It's been a while since we had a songwriting update! Have we ever had a songwriting update? It's certainly been a while!
Anyway, I just now wrote the best first verse I have ever written, at least in terms of NAILING what the song in question is trying to accomplish! What happened was, I had this pretty neat refrain lying around for almost a month. I wanted to come up with something special for it! It was the kind of refrain that could work brilliantly if it had a song to pull together, but if the song around it was too pat or too blah, it would fall flat. So I wanted to wait for something special, but finally I got sick of that and said - tonight, I said: "Screw it! Slap some kind of verse one on there. I can always come back and scrap it, substitute something better if something better shows up!" (Something better never shows up, folks. Once you've got that subpar verse on there, expect it to stick and drag down your opinion of everything associated with it.)
Anyway, I went ahead. Forged ahead, as it were - determined to get some kind of verse on there. "Verse 1 or bust!" To get my mind right, I began by playing the refrain three times through, then I noodled into / noodled up a chord progression for the verse, and then I started the lyric off like a kick off a cliff, with some rather mundane, cliched words: "All of my life..."
Though I started out with what I assumed would end up being throwaway lyrics, to be written over as soon as I had some momentum going, the whole thing just took off from those words over those chords. It took off and spooled out into a complete, coherent verse, and then I stepped back and said holy shit! Nice job! It's crazy. It actually says something I've been trying to put my finger on about myself all of my life. Crazy. I'm pretty sure I've even tried and failed to formulate this sentiment, in regular words, just prose - or more properly, speech! And failed. More or less, failed.
And then all of a sudden, here comes this verse, out of nowhere. And it fits SO GOOD. Fits the song, fits in general, I am just swimming in gratitude, right now. Towards myself I suppose!
I'm welcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment