One of the most important things you can do as a songwriter is keep track of your unfinished ideas.
Many years ago…
About two years ago I started writing a song. It was a heavy metal song sort of in the phrygian mode with crunchy stoccato riffs and a chorus that I couldn’t sing very well and probably wasn’t very good.
I recorded part of it, but I don’t have a heavy metal band and never finished it.
Ten years previously I half wrote another song. It had slightly embarrasing juvenile lyrics and the verses weren’t up to much but the chorus was good. I needed to use that chorus in a decent song.
For at least 10 years I did nothing with that chorus.
SteamLife!
At about christmas time 2010 I started work on my second solo album, IronBark. I went back to that heavy metal song, made it more rock than heavy metal, replaced electric guitars with acoustic.
But the song still didn’t work because it didn’t have the hooky chorus that I felt it needed.
After several months nudging at it that hooky chorus from ten years ago came back to me – I had to dig through some old cupboards to find the piece of paper I’d written it down on, but even through three house moves I’d kept hold of it.
I changed the key, did some cutting and pasting and made it fit.
Two songs I didn’t know how to finish and thought were dead ends turned into one song that I’m proud of. It’s madcap and silly and the lyrics are absurd, but tis become one of my favourite new songs.
Here it is:
Save Your Ideas
One of the most important things you can do as a songwriter is keep track of unfinished ideas.
A portable recorder, the sound recording function on your phone, pen and paper, the DAW on your computer – all of these are invaluable at capturing the unformed and unfinished. Just because you don’t have space for an idea now, doesn’t mean you won’t in the future.
This song and the others on it are part of the reason this blog is relatively quiet at the moment. Another is that I’ve taken to writing longer form stuff rather than blog posts – be sure to check out my latest free ebook More Than 32 Bars.
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Great post and you’re right -it is a very strong chorus
Thanks, Matt! I am proud of this particular chorus.
Will put up a link post tomorrow – keep up the good work!
That opening riff sounds like music you’d see a freaked out rodeo clown running around to.
Question. Did you rewrite the juvenile lyric? I noticed you said that the lyric was absurd. Was wondering how much was a put two ideas together and how much was put two reworked ideas together. Not that there is much of a difference, mind, but it is of interest (to me at least.)
‘music you’d see a freaked out rodeo clown running around to’ – pretty much the feel I was going for.
Actually, the juvenile verses have gone but the lyrics to the chorus have always been pretty much the same:
Does anyone know what the heart is for…
Does anyone know what the mind is for…
They’ve always been in there. But the original version I wrote when I was a teenager was a lament for how cruel the world was or something equally embarassing.
Whereas now the context is of an engineer who is trying to convince the world that his steam powered machines have come to life and are breeding under the floorboards at night.
The chorus line melody just didn’t seem to work with other lyrics – so I bent and twisted my story till it fit then wrote the verses accordingly.
Whether writing narrative songs abut outlandish characters is any less juvenile than what I was writing as a teenager – I hope so, but possibly not