. I can tell you what I see and think of it, but with a big caveat: Musical objects in my mirror maybe be much larger than they appear.

In my experience, no amount of rationalizing, deconstructing or intellectualizing about music can ever be as satisfying as the feeling you get in your gut when music really speaks to you. That feeling is yours and you don't have to justify it to anyone. It is a non-transmitable experience, one that cannot be articulated through words. The number of people who enjoy a piece of music has absolutely no bearing on whether it is good or bad. The class, race or gender of those who enjoy it is utterly irrelevant.

These are divisive times. Such divisiveness has always informed politics and religion and so forth. I'd say that's quite enough without dragging music into the endless grind about what makes us so superior to one another. So forgive me if I pass on having a "this music is good, that music sucks" conversation. I don't have it in me. I don't consume music, I live it. And I can't bring myself to side with any particular camp that extolls the virtues of one musical form while demonizing another. I just can't do it.

As I get older, I find myself less and less tolerant about the niggling, petty twaddle that passes for discourse about the arts. Making any kind of art is a put-up-or-shut-up kind of deal. There are people in the world with the guts to put their stuff out there, and our opinion of what they do doesn't even come close to revealing who we are. But how we react to what they create certainly does.

You Are Here

I've never spent nine months making an album before. Not nine solid months--i took time out for meals and for personal hygiene, of course.

But nine months of writing, adding, eliminating, rearranging, bringing things back that I had once discarded, and putting it all together again in various configurations until it starts to take shape. Well, what can I tell you? It has started to take shape.

It's like being lost in a shopping mall or some gigantic public building and finding the glass-encased map with an arrow that says: "You Are Here". Good information to know. And there's a small but definite feeling of satisfaction of knowing that, while you're still figuring out where you're going, at least you know where You are. I haven't arrived yet, but at least I can say that I'm here.

I have eleven songs. I would like two more. And when I say "songs", I mean that the chords and melodies plus most of the arrangements are complete. I am still working on words, but they are coming. I've made an effort not to try writing words. Very few lyrics have been written, so my strategy can thus be considered a howling success. But the words are beginning to flow.

Earlier in this blog, I spoke of songwriting as a process akin to learning to speak. You're all bottled up, and then a song comes but it's just music and you don't have a clear idea of what exactly it is you're trying to express yet. I think very small children get frustrated because they don't have the vocabulary to express how they feel and what they need. As a grown up, I haven't forgotten that feeling because I go through it every time I sit down to write a song. When you can't use words to express yourself, you howl and moan and cry. And then, as you learn the language, you can be more precise in expressing what you feel so others can understand you. The more I work on this music, the closer I get to the hope of understanding.

By letting go of my expectations, I find instead that what I'm putting together is just what I need. I did the same thing with the music when it wouldn't come in forms that I expected. I simply allowed myself to write whatever begged to be written, trusting my instincts rather than using my head so much. I've also tried applying this philosophy to my own life, with similarly encouraging results.

The major turning point came when I decided to use sequencing tools more. I've come up with much, much better tracks using keyboards as the basis of the songs than an acoustic guitar and a click track. I thought that doing to would make things more organic, but doing things that way just made it more difficult. Best to add that stuff later, after the compositional kinks are worked out and you have a solid track behind you. But this project was all about learning, and I am certainly learning my lessons.

The other big factor is the drum sound. I've finally found a drum sound I like, and i generally leave the mics on the kit, ready to go. I have set EQ and compressor settings I use every time and it really makes the tracks come alive. My early attempts at recording drums were ok, but getting it down to a science really helps the tracks feel like part of a greater whole. Plus, i can play drums much, much better now than I could back in autumn. And I discovered this when I went back to replace those old drum tracks with new ones.

Of the songs themselves, well...writing about music on the blog is kind of futile. But I can say that I'm playing much more piano than I expected I would have, and the types of songs I'm writing are a surprise to me. But they sound like different parts of the same thing, and that thrills me to no end. I'm acieiving cohesiveness without trying too hard.

The only thing that causes concern for me is that the kind of songs I'm writing will require some really skilled singing. In short, I'll have to sing my ass off to make them work. But I started this project because I sought a challenge. I've certainly got one.

Corpus Alienum: How I Created Another Album By Accident

On the way to making the album that this blog is supposedly about, I accidentally completed another album first. Oops.

I got on a roll with the one-a-day compositional plan I've written about earlier in this blog. I created a really crazy track that I originally titled "Alien Bounty Deliberation", featuring lots of freaked out, homemade, heavily processed alien voices over an electronica hoedown beat and thoroughly improvised, wandering and atonal orchestration. It was a blast and I really liked it when I was finished.

High on the experience, I had an epiphany in the shower that shed light on what to do next. I thought it would be interesting to create an album-length story comprised of instrumental pieces with one word titles. I reasoned that anyone glancing at the titles would immediately be able to figure out the simple story line. And the simple story line would have to be about aliens from other planets coming to Earth to eat humans--pretty straightforward. Amidst the hot water and soap, an idea, like so many other ideas in mankind's history, was born.

