Adam's Beanstalk

A daily adventure-bag of insights and old bones from an unknown poet in Manitoba's south. Caveat: Not everything is to be taken literally. Things are often shaded with poetic crayons; be the owl. Also, not all these bones are collected from different fields. Find themes that run througout each post and the journal as a whole; the most insignificant event may be part of an ear.

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Song Writing 100: Old MacDonald and Friends

Yeah, it’s much easier to feel God in the music. A story writer steals much more: steals from everyday life. Almost nothing is his own. But music--music comes out of nothing. Sometimes a melody hits you when you’re out working in the forest, in the field. The field is best, you can riff off of the drone of a tractor engine or nearby aerators in the neighbour’s bins. And then you hum, you hum it to yourself, each time changing it a little, polishing up the rough edges. Write some words then, they help you remember the melody until you can record it on paper, on a machine. Words are a problem here. You’ve got a timeline--if you don’t change the words within a week of focussing on the piece, the old one’s are gonna stick, like it or not. It’s very hard to change words, especially those in the chorus, when they have been engraved on the mind’s circle a certain way. Once you’ve got this, a little tune, with some good words, then you can start bending--bring it over to the furnace, heat it up, and then bang the heck out of it on the anvil. You get a generic song if you don’t pound it very much (but sometimes a melody and great lyrics are all a song needs--some songs that are beautiful in their simplest forms can’t take much beating), but if you really take the hammer and start smashing you can get something that keeps the listener constantly surprised. Hey, if you’re feeling ambitious, you can even weld a few of these unique creations together, to get a song that goes through dynamic changes, constantly evolves, never returns to what it was. That’s what I did with "Step Down in the Ground". (Try to find it on the Rustic Poets site). It could have been seven songs, I had that much material. I remember sitting in the backyard in summer, on the old cement cover for the sewer, making a melody for one part of the song, writing some words down, running back to dad’s computer to record it, and then returning to write the next, completely different block. Everything came together in that day, all the scraps that I had been collecting over the course of the year. But you’ve got to be careful that the parts are linked, that there is cohesion running between them. Otherwise it’ll be like listening to a role call in a barnyard, and we all know how that sounds.

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