Emotions and songwriting

I have said before that music has the most direct link with emotion of any art form. I cannot claim to have run or read about any sorts of neurological tests on this, but I'll continue to make that claim until proven otherwise, based on my own experience. You can look at a great painting or watch a great play and be swept up in it, sure, but there's something about music that allows it to dig right through to the emotional center and press just the right buttons.

Seeing as how music can so easily evoke emotions, it makes sense that songwriters can use music to express their emotions. For many songwriters and musicians, songs are their primary way of expressing how they feel. Sometimes it comes across only in the lyrics, while sometimes the music itself is an expression of deep emotions.

It seems that the songs to which people respond most passionately are not just ones that tap into emotion, but ones that tap into negative emotion. Loneliness, heartbreak, sorrow, loss - these are the emotions that seem to connect best through song. Songs can make us cry more easily than they can make us laugh, but even the saddest songs do not usually leave us feeling depressed. On the contrary, they make us feel like someone understands. They may even evoke a sort of ecstatic response.

Songs cannot usually be written with the same degree of emotion that one experiences when listening to them. There are some styles, such as blues, where this may not be the case precisely, but such styles are usually steeped in traditions so that you are not so much writing songs as variations on a song, leaving you free to feel out the rest. Putting together a fully original work requires one to temper one's emotions a bit.

This is not to say that songs do not spring from deep emotion. They certainly do, very often. It's just that the craft of songwriting involves more than that. It involves structuring the song to get the most out of the emotion. It involves putting thought into how the words and music work together to bring about that transcendent quality that makes listeners feel what the songwriter feels.

I think it would be accurate to say that most of the emotion comes through in the performance rather than the writing of the song. A great singer can convey a range of emotions with his or her voice. I have heard guitarists who can make a guitar reach incredible levels of expressiveness.

The songwriter's job, then, is to craft a song that allows the performers to do the job of expression. It is to create the proper rises and falls within the structure and use the right chord combinations and melodic lines, so that performers are able to get the rest of the job done.

Experimentalism in music, Part 2

Nietzsche once said (or wrote, anyway, in German), "What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?" To borrow from him, then, what good is a song that does not even carry us beyond all songs? When we create a song, our usual goal is to take the listener somewhere else. The best songs are those that transcend their songness and truly do bring one to a new place.

And what better way to explore new places than through experimentation?

Dictionary.com defines an experiment as "a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc." I want to contrast this with the common perception of what is experimental music. As I mentioned in Experimentalism in music, Part 1, most people think of experimental music as the stuff that gets categorized as "experimental" - noisy music that doesn't stick to the standard rules in some way.

To call this music experimental, however, is not quite right. It is certainly unconventional music, but lack of convention is not sufficient for something to actually be experimental. Rules can and have been broken for a long time. An experiment requires that they be broken in a new way.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of experimentation in which a songwriter can engage. I call them artistic experimentation and personal experimentation, although I'm open to better names if anyone would care to suggest them.

Artistic experimentation

Artistic experimentation is what we normally think of when we consider experimental music. It is experimentation with the art form. That is, it is attempting to do with a song what others have not done. It may be something relatively subtle, such as a song like the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", which featured a novel combination of instruments. Or it may be quite obvious, such as Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", which was unusual and new in a variety of ways. The main point of an artistic experiment is that it tries something new with the art form, or at least something so rarely done that it is still novel.

What is not artistic experimentation is freestyle or formless playing. Avant-garde jazz, for instance, is not experimental music, though many would call it that. It is just unconventional music. Progressive rock after the mid-1970s or so is not particularly experimental, either. In general, if a song is well within the bounds of an established genre (whatever else I might think of genre being moot here), it is not experimental. The term "experimental" has been greatly misapplied to various songs and styles over the years. As I said, lack of convention

Personal experimentation

Personal experimentation is quite different and much more subjective. It is experimentation with one's personal craft. That is, it is attempting to do with a song that which you have not done before. For instance, if I were to try writing a straight blues song, it would be a personal experiment, since I have never written a straight blues song. If Madonna were to create a death metal song, that, too would be a personal experiment. Whether a song is a personal experimentation is entirely dependent upon the one creating the song, so just about any song can be an experimental song in this way.

