Erik Didriksen’s FAWM profile begins thus:

Erik Didriksen originally began his songwriting career writing awful minute-long compositions in a demo version of Fruity Loops. The first song he wrote worth listening to was written about a year later about a girl who, to this day, can’t stand him. (If she ever heard it, her opinion might change.)

You might think from this humorous intro that he doesn’t take songwriting seriously. You’d be wrong to think so however, as he’s a great songwriter with a particular talent for loop-based arranging.

His is the final 50/90 interview I’ll be doing this year:

1. 50 songs – did you have a system for finishing?
Obviously not; regrettably, I only wrote sixteen songs over the course of 50/90.  I’m a huge believer in FAWM’s unofficial slogan — “You can’t wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club.”  (It’s actually taped up on my wall.)  That said, I think there’s a pretty significant gap between idly waiting for the muse and lacking all motivation.  For whatever reason, I got that vibe near the end of the challenge, and it really devastated any and all chances of me ending up with fifty songs.

To some degree, I do have a system for these things, though — without it I would’ve never come close to finishing FAWM, which I did this past year.  When I was in high school, I read somewhere in high school that Kurt Cobain would write in his notebooks late at night, just before he went to bed, when he was really tired — at that point, your brain becomes more prone to free association because it’s sort of misfiring in exhaustion.  I took that idea up at some point — so now I randomly will write late at night little quasi-lyrical scraps that I can come back to and use once I’ve polished them up a bit.

There’s a film called “Drive Well, Sleep Carefully” about Death Cab for Cutie on their Transatlanticism tour, which has a lot of interviews interspersed.  At one point Ben Gibbard makes a great little comment about his songwriting.  I’m paraphrasing here, but he says something to the effect that, fairly often, he uses songwriting as a way to document what is going on in his life, and that the resulting songs are much more beautiful ways to remember certain events and people than simply by memory alone.  I think going back and revisiting those little scraps of memory that I accrue fit into that nicely — I document a bunch of little triumphs and miseries and then make them far more beautiful than I ever could have just remembering it.

I would say the first two songs I did for 50/90 this year, “Dandelions” and “Fireflies (We Only Come Out at Night)” are my biggest successes.

Before 50/90, I was trying to lay out all the songs I had written to that point into a cohesive sort of album, and thought I didn’t have anything that would work to start out an album.  I started out 50/90 trying to fix that, and I think “Dandelions” works that way.  It seems totally arbitrary, but that was a goal of mine in writing that.  It also has a lot more chromaticism than I normally include in a song; it starts out in a nice diatonic E major, and incrementally adds dissonance.  That works very nicely with the lyrics, I think; they sort of outline this nice pastoral scene until slowly the revelation is made that something’s wrong here.  I’m pretty proud of the lyrics, too; I think the feeling is well set.

Download Dandelions

“Fireflies (We Only Come Out at Night)” has a lot of the same successes; I’m exceptionally proud of the lyrics — I don’t think they sound forced, but the rhyme scheme is really thick — ABABCBDDBB.  It’s also non-diatonic, to some degree — it’s based around the Lydian mode.  I think one of the things I like about this song in particular, though, is its semi-ficticious nature.  I tend to document real events that happen to me in my songwriting; and while “Fireflies” definitely sprung out of a mood that I was feeling at the time, there’s a pretty oblique narrative of going out and seeing someone on the sly that never happened.

Download Fireflies (They only come out at Night)

3. Music or lyrics?
That’s a pretty broad question…  In terms of my songwriting, I’ll generally start with a lyrical concept in mind — like something out of one of my notebooks — and I’ll start writing music trying to capture that mood.  The lyrics will get worked out to fit whatever melodies I come up with later on.  That’s just a general overview of my working pattern; and it’s mostly a matter of building a strong foundation in my weakest area.  Lyrics, for whatever reason, seem to come to me a lot easier than music does.  So if I take my weaker side and build something strong, then the song will probably come out stronger on the whole.

As a question of my preference listening to someone else’s work… it depends on context.  I don’t need a great set of lyrics for a song I’m going to dance to — but if there is a great set of lyrics, then the song is that much better.  Similarly, if the focus of the song is around the lyrics, the music might not matter so much — but if it’s great music, then you’ve got a killer song.

There are a lot of little musical patterns I’ve noticed over a bunch of songs.  A couple of chord progressions seem to get used a lot on my part — the classic Motown I-iv-IV-V, for instance, appears in my catalogue a couple of times; I-IV appears a bunch of times as the main progression in a song.  Additionally, someone pointed out to me how similar two of my songs sounded — one being i-III-VI (or, analyzing it in its relative major, iv-I-IV) and the other being I-iv-IV.  I was a little embarassed about it; and then became truly embarassed when I did a little analysis on one of my favorite songs to discover that it, too, was a I-iv-IV.  I know the saying is “Good composers borrow, great composers steal,” but if I’m going to do it, I’d like to at least know I’m doing it!

Metrically, I tend to write a lot in some form of triple meter; I really think that’s Ben Gibbard’s fault, a lot of early Death Cab is in 6/8 or 3/4 and I really dig on a lot of that stuff.  You can draw a lot of parallels between songs like “Postcards” and “Song for Kelly Huckaby.”  I try to play around with weird metrical things, too — that’s a big part of my Sufjan Stevens and John Lennon influences.  I was unduly proud of a little metrical hitch in “Father Christmas” from 50/90; there’s a measure of 15/16 in the middle of the song — it actually sounded totally wrong in 4/4, and the 15/16 actually serves as an aural correction!

As for lyrical cliches, I can’t think of any offhand that I subscribe to.  I think it might be an interesting little excercise to see how many times I use certain words in my songs and sift through the common ones (I, you, my, the, etc.) and see if I’m particularly prone to using some bizarre word in my songwriting.

There’s that element of ‘practice, practice, practice’ to 5090/FAWM, but I think more importantly than just practicing is that you’re doing so much of it at a time, you’re trying not to bore yourself.  If you’re only writing a song every half-year, you aren’t hearing yourself produce the same thing each time if that’s what you happen to be doing.  If you’re putting a song out every day or two, you start to hear some of your own tendencies and try to veer away from them when they start sounding cliche to your ears.  And the tendencies that remain — the ones really buried underneath the surface — those sort of emerge as your distinct sound.

I think the other element that makes these challenges so successful in helping you “grow up” as a songwriter is the interactivity.  I’m not just writing a slew of songs; I’m writing a bunch of songs and finding out what I’m doing that works as well as what doesn’t work.  Furthermore, you meet really cool people and start working with them — I’ve been approached by a couple of people for some production help; and I’ve also gotten to collaborate with a few people as well — both of which are incredibly exciting for me.  In the end, I’m not just making music, I’m making friends too.

Related posts:

1. Tim Wille – A post 50/90 interview
2. Meg – A post 50/90 interview
3. Josh Belville – A post 50/90 interview
4. Mike Skliar- A post 50/90 interview
5. Rose Deschamps – A post 50/90 interview