Notes on Songwriting

Originally posted February 22nd, 2023

I’ve started writing lyrics again, something I used to do near religiously as a teenager but waned as I got into painting around 18. I used to do this thing I refer to as ‘tracing lyrics’, like how when you’re young and trace other people’s drawings in hopes of learning something from it. Tracing lyrics is where I took the tune of a song that already existed and put my own lyrics to it. I wrote hundreds of songs this way, posting the lyrics on Deviantart and Myspace. But my skill was limited by other peoples work. I relied too heavily on tracing so when the opportunity to explore a new avenue (painting) arrived I took the chance and left lyrics behind rather than challenge myself to rely 100% on my own abilities.

Before moving on to painting I tried to learn several instruments but nothing ever stuck: tenor recorder, cello, bass guitar, piano, lyre (I’m not sure what I was going for trying the lyre, I think I just liked the notion of being the type of person who could play a lyre) and most recently the guitar. The bass being the one that I loved the most but trying to be self-taught is difficult when I have a brain made for distraction (ADHD). Not that I should give myself excuses. I’m not a believer in the term ‘perfectionism’ but I did read that a perfectionist habit is if something is not mastered immediately then it is abandoned. But the internet just says stuff, so I’m not sure. I see there is another ADHD panic online, just like when I was a kid and “everyone has ADHD now” sentiment. Time is a circle and all that. But anyway, I have had a difficult time learning an instrument, something I believe is vital for being a good lyricist. I believe in practice. Writing, reading, drawing, painting, those are things I have practised for decades, so why is it different when it comes to music?

I bought a cheap, shitty left handed guitar. Tuning it has become a nuisance and it never stays in place, by the time I get to the E chord the A chord is already too sharp. It is constantly shifting and was collecting dust in my sitting room. My fingers feel too small, my hands so inflexible that I can’t imagine myself ever being able to competently play anything. This isn’t my first attempt at the guitar either, I tried a couple years ago on a right handed (my non-dominant hand) Yamaha I got at a charity shop on Kingsland Rd in Hackney. I took lessons, taught by a friend of mine but once we got to strumming it was as if my body refused to cooperate. I knew I had no rhythm but it never feels good to be reminded. Now I’m rewatching old videos my guitar teacher had sent me, trying to relearn the little I knew. I’m trying to stretch my hands out and it still feels too difficult.

This attempt to learn guitar and write songs comes at an interesting time where I’m stuck as an artist. My paintings seem to have been declining for the last couple years, a lack of feedback and community that university brought leaves me with just my own thoughts. I started writing another novel but again, no feedback, no sure path. So I go back to music, something where the progress would be easily distinguishable rather than a serious creative attempt. Which means I would in theory get to a point where I would be stumped and go find a new passion. As I child I used to wonder why so many musicians became actors and vice versa or not very good painters, now I understand the want to rediscover passion. We’re all sorting through emotions, not necessarily in healthy ways, including art.

I’m not of the opinion that sadness is a creative force. I think the discussion has changed somewhat since I was younger but there are still people out there that think creativity is only valuable when it’s sad. I recall Myspace pages dreading the day a member of the band they liked got married, that the music would begin to suck. Instagram and Tiktok share similar sentiments but I’m not really involved like I once was, I think it’s a part of being a teenager. The fear of being happy was echo chamber in the emo scene growing up, as if you will become so fundamentality changed you will suddenly suck at making music. Now as an adult, I don’t know anyone who makes good work when they’re depressed. Making things, songs, drawings, poems, it’s reaching out, away from sadness or at least trying to weigh it out with something else. There is an essay in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib that does a much better job than I ever could called Brief Notes On Staying // No One Is Making Their Best Work When They Want To Die. Abdurraquib knows that for some of us, the sadness will never end, but to romanticise it would be detrimental.

