The Songwriting Process

Paul Simon, folk singer-songwriter and partner of Art Garfunkel in Simon and Garfunkel, comments on how he likes to start a song:

“You Can Call Me Al” seems like the perfect example of that combination of the colloquial with enriched language. The chorus is extremely conversational, set against enriched lines like “angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity…”

Right. The song starts out very ordinary, almost like a joke.  Like the structure of a joke cliche: “There’s a rabbi, a minister and a priest”; “Two Jews walk into a bar”; “A man walks down the street.” That’s what I was doing there.

Because how you begin a song is one of the hardest things. The first line of a song is very hard. I always have this image in my mind of a road that goes like this [motions with hands to signify a road that gets wider as it opens out] so that the implication is that the directions are pointing outward. It’s like a baseball diamond; there’s more and more space out here. As opposed to like this.  [Motions an inverted road getting thinner.] Because if it’s like this, at this point in the song, you’re out of options.

So you want to have that first line that has a lot of options, to get you going. And the other things that I try to remember, especially if a song is long, you have plenty of time. You don’t have to kill them, you don’t have to grab them by the throat with the first line.

In fact, you have to wait for the audience–they’re going to sit down, get settled in their seat … their concentration is not even there. You have to be a good host to people’s attention span. They’re not going to come in there and work real hard right away. Too many things are coming: the music is coming, the rhythm is coming, all kinds of information that the brain is sorting out.

So give them easy words and easy thoughts, and let it move along, and let the mind get into the groove of it. Especially if it’s a rhythm tune. And at a certain point, when the brain is loping along easily, then you come up with the first kind of thought or image that’s different. Because it’s entertaining at that point. Otherwise people haven’t settled in yet.

Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo