fumble and record
I'm trying something new tonight. Instead of running through old material for an hour on my guitar, I started clicking through random rhythms on my electric keyboard and reading through misc bits of lyrics I've been scrambling over the past few days. Then, when something sounds like the start of something, I whip out my phone and record the ditty as a voice memo. Nothing concrete as of yet, but it's clear that rarely will these songs come together fully intact. I'm not as prolific as Fiona Apple that way - I'm probably closer to k.d. lang, and pick at phrases and lyrics and hooks before they start to sound right. It's a more arduous process, but it's still exciting. The hardest part is trying not to censor out anything, even if it sounds shitty.
I have to admit with the previous albums, I didn't write songs this way. Sometimes the melody came first, and then the words came. I rarely recorded anything, save committing melodies to memory or scribbling down a chord progression. Today, I'm feeling more 21st century - after all, our phones now talk back to us, why not use them to capture miscellaneous melodic improv?
This time around, I feel as though I'm scribbling first and playing around with words and rhyme, and then seeing what melodies arise once sorting through loops and beats. I have a starting idea of what the lyrics are about, but after tonight, it's clear that sometimes that isn't any indication of what the final song will be. Case in point: I have a set of lyrics that, if I can pull it off, might be a not-so-cringeworthy bilingual Mando-English track. That's IF I can pull it off - because, in my opinion, those songs rarely succeed without sounding just a little bit cheesy (i.e. à la Sandy Lam's "Lover's Tears").
We'll see. So far, tonight, two sets of lyrics yielded some potential. We'll see how inviting they feel the next time.
(Such fickle things, melodies.
Because, after all - "It's only words, and words are all I have, to take your heart away...")