How to write a song that.., p.1
How to Write a Song that Matters, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Dar Williams
Cover design by Terri Sirma
Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Interior illustrations by Katryna Nields.
Lyric credits:
“Cold Missouri Waters” by James Keelaghan © Tranquila Music, 1995
“On the Eve of the Inaugural” by Peter Mulvey © September Dawn Music (ASCAP), 2021
“Can’t Fall Down” by Jim Infantino © Funny/Not Funny Music (ASCAP), 1995
“The Driver’s Song” written by Bill Morrissey © DryFly Music, 1989
“Chasing Daylight” by Lisa Forkish © Lisa Forkish Music, 2014
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBNs: 9780306923296 (trade paperback); 9780306923289 (ebook)
E3-20220727-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION(S)
INSPIRATION
NARRATIVE
WORDS
MUSIC (IN OTHER WORDS…)
CROSSROADS AND ENDINGS
BRINGING OUR SONGS INTO THE WORLD
THE SONGWRITER (YOU AND ME)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCOVER MORE
ALSO BY DAR WILLIAMS
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HOW TO WRITE A SONG THAT MATTERS
For Raquel Vidal, Rick Gedney, and Michele Gedney, my pillars.
And Toby Shimin.
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INTRODUCTION(S)
INTRODUCTION
When I was a boy…
The phrase popped in my head with a little bit of melody. I knew it was going to be a song. I understood what I had to do. I had to clear as much time and space around this moment as I could, getting a sense of why the phrase had struck me. I had to approach this short line of music and lyrics with confidence, but also with care, listening to the song as I created it. What clues was I getting from the words, the rhythm, and the feel of this phrase? Where was it taking me?
I gently inquired if “When I was like a boy” might be more accurate. Isn’t gender just a construct? Is there such a thing as being a boy these days? The new phrase, swirling in my head, responded gently. “It’s not when I was like a boy. It’s when I was a boy.”
My friend Jaimé Morton had taught me a new guitar tuning called D–A–D–G–A–D. I played the phrase on the guitar and started messing with the chords around it. I didn’t know their names. Jaimé had just taught me how to go up and down the fretboard with the same chord shape, so that’s what I did.
Over the next few weeks, with and without my guitar, I started pulling in information, writing couplets, then verses, about that time when I was “a boy.” I’d just heard Judy Kaye’s version of a Leonard Bernstein song, “Dream with Me,” sung by Wendy to Peter in a telling of the children’s story Peter Pan. “Dream with Me” suggested that Wendy was a little in love with Peter Pan, but she also loved being one of his fellow adventurers. I was that Wendy, at twelve, a little in love with the boys who tackled me in football.
I compiled other memories of being in the woods, being on a bike, and being with the other boys. I wrote two verses over two months. Each verse included some aspect of my boyhood freedom, coupled with my limitations as a grown woman.
The feminists are going to kill me, I kept thinking. I was living in Northampton, the lesbian mecca of Massachusetts, its own Neverland for girls who didn’t need boys at all. Why would a woman call her childhood her boyhood? But the phrase was insistent. I kept on listening and letting the song unfurl.
I’d come to the third verse. How would I end this song? What was the truth? What really happened?
I realized that even though I had lost some of my childhood freedom as a woman, I knew I was part of a movement that was bringing more freedoms and rights to more women. Should I end the song with something about the women’s movement or some other feminist theme?
I also started thinking about how the joyful memory of being “a boy” was something I could talk about with some of my friends. Feminist ideology aside, I had compatriots whom I knew would understand this gender experience. At that moment, my mind brought me to the subject of the final verse.
I was going to turn the focus on… men.
Scores of male friends had confided in me over the years. Their common refrain was “I’m not like other men, and I can’t talk with other men about it.”
And there it was. I knew how I was going to end the song. The narrator would be hanging out with a man. He would talk about what he lost when he became an adult, and he would begin by saying, When I was a girl.
My musician roommate, a radical feminist, heard the song and said, right off the bat, “Whoa. Why did you end with a dude?”
But this was the song I felt compelled to write, so this is the song I wrote.
A few days later, I was a last-minute addition in a round-robin concert, and we were playing songs based on phrases taken out of a hat. One scrap of paper said, “Come up to my treehouse.” We murmured among ourselves, and my friend said, “Why don’t you play that new one?”
The applause at the end of my new song, “When I Was a Boy,” was very strange. There were no hoots or whistles, but the clapping was notably sustained. After the show, a young woman approached me. I girded myself. Big feminist.
