"Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest" - Neil Diamond - Anyone can sit down and write what's in their heads, there's no real challenge there for the creatively-minded. To express yourself in a free-formed manner simply requires that you have a pen, paper, and your thoughts; whatever you want it to be, it is. A significantly more taxing route for those of the more, masochistically-inclined would have to be to express your emotions through song.
Songwriting as always been a performed medium, from the traveling minstrel of medieval time to Neil Young or Johnny Cash of more modern music and that's where I've run into my share of difficulty. Songwriting's cousin in verse, poetry is meant to be savored, repeated, turned back to and scanned as often as is necessary. It is not usually performed - most poetry is read to ones-self, designed to carry the flow and tune internally, whereas lyrical verse is forced to conform heavily to some requirements exclusive to its format.
Because it is an art meant to be performed, a songwriter has, on-average, three to four minutes to get across their message to the listener and make it speak to them. He does not have the luxury of his work being written down on paper and enjoyed at the consumer's pace. Out of those three or four minutes, a third of that time is taken up by the chorus, leaving you with more like two to three minutes of actual time. From there, you have to worry about a well-written bridge to prepare the listener for the climax of your song, so while you can express your message during the chorus and bridge, the real meat of what you want to say is going to be in the small chunks of verse you have left in the song.
Many songwriters feel the urge to first pick up a pen because of uneasiness. That's often how it works in life; our most creative moments are often sparked by our biggest feelings of regret or loss. As Adam Duritz, lead singer of the Counting Crows once said, "...Songs are not about 'I feel sad.' They're about, 'Let me tell you the things that are on the walls and in the room I'm sitting in,' and between the lines of that is the fact that I'm sad. He touches on a good point that expression of one’s feelings is where the power of songwriting comes in when compared to the spoken word.
When Bob Dylan penned the lyrics to "If You See Her, Say Hello" in 1975, he didn't have to come out and tell the listener that he was suffering from his recent divorce from his wife Sara. When he sang "She might think that I've forgotten her, don't tell her it isn't so", you could hear the pain in his voice over knowing that he was in the wrong for their split and that is the gift of a songwriter. Dylan never once came out and said "this song is for Sara", he left a sense of ambiguity that allowed the listener to form their own connection to the song and how it applies to them.
As Duritz said, the biggest difference between songwriting and a face-to-face expression is the deeper meaning beneath what you're saying and that is the advantage that the format provides. Songwriting definitely favors the more introspective side of our imagination over a direct form of communication like verbal communication. I've found that there is often no magic in the spoken word. Where it matters is the magic of making music, you have that unbelievable effect, you are really almost, pardon the corny saying, doing open heart surgery on people with a guitar. Where a song goes in someone's heart is a completely different destination than a quote from a magazine or a quote from a speaker goes. That's definitely where things become complicated for someone trying to compose, though.
So then it becomes the question of how it is that a songwriter can balance the line between wanting to express emotions in song and knowing that it's in your best interests to avoid the specifics if what you are writing is meant for mass-consumption. After-all, a well-written song, like Duritz said, should show why people feel how they feel, not how you specifically got to the point where you felt these feelings.
In my life, I've tried my hand at many different kinds of writing. I've written for newspapers, websites, and magazines. I've written short stories, novels, I've even tried my hand at a (very terrible, albeit) screenplay. The point is, I've tried to experience, in some small way, every form of creative expression you can accomplish with a pen and paper, but nothing has frustrated me in the way that songwriting has.
Really, what I've found is that every song you write is a snapshot of a particular time in your life. Looking back on a library of songs by an artist can reveal where that person's mind was during the composing of each song. There are very few things created in a vacuum, very few songs that just pop into someone's head with little emotional connection to what they're experiencing at that time. The problem then, with such an emotionally driven art form, is that it can almost become an issue of trying to focus what's running through your mind into something that is consumable for an audience.
From a personal standpoint, I've never had issue writing about the failures and successes in my life through something like free-form journal writing where there is no mind paid to structure or form, but quality songwriting requires a willingness to avoid cliche, which is so easy to do when writing a song about my biggest thorn, relationships.
How do you write a song about a subject that has been written about for thousands upon thousands of years and still make it creatively different? That's the million dollar question that has caused a few restless nights across generational lines. What, I think, separates the great writers from the average to bad ones is an ability to walk that line and deliver something truly meaningful and unique that can touch a listener.
For instance, one of the greatest love songs in rock history, "Layla", was written by Eric Clapton in honor of George Harrison's then-wife Patti Boyd. While the relationship, a "behind his back" affair between Clapton and Boyd was the reason it was written, it still stands as one of the greatest examples of unrequited love in lyrical form to date, never mind the fact that has one of the best riffs in rock history and a beautiful guitar coda which, in-itself, is incredibly memorable. When Clapton achingly says "I tried to give you consolation...Like a fool, I fell in love with you, turned my whole world upside down", you can tell that he penned those lyrics from the heart.
In contrast, I could go with "Achy Breaky Heart", or "From a Distance", but those are just way too easy. No, for an example of songwriting gone wrong, I present to you the lyrical abortion that is "Your Body is a Wonderland" by John Mayer. This should be prefaced by saying that I personally think Mayer is a very talented young musician who is a very targeted guitarist, but the song is an example of what happens when you violate every law of songwriting in-order to appeal to the masses. While you can't argue with its success, scoring Mayer a Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, the lyrics are filled with borderline creepy and cheap lines such as "One pair of candy lips and your bubblegum tongue" to "you want love? We'll make it, swimming a deep sea of blankets", it's disappointing that Mayer wrote a song laser-targeted to the panties of the young women of America and less towards displaying his considerable talent.
What I believe it all comes back to is the creative gift of expressive writing. While I sit and end up penning a cliche and trite song about regret, when my mind is filled with these grand notions of what I am going through in the pit of my gut, I only have to click on an .mp3 to hear someone far more gifted than myself express those feelings in an emotionally moving way I have proved completely unable of doing.
I listen to Ryan Adams painfully admit that "If it's gotta be you, treat her nice. Hold her hand and tell her twice that she doesn't have to worry, and it will be alright" and I admire his ability to express the regret of seeing your love with someone else so poetically. When Kristopher Roe of The Ataris sings of heartbreak and how; "You told me that you loved me, I started tearing down those walls. I really started to trust you but you set me up to take the fall", you become placed in his relatable world of working towards getting someone to love you, only to have it all come crashing down. You're able to experience this with Roe because he made you feel the story rather than just tell it to you.
So yes, when Neil Diamond said that performing was the easiest part of his job, he was probably on to something. Performance is all about the moment and expressing the feelings that got to you the point where you wrote this song. Performing a song about regret and longing and loss has not proven to be anywhere as difficult as taking those feelings and filtering them into a coherent piece of music.
'Till next time,
Colin
