Writing Songs - Strumming down Another Avenue of Creation.

So I have written two songs.

I don’t count the one I wrote for health class for some kind of weird project in grade school.

The first song I wrote was for a friend’s birthday last year. The second was for my friends’ wedding anniversary.

The first song was easy. I don’t know why. It flowed. Words and melody just worked. I was heavily influenced by Fleetwood Mac, same chord family/progression. I didn’t intend for that to happen but that bluesy folk music just seemed to fit the overall theme of melancholy I was going for. And I did write the words first, working in the rhythms and rhymes. I figured I could change the lyrics as I went. It was a lot like writing poems but simpler. I have always found that writing poems is really hard. Every single word, phrase, line break has to count, has to have meaning. I’m not saying songs aren’t like that but I think there is more freedom to slide around the poetic forms within the boundaries of song writing. To be honest, I think there is a lot of freedom in poetry as well but without the music entwined with the words, the audience tends to focus only on the words.

The second song, on the other hand, was a struggle. I came up with the chorus first. I thought I found a good hook. I wanted this song to be upbeat and a little faster than the last one. Then I started to write the verses…and lo and behold, they completely changed the song. When I put those verses together with the chorus, they just didn’t mesh. I spent literally hours trying to get them to work together, but although the words worked together, the melody and tempo most certainly did not. I had to take a step back and rethink that wonderful chorus I had started out with because the verses were so much better – melody and lyric-wise. I also had to give my poor fingers a break. Trying to play the ukulele for that long without a break was shredding my fingertips. I tried again the next day. I used a piano app to work on the melody and an ukulele app to work out the chords. But I still had problems reconciling the two parts. Finally, after 3 hours of playing and singing around my house, I got something that I thought would work and I recorded it before I lost it forever. By that time, my fingers were beyond red and my voice was nearly gone.

And they loved it which of course made it totally worth it.

As another outlet for my creativity, I have found songwriting to be challenging, trying and most of the time fun. Will I keep doing it? I don’t know. I hope I get the calling to try again.