Chapter Seven: Improving EDIT
From Songfarmer: Writing More and Better Songs
Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Prompts, Conclusion
Improving Edit
“The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.”
- Leonard Cohen
“I take the tired verses and throw them out.”
- Loudon Wainright III
“Then something better shows up in that ninth or tenth verse than what you had before. And you go, ‘Oh’.”
- Tom Petty
Beat the Line and Overwriting
Once you have gathered a few lines into your manicured zone, you can start playing an EDIT game called “Beat the Line.” How to play: Take a lyric or line from the wild zone to the manicured zone. In other words, you select a line and put it in the structure of your song. For example, you might use it as the first line of a verse, or as the first line of a chorus, or anywhere your taste and judgment says it might fit. Then assume that’s the line you will use in the song, unless a better one comes along. Next, try to imagine a new or tweaked hypothetical line that would be better than the line you have in that spot now.
Yes, you will have to FLOW to come up with ideas to beat it, and your EDIT mode will decide whether it is stronger or not. If what you find in the recent FLOW is not stronger, the original line stands, and you did not beat the line. It remains king of that spot.
If, on the other hand, you did come up with something stronger than the original, then that becomes the new line, and you move the defeated line back to the wild zone or to somewhere else in the song.
To take the idea further, instead of just focusing on beating single lines, try overwriting, or writing more whole verses than you will need for a particular song to be sure you have found the best words, phrases, and lines for your lyric. So if you imagine a song needs three verses, compose five, seven, or even ten verses to see whether lines emerge that you like better than what you have.
The following are topics and questions to pose when in the EDIT mode. When reviewing your draft of lyrics, consider:
Development - Does something happen or change from the beginning to the end of the song?
Pronouns - Is it clear who is speaking or which perspective the song is from? Is it from first person (I, me), second person (you), or third person (he, she, they). Or does it blend these perspectives in a logical way?
Phrasing - Can you eliminate excessive or redundant words? Do the words fit the melody comfortably?
Clarity - Is it clear or apparent what is happening in the song? When you ask your buddies about it do they “get” the actions of the song?
Believability - Do people behave like this? Would your characters really do or say these things?
Images - Can you put more vivid pictures, sounds, smells, dialogue into the lyric? Can you create a lyric so rich with images that it seems like listeners just traveled somewhere and interacted with your characters?
Contrasts - Can you set up opposites or polarities to make the ideas pop?
Mystery - Can you leave out some facts so that listener has to solve a mystery or play detective at some point in the song?
Repetition - Can you repeat something often enough that it is singable or a welcome resting place or break from new information?
Metaphor - When you introduce a metaphor to compare one thing to another, is it consistent and logical?
Originality - There’s no such thing. Borrow small pieces from many, because there’s nothing new under the sun, but there can be fresh combinations. You can learn a lot from writing your own lyrics to an existing song. (That’s what Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan did many times.) Then, after you’ve got a newly composed lyric, you can just come up with another melody for them!
Ending - Does the end of the song feel like a return to home, a transformed reflection of the beginning, or a loop closed?
Associated words
When composing the first draft of your song, you may have produced a list of words related to your song seed. Now that you are in an EDIT mode, take second look at your seed, and switching back to the FLOW mode, produce one more list of words related to either that initial seed or to the central phrase in the lyric. The object of this exercise is to see if you have fully explored the ideas in your song and to see if obvious (or less obvious) associated words can be used to improve individual lines in the song.
Vary sounds
Use a variety of sounds in your song to keep the lines sounding fresh to the ears of your listeners. While you are composing, use the EDIT mode to determine what sounds your lines end with. Consider vowel sounds in particular, because vowels sing well. Specifically, think of the long vowel sounds (A, E, I, O, U) and see if you have an: “ay” rhyme, “ee” rhyme, “eye” rhyme, “oh” rhyme, or an “oo” rhyme.
If you don’t have one of these long vowel sounds, use your FLOW mode to produce a few words that end in this sound that might make sense in your song. Then continue to use FLOW mode to come up with the words in the line that precede your rhyme. For example, if you don’t have an “ay” rhyme, you might use FLOW mode to produce day, stay, and way. Then you’d use FLOW mode to come up with the words that set up one of these end of line sounds: “When you walked by today.” Then come up with the line that follows this one, “I hoped you’d look my way.”
To take this idea of sounds further, you might think of word families to vary the sounds in your song. Word families are words that have a common feature or pattern; they have some of the same combinations of letters in them and a similar sound. The most common 37 word families in English are: ack, ain, ake, ale, all, ame, an, ank, ap, ash, at, ate, aw, ay, eat, ell, est, ice, ick, ide, ight, ill, in, ine, ing, ink, ip, it, ock, oke, op, ore, ot, uck, ug, ump, unk. Try ending some lines with these sounds. That is, use FLOW mode to produce a word list and then produce the lines that end with these words.
Rhymes
Rhymes provide patterns, and patterns help the brain organize information. When you use rhymes in songs, you establish patterns that make the information in your song easier to remember. Because rhymed lines are more memorable than unrhymed lines, most songwriters are looking to rhyme words that fall at the ends of lines. One additional way to enhance the memorability of your lyrics is to try to create internal rhymes (when it suits the song.)
