On the surprises of song writing

I thought I was writing one song … and then another appeared.

Yesterday I decided I would write a new song.

I had a few ideas: I needed it to be appropriate for my primary school choirs and to have some straightforward harmony parts, and I wanted it to express the ideas of community and unity that singing in harmony lends itself to. In my mind it was going to be about different people, personalities and voices singing together in their different ways, but sounding beautiful, as if one.

The writing process

When I write songs I tend to start with the lyrics. I often find that as I write the words, it’s as if the melody is there in my head already and by the time the words are complete, the song is nearly formed. I then go to the piano and play through what I have written, changing things if I need to. I record this process as I do it — too many times I have played something I love the sound of and then find I am unable to remember it again.

So I wrote out a song with two verses and a chorus. It was about harmony and living in peace and love. Beautiful.

But I didn’t like it.

I wondered whether the children singing it would resonate that much with the big ideas of world peace and neighbourly kindness. Maybe I’m underestimating them, but I suspect that these are the issues that I am worrying about, not them.

So I changed a few lines and then the chorus, saving it as a different song (just in case I wanted to return to the first). This time the line ‘sing loud so the world can hear!’ became the linch pin. The chorus worked well and there was a growing sense of climax which would lend itself to the idea of the harmonies building.

Great! I could go to the piano and try it out.

And this is when the unexpected happened.

A life of its own

I chose a key and began playing, but the melody that came out seemed to fit the first line of the song, and then take it in a completely new direction. I literally played the melody of an entire verse that was not the verse in front of me. I knew that the song that I was playing was about something else entirely. This was a song about memories and dreaming, not about singing out loud and proud.

I recorded the melody for verse and chorus, then went back to my lyrics. The words began to form in complement to the melody and I seemed to watch, slightly removed, as the song took shape before my eyes. The images of a person looking out of the window and daydreaming all kinds of beautiful scenes gave me scope and I found the rhymes enabled me to give the song its structure.

I still wanted to have a song with harmonies so I added these once I had recorded the main song. I tried to make the harmonies emphasise the dreaminess of the words, especially in the chorus.

And so a new song appeared, as if out of the ether, as if waiting there for me to simply transcribe it. I’ll try it out in the summer term and see what my choirs make of it, but I’m hopeful they’ll enjoy it and be inspired as a result.

A rough recording of my song can be heard on soundcloud

Photo by Julia Craice on Unsplash