I spoke with my therapist today, who I started speaking to when I moved to America in October, unable to leave my sister’s apartment, I hardly could make it to the post box. Now I can get to the coffee shop on weekends, sometimes get to the record shop, a good place to practice my breathing exercises. The Polish man who runs the place likes to put on Arctic Monkeys live albums and we chat about Radiohead. There’s a second hand bookshop where I pester the booksellers and find all the things I’ve been meaning to read that are piling up in my room. I spoke to my therapist about defining myself by my mental health. Back when I went outside I would tell anyone who’d half listen about all my diagnosis’s, that somehow telling them every detail I would never be misunderstood. That putting it all out in the open would bring us closer, rather than what it actually ended up doing which was put a wall between us. And I didn’t tell her I’d been writing songs again. I’ve never been one to show my lyrics to people except sometimes when I’d been drinking but sobriety has put a stop to that. The internet felt like it didn’t count back in an era of being anonymous online. Lyrics represent something about myself I’ve not explored in any other form of expression. Painting and prose have always been wish fulfillment to some degree. Or a kind of daydreaming, a way to see things more beautifully, more simple, more belonging. Lyrics are the actual.

I have been trying to write a song about agoraphobia. I have been plucking random chords, hoping something will gel and I find catharsis. I think my downfall in this process is being so focused on the subject-matter, I can’t allow the story to take me where it takes me. I admire anyone who’s made a concept album because I think the restrictions would drive me up the wall. I’ve avoided musician interviews, trying not to emulate someone else's process, even subconsciously. The YouTube algorithm is convinced I want to watch every Brian Eno interview at the moment and I’ve yet to give into the temptation.

I’ve heard people say that songwriting is actually just channelling, that we’re not really writing but taking from some higher being or what they call a muse. Sing to me muse and all that jazz. I suppose the idea is surrender. To surrender means to be vulnerable. I imagine myself floating in a pond, letting spirits speak through me, the oracle. I don’t know though, I think in a literal sense, yes, it’s true. We are all subject to culture and society and how could those things not influence and make up our parts? It falls into the realm of conspiracy to me, the muse, and I believe things are actually much more matter-of-fact than people like to believe. They want the secret organisation, the great muse, something grand and exciting. But what I’m writing isn’t coming out of the clouds but right in front of me. I’m sat in an apartment trying to be okay with going outside. It’s not exciting. I’m not tapping into the beyond. Ultimately I don’t care if that what works for you, but I’d ask you not to discredit yourself so easily. Divine intervention makes for a good story but mundanity is where the sweetness lies. I think of The National’s Slow Show:

“I wanna hurry home to you/Put on a slow dumb show for you/And crack you up”

Maybe because I’ve gotten older, maybe because I’m no longer listening to emo music where a lot of the lyrics are just very roundabout ways of saying you hate your 16-year-old girlfriend, but lyrical simplicity is far more interesting and profound to me than the style over substance approach (*cough*Panic! At the Disco*cough*).

What I vividly remember about writing in my teens was trying so hard to be like the musicians I idolised. I wanted to be Adam Lazzara of Taking Back Sunday, swinging a microphone on stage, Hayley Williams of Paramore belting out to the crowd, Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance’s theatrics and his rage. Despite these bands being from the same scene, lyrically they are very different. Paramore write about the lie of growing up, that things aren’t what was promised and dealing with reality. My Chemical Romance are more interested in storytelling, their concept albums stay within the universe they’ve created and lyrically are more like a dialogue, usually do to with murder, drug abuse and romance. Taking Back Sunday are probably the most cliché of the scene, with lyrics like “You could slit my throat and with my one last gasping breathe I’d apologise for bleeding on your shirt”, but they’re since become more Americana, more interested in distancing themselves from the confines of the scene. Lyrically Lazzara I think has grown up the most out of the three, I think early Taking Back Sunday he struggled with sense of discomfort in his work or himself and only until the self-titled album did it start to feel like he was in control and in turn the lyrics more confident. So you can imagine trying to copying such different bands turned into a tonal mess. It never occurred to me what I had to say was all that important, so I tried to emulate others but in doing so muddied the waters even more. The issue even came up again when I interviewed for art university and the interviewer said he saw that I was trying to be other artists, that he couldn’t see me in the work except for in the scans of journals I brought on a whim. The journal scans, decorated with typography and drawings, were what got me into university and it was the thing I was most unsure about. It is funny how life can have a sense of humour about things like that, attempting to recreate others success only bringing you down.