An internal rhyme is:
- two sounds that rhyme within a single line (before the last word of the line), or
- a rhyme that happens between two sounds in two different lines but not located at the ends of those lines
If used correctly, internal rhymes add rhythms and a kind of pleasing snap to lyrics.
Hard rhymes
As an experiment, throughout the course of a song you are composing, try using only hard rhymes, that is, perfect rhymes at the ends of your lines. For example, with word “stone” you could use “alone” but not “home.” You will end up saying things with your lyrics that you might not have anticipated by sticking to hard rhymes as you compose lyrics.
Feminine rhymes
Feminine rhymes are two syllable rhymes, like drinking and thinking, or father and bother. They can sometimes have a more memorable quality in a lyric because there’s twice as much rhyming happening at the end of lines and the two syllable words are encountered slightly less frequently than single syllable words.
Repetition
It seems obvious, but then, maybe that’s why we need to remind ourselves that building in repetition makes songs more memorable. Repetition builds familiarity into a lyric that allows the brain to rest and enjoy before tackling new information in the rest of the song. The tradition of choruses that come around a few times in a song is based on the enjoyment of repetition, but even for songs without Verse-Chorus-Verse structures or songs without refrains, repetition can be employed. If you are writing a song without a chorus or without a refrain, you can still find spots to repeat phrases or words to provide pattern and familiarity for the listener.
Cliché
To make your lyric more memorable, do your best to avoid clichés or overused expressions. Go for a fresh comparison or statement in your lyric - to add a new twist or unexpected perspective and to pass up the most obvious or frequently used ideas. The best cure for cliché is knowing a lot about your subject, or writing about what you know, because your experience will direct you to the more nuanced features of your subject and not just the surface, superficial ideas.
Hear your song a different way
While you are composing melody or finding a way to sing lyric fragments, move to a different key from the key you were playing in initially to compose the song. Try some of the melody in the new key to see how it strikes you from that new position on the guitar or piano. Or play the song in the same key you were writing in, but use a capo on the guitar. Sometimes the different voicings of different chords can influence melodic choices or overall feeling, and can send you off down fruitful paths.
Once you have some words and melody coming together, try singing and playing your song directly to the wall and listen to your song bouncing back at you. We are used to hearing the sound of our singing in our heads, but the wall will reflect the sounds back to your ear with a delay of milliseconds. Using that bounce of the sound waves against the wall in the EDIT mode can give you a slight distance and enable you to evaluate and “listen” to your song more objectively.
Finally, as a way to hear and evaluate the current state of your song, record it on a voice memo and play it back. Listen to it as if you didn’t write the song. Try to put yourself in the perspective of someone hearing the song for the first time and take notes on what you like and what could be better.
Chords
Interesting chords can sometimes produce unique melodies or create a feeling you can explore with lyrics, so ask your musician friends if there are any new chords they know that they can show you. If there is a new chord you have learned, try it out while you are composing and see if it suggests any promising possibilities for the lyric and melody you are composing. Try a diminished chord, a minor chord, or inverted chord with the usual order of notes switched around to see if it adds to or detracts from the movement of the melody. For a performing habit, keep a copy of a chord reference book like Mel Bay’s Guitar Chords (or the Chord Garden section in the back of this book) around and in easy reach, and try to learn one new chord a week.
Development
Listeners expect development in a song. What do we mean by “development?” In many ways, a song is a story, and listeners expect that songs and stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and that by the end, something has changed. Components that can change:
- The character can change his belief, attitude, or behavior
- The perspective can shift from a close up focus to a wide focus, or vice versa
- The questions posed in the song are answered
In general, strive for something to be different from the beginning to the end of the song.
Bridge
The right time to think about adding a bridge is usually after the verses and choruses of the song are mostly finished. A bridge section usually brings musical and/or lyrical contrast, new twists, or some form of development. Thinking about a bridge is a good time to ask: what haven’t I said about this subject or situation that might be relevant? Not every song needs a bridge, but it’s usually a good exercise to consider a bridge, even if you just rule it out.
Truth, resonance, and timelessness
People have varying opinions on many subjects, but there remains significant overlap in our various views, and that overlap we can call truth. When we encounter these rare observations or statements, the essence of the idea feels valid for many people across many of different various experiences. A song with truth is one that you can sing over and over again. When you have found lyrics with truth, you can look people in the eyes as you perform it, because it is something you can stand behind with confidence.
Truth can emerge from the EDIT mode when a rough idea is polished and refined to a state of clear meaning, and truth can also emerge from the FLOW mode when a line pops out with all the necessary equipment in place to communicate and connect. “Resonance” might be the presence of a near universal truth in a song, and most of us hope we can find songs that have this quality in the finished versions. To highlight truth in a lyric while revising, in EDIT mode, ask yourself: what is true about this song? If it’s not already in the song, stated in an economical way, try to compress those lines. Use EDIT and FLOW to rewrite anything that you do not feel is true or credible.
To test whether you believe a lyric: sing it. If it is hard to sing with conviction, most audiences will detect this subtle backing off, and the song will probably be held back by this lyric. It should be rewritten.