“I just wanted you to know,” she said, “I really appreciated that song, and… yeah, I did.” She walked away.
No one was rushing for her pitchfork. One by one, I heard, “Cool song.” And “I liked the new one.” But the biggest surprise came when I was standing off to the side in the shadows. A tall man stood next to me and said, “I was a girl.”
Then he smiled, as if to say, “I know! Me!”
“When I Was a Boy” launched my career. I didn’t know, in the mid-1990s, that conversations about feminism and sexual orientation were becoming deeper inquiries about what it was to be male and female. I didn’t know that feminists would understand what it meant to feel that “boy” feeling in my blood as a child. I didn’t know how many men would talk with me and write me letters about their gender identities. I just knew the song was true for me and that it mattered to me to write it. This was the song that strengthened my resolve to pursue all my songs on their own terms, with all the whimsy and curiosity I had learned to apply to the process, but also with some personal courage. This song and its success reinforced a sense that listening for cues and clues of what really happened for my narrator, not just what I thought should happen, was important. Writing about what mattered to me had a purpose.
In 2013 I started leading songwriting retreats and discovered that I was finding names for the steps we were taking to write a song from start to finish. I noticed that we weren’t just discovering the stages of a song; we were defining the steps that a songwriter takes in transforming a first inspiration into a finished song. This book distills a process that’s shared by me, my colleagues, and hundreds of songwriters from the ever-evolving exploration of how we write our songs.
People have very different ways of beginning songs and staying the course in writing them. That’s why we say we lead, not teach, retreats and workshops. My effort has been to show how we were able to write songs that mattered to us. And, now, nothing would make me happier than to help you, songwriters I have met or have yet to meet, on the path to writing a song that matters to you, and… who knows?
YOU DON’T HAVE TO PLAY AN INSTRUMENT
A common concern that people have is how they can write songs if they don’t play an instrument outside the instrument of the voice. Many of the musical references in this book are to chord structures, and a few of them are described (different tunings and hand shapes) in terms of how I have come to them as a guitar player.
Here are some ideas for working with music when we don’t play an instrument:
1. We can bring our thoughts and questions to someone who plays an instrument and see if we can collaborate.
2. If we’re hearing certain chords or cadences under a melody we’re writing, we can go to a piano, pick out chords by
3. There is something called a “baritone ukulele” that has four strings that are the same notes as the high strings of a guitar. So, it’s a guitar with four strings instead of six. Ukes are lighter and easier to play than guitars, generally. We can do a lot with just a few two- or three-fingered chords (which translate to playing a six-stringed guitar later on if the desire is there).
4. Know that many songs can be written with only seven or eight chords, tops (or even three). A little instrument learning goes a long way to help unlock many forms of musical communication!
However you join music with your lyrics, please, please, just jump over things in this book that don’t relate to your songwriting or that are intimidating in general.
INSPIRATION
THINKING POETICALLY
Here are some words: “door,” “key,” “road,” “river.” Perhaps these words will be part of what we’re doing today. We’re going out the door, we’ve got our keys, and we’re going down a road next to a river. These are the words of things that are getting us from here to there.
Now, read the same words, but think of them poetically: “door,” “key,” “road,” “river.”
Did you feel a difference in your thinking? I feel a difference between thinking about words objectively, as connectors from point A to point B, and subjectively, as the poetic vehicles of how I experience the world. These words take on different meanings when they are the subject of our thinking, not the object.
The term “nuclear family” means one’s immediate family. Poetically, “nuclear family” can mean many other things.
Some people never turn off their poetic thinking. They see children running out of the school door at recess and think of water bursting out of a fire hose. A teapot becomes a metaphor for the entire British Empire.
Some people will consciously tune in to their poetic minds and reside in that space of poetic associations. I write songs for a living, so that’s what I do.
Others feel like, once upon a time, they put their poetic thinking aside, and now they’ve lost it forever. That is a red-herring thought. There are many reasons we step away from a poetic perspective, but it’s never “too late” to have one. Poetic thinking never ends, not with age, parenthood, grief, busy jobs, or the fervor of a political moment.
We all have the power to look at a phrase, a word, or a moment poetically, whether we are at a songwriting retreat, at a stoplight, or in the middle of a work meeting. Ideally, when we realize that we want to write a song, or an inspiring idea comes from out of the blue, we can set a little time aside to go with that surge of excitement that comes with its creative origins.
FOR EXAMPLE…
If you’d like to start right now, here we go. Look at any of the following words poetically and see what happens:
The playing field.
The fire escape.
The waiting room.
