It should be noted here that I'm fascinated by the topic of songwriting. I love a good song. I remember Hal David trotting out that line, as he was taking part in a roundtable discussion I attended in Hollywood years ago. His panel included Bill Withers and J.D. Souther…just a really oddball assemblage of songwriters, and someone in the audience asked how such a disparate bunch ended up doing the same thing. And Hal looked at the others - Bill's rumpled shabbiness, J.D.'s vintage-Camaro badassedness - and said "Well, we all just love a good song!" Yes. That. I love a good song. And, as it happens, many of the songs I love aren't written or performed by the BANDS that I love. I love me some pretty awful bands. Well, GREAT bands, but, you know…not a lot going on in the songs. I listen to Poison, Mötley Crüe, AC/DC, Dio, Bon Jovi…you get the idea. But the great SONGS I love were written by Don Henley. Burt Bacharach. Bill Withers. And older, too: the teams of classic American Pop, like Rogers & Hart, or frequent solo acts like Cole Porter. Just great, great songs.
So, then: some ideas about what constitutes great songs. A topic so rich, I'll just cover single aspects over the course of many posts. Herewith, then: lyrics, and what I think is important about turning words and ideas into lyrics.
For me, words can be prose, or poetry, or lyrics. Sometimes those three things can intersect, but not often. The flow of a poem, which might be divided up into regularized stanzas, is too stiff, too unyielding, to accommodate musical accompaniment. Prose, by its very nature, is irregular and doesn't adapt well to singing. In my mind, I need to take an idea, perhaps put it into words, and then sort of "chisel" the lyric out of the central concept, not unlike a sculptor chisels his form from a block of marble.
Example #1: a song I wrote in between the old Iron Fist and the re-formation of the band. The song is called Magic, and what I wanted to address was my nostalgia for the summer I was 10. The concept was pretty basic: as a full-on adult, I often feel besieged by the onerous details of daily life. Ten thousand little things need to be done every day, and it wears on you after awhile. When I'm feeling particularly worn down by these things, I remember the freedom of turning 10, which for me was the summer of 1978. And so, the idea was born.
"1978 was a great summer. Adulthood makes me wish I could revisit it."
This is NOT a great lyric. But, it's a great idea. Or, at least a workable idea. To address it fully, I decided to try to capture the innocence of being 10 in 1978. Innocence is partly defined by "not-knowing," albeit in a different way from 'ignorance.' Perhaps innocence is better defined (partly) by "not-yet-having-learned." And so, I wondered: what did I (and others who turned 10 that summer) NOT know? Something that was cultural…central to our young society…something like: Darth Vader. In 1978, we did NOT know that Darth was Luke's father.
When Darth Vader was no one's father
He was just a bad guy dressed in shiny black.
Good, good. Now, what else was big in 1978? Well, John Travolta was, in both Welcome Back, Kotter, Grease, and, soon, Saturday Night Fever.
Barbarino turned into Tony
Kenickie soon became a taxi hack.
That's good: that addresses Travolta in his Kotter guise, making way for the much-more-serious Tony Manero from SNF, and also addressing Grease (Jeff Conaway as Kenickie) AND the beginnings of the TV show Taxi, starring Conaway and also coming out in 1978. And from there, the innocence of that time period just flowed, in the way that really, really awesome songwriting sometimes does:
Remember when your Kool-Aid was a purple potion?
And you could play for hours outside, and never need sun lotion.
When the days would last forever, and the night was full of thrills,
When everything was paid for, 'cause parents got the bills.
When I think of all the time I spent inventing dreams,
Nostalgia takes me in her arms, and once again it seems…
That there is magic.
The second verse continues in the same vein, kind of a roll-call of late-'70s-ness: the colors of the time (orange, avocado, harvest gold), some politics (the oil embargo), and all the things I loved at the time, from 35¢ comic books to Kiss bubblegum cards. By the end, I wanted to send out a message of positivity, one that said "Hey, it might be tough to be an adult, but it doesn't ALL have to be dreary!" And so I closed with this:
Mortgage payments and leaky basements:
This adulthood thing is really for the birds.
Aging wizards: you needn't worry…
The spells all work if you can find the words.
You can't fix the here-and-now by living in the 'then.'
As Thomas Wolfe once pointed out: you can't go home again…
But there's still magic.
So that's how it's done in my head: come up with a concept, maybe write it down in prose, and then use metaphor and allegory to turn that concept into a workable lyric. It MUST rhyme, a topic I'll address separately. And the general syllabic flow must be natural and unbroken; the song should feel very easy to sing, without a lot of awkward consonant elision. It's hard work sometimes, and easy others. But, after over 30 years of practice, I feel pretty confident that the lyrics you'll get from the band are the best they can be, and they address the subject of each song both believably and honestly.
