Avant-garde singer-songwriter Björk comments on using her memory as an editor and gathering lyrical thoughts in diaries:
Take us behind the songwriting process: what comes first?
The melody, always. It’s all about singing the melodies live in my head. They go in circles. I guess I’m quite conservative and romantic about the power of melodies. I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it’s good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.
When do you start writing lyrics?
Well, my writing really differs. Sometimes a song is about a particular emotion, so I sit down and gather all my thoughts. Sometimes I have to write lots of thoughts down in a diary and edit them until I have the right words. Sometimes the words will come in one go. …
Do you ever get writer’s block?
Well, I do have a poet friend called Sjón who helps me sometimes. Usually I have one song that is the manifesto for the album—on Post it was Isobel, on Volta it’s Wanderlust. When I write these songs I usually fill two or three diaries with words. Sjón will then help me narrow it down to two verses and a chorus. In my head I know what these songs are about and I can write books of words on them, but I can’t put them into a song, so Sjón helps me.
Source: Q Magazine
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
Leonard Cohen, singer-songwriter and poet, comments on hard work and keeping notebooks of ideas:
Do you mean that you’re trying to reach something that is outside your immediate realm of thought?
My immediate realm of thought is bureaucratic and like a traffic jam. My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV. Or, as I put it in a quatrain, “The voices in my head, they don’t care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through.”
So to penetrate this chattering and this meaningless debate that is occupying most of my attention, I have to come up with something that really speaks to my deepest interest. Otherwise I nod off in some way or another. So to find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat.
But why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with the payload. …
What does that work consist of?
Just versions. I will drag you upstairs after the vacuuming stops and I will show you version after version after version of some of the tunes on this new album.
You do have whole notebooks of songs?
Whole notebooks. I’m very happy to be able to speak this way to fellow craftsmen. Some people may find it encouraging to see how slow and dismal and painstaking is the process.
For instance, a song like “Closing Time” began as a song in 3/4 time with a really strong, nostalgic, melancholy country feel. Entirely different words. … And I recorded the song and I sang it. And I choked over it. Even though another singer could have done it perfectly well. It’s a perfectly reasonable song. And a good one, I might say. A respectable song. But I choked over it. There wasn’t anything that really addressed my attention. The finishing of it was agreeable because it’s always an agreeable feeling. But when I tried to sing it I realized it came from my boredom and not from my attention. It came from my desire to finish the song and not from the urgency to locate a construction that would engross me.
So I went to work again. Then I filled another notebook from beginning to end with the lyric, or the attempts at the lyric, which eventually made it onto the album. So most of [my songs] have a dismal history, like the one I’ve just accounted.
Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo
Bob Dylan rambles about changing keys while writing:
When you sit down to write a song, do you pick a key first that will fit the song? Or do you change keys while writing?
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe in the middle of the thing.
There are ways you can get out of whatever you’ve gotten into. You want to get out of it. It’s bad enough getting into it. But the thing to do as soon as you get into it is realize you must get out of it. And unless you get out of it quickly and effortlessly, there’s no use staying in it. It will just drag you down. You could be spending years writing the same song, telling the same story, doing the same thing.
So once you involve yourself in it, once you accidentally have slipped into it, the thing is to get out. So your primary impulse is only going to take you so far.
But then you might thing, well, you know, is this one of these things when it’s all just going to come? And then all of a sudden you start thinking. And when my mind starts thinking, What’s happening now? Oh, there’s a story here, and my mind starts to get into it, that’s trouble right away. That’s usually big trouble. And as far as never seeing this thing again.
There’s a bunch of ways you can get out of that. You can make yourself get out of it by changing key. That’s one way. Just take the whole thing and change key, keeping the same melody. And see if that brings you any place. More times than not, it will take you down the road. You don’t want to be on a collision course. But that will take you down the road. Somewhere.
And then if that fails, and that will run out, too, then you can always go back to where you were to start. It won’t work twice, it only works once. Then you go back to where you started. Yeah, because anything you do in A, it’s going to be a different song in G. While you’re writing it, anyway. There’s too many wide passing notes in G [on the guitar] not to influence your writing unless you’re playing barre chords.
Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo