Idea To Product (Cont)

 

I just finished Daniel Levitin's I Heard There Was A Secret Chord. In the chapter about using songwriting to treat PTSD, he writes, "Music helps us express and process emotions that we cannot express in words, to others or even to ourselves."

Music can be thought of as a proxy for language--a kind of "emoji", but when you're writing lyrics, it can be an obsession over words, and can go on for months or years, trying to find the perfect rhymes. It's a top-down left-brain process in which the words must be in a perfected order--not unlike the obsessing over one sentence. What I've been doing since last April is highlighting words and phrases that sound musical, and then writing the music from that seed. I don't necessarily have to keep the words, but I try to keep some of them so as to keep some of the "roots" from where the words originated. 

One of the first songs to emerge from this approach was Only For the Action, derived from a diary entry about a John Woo film I had seen, and that we like those kinds of movies "only for the action". This phrase suggested the following riff, which at that time was a kind of background vocal. 

 

Once you have the seeds the song grows from just those words. But once you have the song structure, you're back at the lyrics phase. For singers, it's very easy to find words that fit by just singing against your musical framework. You can use more words and phrases at random (technically called bibliomancy) and you could have a set of working (or final) lyrics in a short time. In pop music lyrics can sort of have meaning, and can be more interesting if they are ambiguous. This way the music has more spontaneity and the words become more rhythmic in nature, something I personally like. Only is only an instrumental but since a structure is there, I can use a submix to sing words against--adding another stage in the creative process from Idea To Product. 

Music can in fact be a proxy for words, but if music has words, words are your tools. In my case, I use them to shape the music itself, then put them back in later in some fashion, where the meaning can emerge in other ways that you wouldn't have thought of. If you use the metaphor of design with music, there can be many prototypes that have to be made before you can have a final product.  With my current way of working language is primary tool, even if the final product doesn't have any words. 

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Dynaxiom 3014. Creating music beginning with words, even if you don't eventually use them, makes the music more likely to be singable.