Those ten titles turned out to be...

Scrutiny

Invasion

Capture

Labor

Deliberation

Ritual

Decadence

Consumption

Next

Paroxysm

You get the idea.

The album I set out to create (and that I'm still working on) had reached another stalling point. It really is a big job and I was beginning to feel intimidated by it. Fortunately, since I had been writing so much material that was stylistically very different, I had an escape valve. I wanted to complete something, to have the sense of accomplishment of finishing an album that could quite possibly whet my appetite for finishing my main project. Kind of like a creative crop rotation to ensure a healthy supply of artifacts.

But most of all, it was a lot of fun. The whole thing took about a month, chiseling away a little every day. All of the compositions were created on the spot. I had no notes or ideas before sitting down. I just started recording and improvising and kept going until each piece was finished enough. It was great not to have to worry about conventional song forms--a medium I love, but can be a bit constraining when your mind is elsewhere. Equally refreshing was the lack of restraint I could exercise when creating sounds and drum loops. It was nice to break out and do something crazy.

I've always been a fan of music that's out there. i can withstand large amounts of dissonance and jagged noise. I enjoy a lot of music that would clear a room. Just ask my friends. Although the music I created for Corpus Alienum isn't too far out as far as I'm concerned, I can see where it might be a bit of a stretch for some folks. It is, after all, abstract instrumental music. But I tried to have some fun with it. There are many musical jokes. Consider it a soundtrack in search of a movie. Or a ballet. If someone wants to stage an alien invasion ballet, inquire within.

I plan on releasing the eponymously titled Corpus Alienum album as a download only release in June. I have already begun planning sequels. This is definitely the first in a series.

Now, back to the other album...

Working Titles

At the end of last week, I reached a minor milestone. I managed to write thirty compositions in thirty days. This doesn't necessarily mean thirty completely fleshed out songs, although several titles have reached various states of completion. And it wasn't strictly every day, either. I took about ten days off from writing when three of the compositions demanded my immediate attention as they were incorporated into the album. But on some of the remaining days, I managed to produce three or four new pieces, so that made up for the missing days. It all came out even in the end.

The pieces range in style from pure incidental music to funk, lounge, pop songs, weird sonic experiments and just plain silliness. By allowing myself to see ideas through, no matter how bizarre, I've come up with three songs for the new album, about a half dozen tunes for an instrumental project and several solid ideas for stock commercial uses and further exploration. Funny how I decry censorship in practice, yet I've spent so many years subjecting myself to my own.

So, for the first time in my life, I have a surplus of ideas. I'm going to keep up the pace merely because I'm curious to see what happens next. When each composition is complete (or as complete as it's going to get on any given day), I do a quick mix, date it and give it a working title.

I'm told that my working titles are amusing. They reflect whatever I happen to be reading or watching or talking with Kate about at the time of creation. I'm including a list of them here:

Twink

Piano Piece Version 1

Molecule

Dark Signal

Petals

Pickles

Bleem

Ledge

Cottonesque

Station to Starlight

Mister Coffy

Green and Gorgeous

Begin the Begat

Jojo

What You See

Anything But

Second Time

Owlet

The Planet Eater

Sub Space Interference

Mid Tempo Number

Botany Bay

We All Ended Up Having to Eat Each Other

Buffering

Clokey

Dust on the Olive

Floating Cookies

I Can Smell the Rain

Grease on the Monkey

The New People

And I added a new one yesterday called "Vacate".

Last time, I mentioned that I planned on re-doing drums on some of the earlier tracks. This turned out to be unnecessary, since fiddling with the mixes seemed to take care of perceived problems. I'm putting the album down for a week or two to see what new compositions I come up with on the "One-a-Day" program.

Fait Accompli

Just a quick update.

I went to my friend Steve's house today to listen to my mixes on his monitors. Mine aren't the greatest in the world and I needed to listen to what I have thus far in a more objective environment.

Listening to those mixes tells me that I'm fairly on target so far. I made only a few adjustments. But I would like to attempt to replace the drum tracks on two of the songs from last fall. Back then, I was still learning to use Logic and still getting my drum chops back together. Now I have a much better drum sound and the mics have not moved since I last recorded drums. I think I would be remiss if I didn't at least try. That will be my job this weekend.

I'm back on my "composition a day" schedule again, dreaming up and slapping down sketches of different types of tunes. I'll probably do that for two weeks and see what i've got. Hopefully, I'll find a few more songs to begin building basic tracks.

I don't want to psych myself out or anything, but I do have a tentative schedule. I'd like to be done with basic tracks by the end of May and complete all recording by July 4th. that's a pretty arbitrary date, but it feels right. I try not to think about it too much. My heart skipped beat the other day when i considered that once I complete the basic tracks, then I have to write and perform all the vocals. This is a lot of work! But I'm in too deep now. It's a fait accompli.

I'm game.