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Writer's pictureJon Wheeler

Songwriting Check-in (April 2024) New Inspirations...


a blogger with a guitar

I’m trying to work out if I really didn’t have time for this last month, or whether I subconsciously knew that I probably hadn’t achieved very much in terms of songwriting turnover. I’m going to go with both. March wasn’t an unproductive month, it was just… different. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking with it.


So… I’d better explain myself, hadn’t I? I’ve tried a few different things this month, which I’ve kind of pulled together from a few different sources.


In February I suppose, open tunings came into the discussion at our songwriters group. By our meeting in March, Darren the Tunesmith had written something to share, and although I was totally on board with the whole open tuning idea, I suddenly realised I hadn’t had a ‘proper go’. By ‘proper go’ I mean, actually writing down something resembling a song with structure, not just jotting down a few cool chord shapes for future consideration. Some people do that, it doesn’t really work for me, everyone’s different…


Darren had hotwired a previous idea about taking old folk song lyrics and updating them, but he’d done it using an open tuning. He didn’t share it with the group, but he had a go at recording it with Garageband and sent me the result a few days later. It’s pretty bloomin’ good. Game on!


Darren’s song spurred me to get my finger out. Not because it's some kind of competition, but because he’d been brave and considerate enough to share something with me, and I wanted to reciprocate. So I recorded and emailed him a draft recording of a song called “I Get That All The Time” that I’d just written in open ‘D’. It’s kind of a vaguely bluesy ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ type affair. I think he liked it. It’s actually got a riff, which is pretty rare for me.


 

Okay, second songwriters group related song… We all swapped emails, which is great because the discussion has continued beyond the meeting. Subsequently another of the workshoppers, Erika, shared a set of poems that she’d written with all of us, that she’d always imagined had a lyrical quality… could music be set to them? Game on!


You’d possibly imagine that having the lyrics would make it easier, it’s half the battle, right? No flippin’ way! I intuit my lyrics from what I’m processing or what I’m thinking about, and how the music makes me feel. I don’t even know how I feel about stuff a lot of the time, how do you work out somebody else's motivations or lyrical intent when you barely know them? I’m going to apologise now Erika, I’ve done the exercise with your poem “Slow The Beat Down”, when I get a moment I’ll record it and send it to you, I have no idea how good it is. I hope you like it. All I would say is that there was an obvious temptation to twist or rearrange the lyrics into forms that suited my ‘style’, I’ve tried hard to resist that.


 

Then there’s the songwriting results of my walk, which you can read about in my blog “Taking 5. Walking For Inspiration”. Well I took 5, and I got 3, fairly formed song ideas, two of which I’d say are lyrically related to the walk, and all of which are in that same open ‘D’ tuning. Of those three songs “Understand”, “Superocean” and “Black Ash” the last is the one I’m probably most interested by. It couples the inspiration of our day out walking, the open ‘D’ tuning, and an idea in the ‘Tunesmith’ book I’m trying to get my head around about shifting the position of rhyming couplets within lyrics to be less predictable, and more interesting.


If that sounds a bit vague, I’m sorry. It’s not an easy idea to nail down. The simplest way to explain it is to say that in an obvious rhyming scheme, like “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” every other line rhymes. In less obvious patterns, lines might rhyme at different points, or every third line… or virtually never. Anyway, I’ll post that “Black Ash” lyric below for you now, as always, in the spirit of sharing!


Black Ash


Black Ash.

Born of fire, you’re frozen,

Frozen in a moment I can’t see.

Understand me.

The brackish air surrounds me,

Born of fire ignited in a cold silvern flash.

Black Ash.


You stand a statue to the sea.

A shadow that you,

Cast aside so easily, alone.

A soldier on the line.

A thunder crash, above us all

Your smolder skin, the buildings fall

Black Ash.


Black Ash.

Carbon heart and harder.

The music stopped and you can’t turn around.

It’s falling down.


 

I'm aware I've mentioned the phrase "Open D" quite a bit here - I appreciate some of you guitar players might not be totally up to speed with what that actual is. I'll do something to fix that soon, I promise.


Cheers.

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