Most experimentation, for obvious reasons, is personal experimentation rather than artistic experimentation, but it is artistic experimentation that we are talking about most of the time when we discuss experimental music.

The benefits of experimentation

Just as science experiments advance science, so experiments with songwriting advance the songwriting craft. When one encounters a composition that is a novel take on how to put a song together, it enters the cabinet of possible ways of writing a song. All the various conventions that exist in songwriting today are one-time experiments, from the verse-chorus setup to the I-IV-V-I (and various other) chord progressions to the 4/4 meter and so on.

Artistic experimentation in songwriting is actually pretty rare in mainstream music. We hear experimentations with recording techniques quite a bit, but the fundamental song beneath those recording tricks is usually somewhere well within the standard range. Once in a while, you get something truly novel, such as the pairing of Run-DMC and Aerosmith for "Walk This Way" back in the 80s (an experiment in combining that new "rap" thing with good old fashioned rock), but even many songs that sound sonically new are not new on the level of songwriting.

So how do we differentiate a songwriting experiment from a recording experiment? Well, there's plenty of gray area. We've defined a song as the basic essential elements of a piece. If you have a rock song played primarily on kazoos, it would be considered a songwriting experiment only if the playing of the song on kazoos is an essential element of the song. Instrumentation is often in the gray area. When part of what we think of as a song uses techniques particular to a specific instrument, we should certainly consider the instrumentation to be part of the song. Thus, if you have a guitar solo that uses finger tapping and tremolo bar techniques, the use of the guitar is part of the song. Or so I would say.

Can you think of some good examples of artistic experimentation in songwriting?

Experimentalism in music, Part 1

When you hear the term "experimental music", what comes to mind? For most people, though they often won't admit it if they are trying to impress their pseudo-intellectual acquaintances, it has negative connotations. Perhaps it is listening to tuneless twelve-tone rows or hearing noisy avant garde rock, or maybe it is something like one of John Cage's sonic thought experiments. Generally, it does not involve listening to music for pleasure.

I have a specific event that I associate with experimental music. It came in my first year of college, while I was taking my first music class. We were required to attend a certain number of concerts put on at the school and write something about each one. Two friends and I attended a show featuring recent compositions, either by faculty or graduate students (I don't recall now).

The concert was attended by well-mannered upper-middle-class academic types, with a smattering of music students like us sitting as far back as possible so that we could take notes. It was a rather packed house, if I recall, the audience consisting primarily of relatives and friends of performers and composers.

What we were subjected to changed my view of music in some ways. The sounds that came from the stage were mostly unpleasant noises that did nothing to stir any emotion besides boredom or restlessness. It was cacophonous and, more importantly, pointless.

The evening came to a head when a graduate student stepped out onto the stage with a trombone and a plunger. There was total silence from the audience as light music began. She then brought the instrument to her lips and applied the plunger to it and...

...treated us with fart noises for a good three or four minutes. I mean really, it sounded like someone had eaten too many beans, stepped out on the stage, and let it rip. My two friends and I couldn't take it. The laughter was too much to hold in. The other people around us glared disapprovingly at our purple faces. One of us let out a loud snort. It was too much.

Immediately after the performance, the three of us dashed out, indignant stares be damned, and, when we made it to the lobby, nearly fell over from the release of riotous laughter. It was difficult for us to understand how seemingly everyone else could just sit there and listen to farts for four minutes without doing the same.

But academic music is a stuffy affair. It is not meant to be laughed at. If you laugh, you're probably not getting it. So they say. I say: it's all a joke, and if you're not laughing, the joke is on you (as I say about life in general). These poor Laputans were sitting there seriously, tricked into thinking fart noises had some deeper meaning.

I was a teenager when this happened. I've matured a lot since then. I understand a lot more about experimentalism in music and the workings of academia. However, I still have that underlying feeling that, for one, you cannot take this stuff too seriously, and for another, people will assume that something is good and they don't understand it rather than that it is terrible if they are told as much by others, especially those with authority. And this happens a lot with music and art in general.