Another way to think of lines that you can sing year after year is the quality of timelessness. Timelessness means that it deals with the truth of the human condition and some universal concerns in the lyrics. Sometimes saying something that you feel but have never said out loud before can be a way to find truth, resonance, and timelessness.
Don’t explain everything
Listeners and audiences like to play along, and you can allow them room to play along by not filling in every single gap in your lyrics. The Rolling Stones used to go through their song lyrics, crossing out lines at random, to make sure that the exact meanings were open and intriguing enough to be memorable. (For example, “Jumping Jack Flash” was initially about a gardener walking in wet rain boots during a storm, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took out the lines in the song that made that too clear.)
Phrasing and singability
The best way to refine, polish, and test your draft of a song is to perform it. Each time you perform a new song, in your room against the wall or face to face with your fellow humans, you will get closer to the true path and true shape of the song. You will find comfortable and uncomfortable spots and you might get ideas for helpful revisions. Sometimes, while performing, you will unintentionally sing a better word or a better phrasing of the lyric. Sometimes the energy of performing will show you a better key for the song or a way to vary the melody or rhythm.
However, while you are performing in public, focus entirely on communicating and connecting, and put the EDIT mode completely away, out of your mind. Afterward, you can revisit your memory of performing the songs to identify spots that might need some tweaking or ideas that didn’t come across. Some songwriters maintain a rule that “the song doesn’t exist unless you can perform it,” and every time you play a song, you will learn something about it.
Imitation is the best form of flattery
If you get stuck with a song, sometime it helps to imagine your songwriting or musical heroes. What would your favorite singer do with this idea or lyric? Imitate them to discover possible answers for your own songs. Once you get moving forward with an idea again, you can drop the imitation, or keep it going if it’s working. An extreme version of this idea: you could write new lyrics to an existing song. Then once the lyric is finished, you could compose a new melody for the lyric you wrote. A less extreme version of this idea: cover that songs you love. Learn the lyric, chords, melody until you can perform it without notes or lyric sheets. You will unconsciously and consciously learn techniques, structures, tricks, and phrasing that may eventually help you to compose songs.
Folders
By now, you know that we recommend keeping a file or a folder that holds seeds, but you should also have a folder for finished songs. (These can be physical or digital folders, whatever you prefer.) Additionally, you should have another “middle” folder for songs that are in draft form but not “finished.” Keep these three folders together, side by side, so that you are motivated to move ideas from a seed folder to a drafts folder, and then to move drafts to final folders of songs. Having a trusted system or a set of folders where ideas grow up, stage to stage, folder to folder, will assure the songwriter consciousness inside you that the ideas you generate will be stored, evaluated, and used, and that nothing will slip through the cracks.
Feeling stuck
When you feel stuck on an idea that has passed the SEED stage but not yet a finished song, there are two things to do. Either:
FLOW in a focused way to find material that might fit in and fill in the gaps, or
Take a break from composing for a while and switch to another activity, like driving, another one of your habits, mowing the yard, folding the laundry, or sleeping. Your subconscious mind will be churning on the problem, and odds are, it will present a solution to you suddenly or the next time you sit down to compose.
The main thing is to remain calm and believe that solutions will appear, even in a period of uncertainty about the future shape of the song. Your patience over time, the good taste and skills you’ve developed with your habits, and the problem-solving work of your unconscious and conscious mind will find a lyric and melody that feel right.
Finishing what you start
Many songwriters will tell you they have a principle that helps keep them moving forward and it is “finish everything.” What this means: once you begin growing a song from a seed, you stick with it and move it along from the seed stage to a first draft stage. This principle doesn’t mean every seed has to be developed, it means that once you begin expanding a seed that you usually see it through to a finished first draft.
Most songwriters further revise beyond the first draft through multiple drafts of songs, but the point is to get to the first draft in order to assure yourself and your songwriting consciousness that:
- You will not judge the song’s worth in the middle of growing it
- You will learn something from every song you complete
- You will be employing the Rule of Nine (see Chapter 3)
- Writing up everything to a completed stage will close open loops in your mind
One more way to think about finishing things: try thinking of every song as a table that you are making. Some tables are big, ornate formal dining room tables and some are crooked little kids’ tables, but for it to be a table, it needs four legs and a flat surface. So go ahead and get all the seeds you begin composing to a playable song form.
One alternative to finishing an idea to first draft form, is consciously putting it into a folder or a file that you can access later that is labeled “On Hold” or “Fragments.” That action of putting the idea “on hold” will free your mind from thinking about the idea because your mind can’t stand ambiguity and now you have made that “on hold” status of that idea clear. Therefore, the idea doesn’t need to be on the active list of commitments that your mind automatically monitors every day.
Unicorns
Like reports of unicorns, there are tales of songwriters who, in a fury of FLOW, write down pages of lyrics and the song is basically finished. These cases are extremely rare. But every now and then you may catch one, so just hold on and enjoy the ride.
By far, the more common writing style is getting down the basic structure and a few key ideas about the song in an early draft, and then using EDIT mode to improve it.