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in a silent way
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when i write lyrics, they tend to fall inside one of three different sets of brackets:
(1) a direct response to a person/experience, or a manifesto of sorts;
(2) random brain-spill that sometimes contains elements of truth or autobiography, but is generally cryptic and elliptical;
(3) something a little more ambitious, sometimes involving things outside the realm of my personal experience and knowledge.
this third way of writing is often the most interesting. in some cases, i'll read about something, and it'll incubate in the back of my brain for a while, to the point where i've almost forgotten about it. then, when enough related or unrelated ideas have formed around it, the collected information will bubble back to the surface and a song will happen without much coaxing.
i wrote a song recently that drew inspiration from some pretty unexpected places, and there was much more thought given to what the song was saying than is usually the case for me. instead of being something i simply allowed to happen, some amount of conscious craft went into it.
the thought process went something like this.
"i'll give you a shot
and you won’t feel a thing"
there's my first line. i have no idea where to go with it. let's say the shot is a sedative. think about the way it would effect the mind and body. i'll come back to that later.
the immediate question is, who's telling me they're going to give me a shot? it has to be a woman. as long as i'm a man, with my mind and this knotted thing that lives inside my chest, it's almost always going to be a woman. i can't see her, but i hear her voice. what does it sound like? is it round and warm? high and thin? cold and emotionless? wry and conspiratorial?
those are all possibilities. or we could go somewhere else altogether.
"her voice filled the room like a floodlight
just confident enough to make you feel insecure
if floodlights could speak
i guess they'd sound like her"
what do i know about floodlights? not much. but let's run with that.
"a powerful projector on any line
if you were a floodlight
you'd do just fine
you'd distribute your glow
in an even array
if you were a floodlight
well, what would you say?"
there's the first verse in the bank. i'm thinking the song should be called "sedatives and alcohol". she's given me the shot. i'm drifting away. where is my mind going? i'm probably thinking of someone from my past. but who?
it must be a woman. again. even if it's someone who doesn't really exist.
"i knew a girl who was tender and sweet
i remember her face, but not her name
her hands were as soft as a cool summer rain
when it parted my hair..."
i like where that's going, but "it" feels a little clunky. the rain didn't part my hair. her hands did. and singing "they" in recognition of the hands doesn't sound much better than "it".
"when she parted my hair
i was sugarcane"
now we've progressed from floodlight metaphors to...sugarcane. even if it doesn't make much sense, i like it.
what do i know about sugarcane? nothing.
i read up on it a little. when you harvest sugarcane by hand, the field is set on fire. the fire kills pests and eliminates unnecessary leaves. in the aftermath, you cut the cane with a knife.
what happens if i'm sugarcane and things take a bad turn? maybe the rules change.
"she set fire to the field
to burn the dry leaves
the stalks and the roots
would be safe, you'd assume
but the flame had a mind
and a will of its own
now i'm scorched earth
where nothing will grow"
i like that. i think it's a pretty decent metaphor for the end of a relationship, and having no desire to allow yourself to be vulnerable with someone in that way again.
i've also read a about the "scorched earth policy" as a military tactic. it involves destroying anything that may be useful to the enemy while moving through (or withdrawing from) a section of land. if you're making your way into their territory, you destroy their assets — food, transportation, anything that could be of use. if they're coming after you, you destroy your *own* assets, so nothing of yours will be of any use to the invading forces.
one of the more interesting examples i've found involves the scythian people, who were nomadic herders, using this tactic against king darius the great of persia, circa 500 BC.
"when darius the great crossed the black sea
at the bosphorus straits with a bridge of boats
the scythians drew him deep into their grasslands
they destroyed their own pastures
and poisoned their wells"
while his men were starving and dehydrated, darius wrote a letter to the scythian ruler, ordering him to fight or surrender. he responded that he would do neither, unless darius agreed that the two men would locate the graves of their fathers and attempt to destroy them.
this has to be one of the strangest and most fascinating responses to a call to arms i've ever heard of.
initially these details are mentioned in the lyrics. then i cut to describing the loss of consciousness and loosely-implied death. "my speech is slurred, my reflexes slow", and so on.
it feels like it works well enough as an ending. i like the way all the things i cared about in more lucid times are dismissed as nothing more than "dead skin" that falls away (this sort of cynicism is right up my alley). the transition isn't very smooth, though.
after mulling it over for a while, i'm not so sure this is the way i want to bring things to a close. there are other lines and turns of phrase i'm fond of, but they don't feel like they quite fit.
where do i go from here, then? maybe i can comment on what the scythians did and twist it in another direction.
"that's one way to jump from a sinking ship
when you know it just isn't your day
no sense in going down with your cargo
when the hull has corroded and rotted away"
"when you know it just isn't your day" is kind of a limp, lazy line any way you slice it. i'll have to dump it when i think of something better. it works as a placeholder for now, at least. and there doesn't need to be a rhyme there, since the first half of the verse has broken away from the established rhyme scheme already.
what about...
"that's one way to jump from a sinking ship
call it abandoned or derelict"
there we go. that's a little more interesting.
now i'm thinking about "ship breaking", which is the self-explanatory process of breaking down a ship for scrap, as you would with a car. i want to do something with that as a metaphor. at the same time, the longer this goes on, the more disparate places my mind is going to drift, and the more difficult it's going to become to draw all these threads together in a way that makes some amount of sense as a song. if i return to the metaphorical syntax and meter employed in the second half of the first verse, maybe i can bring things full circle.
"if i were a ship
i'd be well past preserving
if you were a jewel
you'd be had for a song
my judgement is questionable
my instincts erratic
these things we knew all along"
the song no longer explicitly says it's a dying dream, or a mess of thoughts before falling into drugged sleep. "sedatives and alcohol" no longer feels like an appropriate title in any way. aside from one or two lines that could use some massaging, it now feels like a finished piece that knows what it's saying, stronger for ending in a way that's not so clearly resolved.
what lives in the middle feeds what lives on either side.
and that's how what started out as something of a drug song ended up touching on light sources, sugarcane, extreme military action, and the death of a marine vessel.
someone once told me they felt i never gave any of my songs proper endings. i'm not sure i agree. i think i let a song tell me where, when, and how it wants to end. for every smash-cut to black, there's a song where everything drifts away or dissolves at an unexpected point, or a change is introduced that derails everything that's come before, effectively re-making the song on the fly. i think there are so many more interesting things you can build with musical architecture than just the typical verse/chorus/verse, soft/loud/soft forms and impulses, and words are an element of that architecture.
how many times have you trailed off mid-sentence in the course of conversation? sometimes an ellipsis is more appropriate than the finality a period implies. sometimes it's the words that aren't said that tell you the real story.
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