I have nothing against experimentalism. Not at all. I love it. I experiment musically quite a bit myself. But I don't like trying to pass off something that everyone knows doesn't sound good and that has no actual deeper value or meaning as something more than it is. And that is much of what I experienced in the world of academic music.

Inspiration vs. perspiration

We have all seen them: those thoughtful, long-haired young men who sit quietly in the corner of coffee shops with their little notebooks, sipping their lattes as they scribble their profound ruminations about love or life or the universe; those bespectacled young women in thrift store dresses and boots, crystals hung around their necks, sitting on park benches playing beat up acoustic guitars.

These are the poets, the artists, the ones who live fully in their creativity, gleaning inspiration from everything around them and reflecting it back as poetry, song, and visual art. Their minds are always a little outside of their situation, their thoughts always on their next Great Work.

Naturally, these archetypes are almost entirely mythical. They are romanticized versions of artists, believed in by non-artists (and even some other artists) as "true artists". They show up in movies and TV shows, their stylishly quirky clothing making them instantly recognizable as one of those weird artsy people.

In real life, there are actually plenty of people who dress and act this way, but what we see is the tail wagging the dog. People aspiring to be seen or thought of as artists (by others or themselves) will imitate the archetypes, dressing and acting accordingly, in the hope that this will make them artists. Some truly are, but most go on to become bankers and teachers and store managers who laugh about their youthful days as wannabe Bob Dylans over drinks with their friends after work. For most, it is a phase.

Actual artists I've met, for the most part, from novelists to songwriters to painters, dress pretty much like other people do and don't carry around notebooks or guitars. They have time set aside to work on their chosen art form, and they spend the rest of their time doing pretty standard things people do, like buying groceries, or playing with their kids. Those not fortunate enough to be able to support themselves with their art alone usually have day jobs, and sometimes those day jobs have nothing to do with their art (as in my case).

Similarly romanticized is the notion of inspiration. We are led to believe, by movies, TV shows, and other media, that real artists are inspired at almost random times with full-fledged ideas that must be instantly brought to life. There is the painter who locks himself away and paints for days without eating, or the poet who stays up all night writing the most perfect poem he has ever crafted, or the musician who hears the crash of the waves against the rocks and feels suddenly inspired to capture the delicate melody of the water.

Once again, the truth is often much more mundane. I only have a few hours a week in which I can actually sit down and work on music for any length of time. If I had to wait for my songwriting opportunities to align with my inspiration to write, I would rarely be able to write anything at all. There are days when I sit down at my keyboard, completely uninspired, and force myself to write something - anything at all. And sometimes that produces a better final product than sheer inspiration.

The most common way I write music, and I suspect that this is the case for most songwriters, involves some level of inspiration - a melodic idea, a rhythm, or even just a concept - followed by a good deal of work on developing it. I start with a kernel, something that really isn't much on its own. Often this kernel comes to me while I'm nowhere near an instrument, just walking down the street. So, to some degree, the idea of random inspiration may be true. But what inspiration produces is not usually a final product. It is a seed. And sometimes it isn't a particularly good seed.

This isn't to say I haven't had songs pretty much come out all at once. I have. But it is usually a slow, sometimes agonizing process to get from that little kernel of an idea to a fully composed song. Many of my songs go through complete overhauls. I throw out whole sections and write new ones in an attempt to find the right flow.

Like most artists, there are barren times, when I spend hours trying to come up with something and come up with nothing worth keeping, and there are bountiful periods, when I write a few songs all of a sudden and things just seem to click. "Forced inspiration", which is what I call it when I'm desperately trying to come up with some kind of basis for a song, actually works sometimes. It worked to some degree for my RPM album last February.

So what's my point? What am I getting at? Well, there are a lot of preconceptions about how art is created, and as artists, we can sometimes feel pressured to fit into them and work as if they are true. However, artists come in all shapes, sizes, and brands. You are no less of an artist if you are rarely inspired and feel like everything comes with great difficulty than you are if everything you do comes from a flash of inspiration. In fact, knowing how to approach the craft when ideas are hard to come by may make you a better artist.

One must create the art that one creates as one creates it. As long as it comes, the means aren't that important. Sometimes, it's a lot more boring and mundane and tedious than we'd like it to be. And that's okay.