I cannot go back and look at old lyrics and try to find myself between the lines. Those pages are long gone. I have to find it somewhere in the process. Writing now I never have I asked myself so many questions, “who’s that?” when a line comes off like Aldous Harding rip-off or a desperate attempt to be poetic that removes any sincerity. “What’s this about?” when I’m just driveling words that I think sound good together, “how does it feel” when pulling together a bridge and a chorus, smoothing things over. It’s a much more inquisitive process than the rambles of my younger days. I’m still in my twenties, I’m trying not to treat myself like some bygone corpse. Being in my twenties, still quite young in the grand scheme of things, perhaps the best thing I could give myself is a break and let some silliness in. I’m not just trying to find some meaning in the everyday, I’m trying to have fun. Which might be the meaning. Musicians are so serious, it’s why I never liked Camden in London. Full of serious musicians with very young girlfriends who I stood with in smoking areas as she complained about him being a dick. “Has he thought about not being so serious?” “No, there’s someone from a label here. So and so said their cousin will get him a chat.” I suppose I come from a self-serious industry too, artists are notorious for bullshitting meanings into the work since 1945. Very serious works of art. Very serious that you understand the overall meaning. We are all scowling over our canvases because this work is very important. But process is always a different story. In the studio my friends and I laughed, put inside jokes into the work, distracted each other from deadlines. I imagine musicians are likely the same. But when we go outside we must prove our worth. It’s the difficulty with any creative practice, we are only deemed worthy if we make money. And to make money we must not be the butt of the joke.

It’s the tattoo debate: do tattoos have to have meaning? It used to be, yes, of course. It’s on you forever it must be deep and special. More so now most people who get tattoos would lean towards the “I like it so I got it” approach. But that can always change. Why do you paint, write, sing, dance? I’m discussing important politics, it’s about trauma, it’s a commentary on class, it’s important! Or I like to. I think a lot of the time things come from a core emotion and we are able to figure out it’s meaning later. Why do you make a political work? Because it is an emotional response, it is speaking to humanity. It’s comforting. It’s taking a stand. Because one cannot simply hold onto rage, sadness, happiness, hope, etc.

I hear a lot of artists talk about “truth”. A work is good because it is “true”. I always wonder what they mean. Truth is complicated, it works much more like an ecosystem than a single definable thing. Maybe the word they mean is simple. It uncomplicates the ecosystem, lays out its parts so you can understand the mechanics. Our interpretations of those mechanics, how we unwind them and put them back together is where the artist sits.

I see the irony that I am writing this instead of writing a song. It’s theory over practice, which like when I was a kid tracing songs, will only get me so far. But it’s a good day to write, I’m sat at my desk by the window looking over my neighbours balconies as it rains. I’m listening to Alex G’s God Save The Animals, wondering if the woman across the way will have to cancel the barbecue she was preparing for. I am desperate for a cigarette despite quitting 5 months ago. My therapist asked me what brings me joy. I forgot to tell her I’m writing again. I said I liked Sunday nights getting Thai food and watching The Last of Us with my sister. I forgot to mention earlier today while writing I looked over the balconies, the tapping of the overhead fan dictating the tempo, and smiled a little bit. And I wondered how could I write a song about that feeling? I’m not sure some things can be translated. But as long as we’ve had songs, we’ve tried, and today we will try, and tomorrow we will try too.

Thank you for reading

-Enya xx

Music mentioned:

Slow Show by The National

Alex G: Tiny Desk Concert

Caught In The Middle by Paramore

You Can’t Look Back by Taking Back Sunday

Mama by My Chemical Romance

Blend by Aldous Harding

Music for Films by Brian Eno