THAT FIRST INSPIRATION
I call it “The Window Opens.”
Children’s author Natasha Wing calls it “Getting the Tinglies.”
Novelist Stephanie Kallos calls it “Open for Business.”
There is a sensation we get when we know that something we’ve heard, or the thought we’ve just thought, has the makings of a work of art.
We just have that feeling: this full moon, this stone in my hand, or this strange headline has just presented itself in a certain way. I’m open for business; I get the tinglies; the window opens.
In 1994 my housemate, Sarah Davis, said, “I think you’re going to want to write a song about this news story. There was an ice storm in Philadelphia, and the deejays asked people to turn off their electricity so they could power the hospitals. And everyone did.”
That was interesting. I nodded my head. It was a good story about neighborliness. It was great fodder for someone’s song, maybe not mine. Then Sarah added a detail.
“They said you could watch the lights going out in entire buildings. Even the businesses.”
This wasn’t just about neighbors. It was about civilization. A window opened. I wrote a long song called “Mortal City.”
Natasha Wing heard that once upon a time there had been a plan to tear down Grand Central Station, but former first lady Jackie Onassis stepped in and saved it. That’s when she said she got “what I call the tinglies.” She wrote a best-selling children’s book about Jackie O’s campaign.
The best way to court inspiration is to simply pause and recognize when it has come to us. That moment of inspiration can be subtle, like a little shift, or a tingle.
COURTING INSPIRATION
And if inspiration doesn’t come to us, the eternal question is: How do we get there when we’re standing here, in a world of jamming copy machines, piles of dishes, and traffic-snarled work commutes?
When we deliberately set our course for “poetic thinking,” looking at something from a different angle or letting our minds make their own associations, we might find ourselves at some emotional portal of fascination, a cross-section of feelings and curiosity. So, the decision to see the world poetically renversé (French for “overturned”) could be a first step.
Another step is to value the time we spend looking at things differently and to give the search for inspiration a little effort if things don’t go renversé at first glance. If I’m in a traffic jam in Waterbury, Connecticut, for instance, I’ll look around and see if something opens a window.
The bumper sticker on the car in front of me doesn’t inspire poetic possibilities. It just makes me mad. There’s a baby in a car seat in the next lane. I think a baby could inspire something… but no. Nothing.
And then I look ahead and see that the highway divides the entire city in two. And a phrase comes into my mind, “The road between us.” Something feels different. Something feels… poetic. What is the road between us? I think of a busy, modern thoroughfare that separates two people. Did someone jump into a car and take that road, while another cursed the road that presented such a convenient exit? I pick out pieces of an image and see what each of them signifies. Who is “us”? A couple? A family? What is “the road”? Is it a road of temptation, success, or escape? I ask questions and ponder the answers. When a window has opened, I look through it.
I discovered a formalized way to court inspiration, or enter into a place where I tended to think poetically, when I followed Julia Cameron’s exercise in The Artist’s Way (a book and a practice). I was tasked to create my ideal “artist date,” a weekly time that’s set aside for things I loved to do. I found out that walking along rivers, going to museums, and sneaking out to matinees of blockbuster movies were equally effective for opening the window.
I PLAY TO WORK, I WORK TO PLAY
The motto I use in my profession is that “I play to work, and I work to play.” What my songwriting friends and I have in common, as we court inspiration, is that we invite creative disruption into our minds and lives. We disorient ourselves in service of discovering new patterns, ordering systems, and poetic priorities that can help us in this artistic construction called a song. In other words, we work to find ways to play.
I used to think that by going to museums, the power of the artwork, like a tea bag in water, would infuse itself naturally into my psyche and inspire my songs. Now I know there is a mental middle step between my inspiration totems and the writing of a song. What a museum trip really did was jog my mind out of its list-making, breadwinning activities. Looking at other people’s art took enough gravity out of everyday life to rearrange my linear, objective reality.
If I see a spider in my house, I find a way to get it out of my house. That’s my activity. Maybe, as I convey the spider out the door on an old guitar string, I’ll think of the spiderweb as a home within my home. I’ll imagine a little spiderweb replica of my house. I’ll allow my poetic thinking to disrupt the brain circuit of doing household jobs.
But if, in the course of keeping a house clean, I’m not entertaining metaphors and poetic perspectives, I can leave the house, go to the museum, and see Louise Bourgeois’s room-size Spider. A spider will go from the object of my daily activities to the subject of my thinking about webs, homes, symmetry, secrets, fear, shame, and who knows what else. Museums are playgrounds for my mind.
