Songwriting Revisited (Cont.)

 

AI music has renewed my interest in writing lyrics. I started writing lyrics around 1990, up until 1999 when I decided I didn't want to write songs anymore and only wrote instrumentals and ambient music. Now I'm continuously writing lyrics in the flow of other writing, capturing lines that have a musical quality. I may start with a blog post,  reduce it to a poem, then reduce it to a lyric based on its core ideas. But lyric-writing requires a distillation of language that must work within a musical structure. Consequently, the original meaning can get lost in the shuffle as you move lines and couplets around to fit into verses. The final piece might have no resemblance to what your original intentions were–yet you can still like the results. [Like Hotel In Galveston. I actually couldn’t tell you what it’s about. Is it about a hurricane or about contempt for American culture?] Alas, there are always regrets for missed opportunities for finding better lines and rhymes. Pop music requires words to be tethered to the syllabic structure, whereas art songs can roam across the bar lines. You can start with prose as an idea for a lyric. Still, the distillation process will cause you to veer off, and you might find yourself writing a song about something else, simply because the music requires a certain syllabic structure, or the metaphors may change based on the rhyming constraints. It’s like someone telling you your 8 x 6 painting now has to be 5 x 2.5, and you go with it. 

Some of the music I generate with AI sometimes feels alien to what I’ve written in the past, but I like the fact that lyric-writing has become more possible because of the ability to quickly try out what I’ve written. There's always some "band" willing to do a demo--even a band that might have existed decades ago.

I’m thinking that songwriting may become a new form of communicating. I’ve already started a separate blog just for songs.