Notes on Songwriting Part 2

Originally posted August 16th 2023

(Featuring random pictures of songwriters I like)

A couple weeks ago, I received an email from Spotify announcing their plans to raise prices this coming September. My first thought was why? It’s not to pay artists properly, I’m fairly certain. My second thought was “Maybe it’s time to put my money where my mouth is and quit the damn app”. So, for the last week or so I’ve been scavenging for download codes from record sleeves, making a list of albums to buy and burning CDs to my computer. I’m not planning to switching to another streaming service, I tried Tidal many years ago and it was okay and I’m not interested in Apple Music either. The iTunes app is a sluggish relic but I’ve been compiling everything on there plus it’s full of music from before I made the switch to streaming in 2016. It’s been quite fun looking through my old collection, what I still listen to and albums long forgotten, plus the joys of rediscovery. I’ve fallen back in love with the Icelandic band Pascal Pinon’s Twosomeness. I’ve also realised I used to be wayyyy more into metal than I thought (my favourites will always be Straight Line Stitche’s When Skies Wash Ashore and Walls of Jericho’s The American Dream).

Spotify’s change came at the perfect time, I’m sick of playlists, suggested songs and the album Songs for a Blue Guitar constantly being taken off and on the app. It’ll help keep me off my phone. My record collection here has outgrown its milk crate container. I have enough music. I want to hear songs within the context of their album placement, I want to dislike a song for months only for it to one day click and be put on repeat.

I’ve not written a song all summer. There’s a page in my notebook with the last piece I scribbled down, a verse without a chorus. There is a mess of lyrics on my notes app, without context, without a tune to pull them beyond a sad sentence. I haven’t felt the pull to write anything down. I used to come up with stuff all the time, a line here and there that would eventually be weaved together. Lately, my mind has been blank. Maybe it’s the isolation, maybe that time of my life is simply over. I like to think it’s because I have been expressing myself in different ways, through drone music, painting and writing the ol’ novel.

I’ve taken this dry spell to look over old lyrics. For many years, I’ve written about the colour blue, like the aura of a person, real or imagined (mostly imagined). Hundreds of lyrics longing for the colour blue. I’m always green, perhaps I long for blue because it is a part of me, though I rarely think so much about the colour yellow. Blue jackets, blue jeans, blue skies, blue oceans, blue nails, blue birds. Even when I don’t mean to, I’ll write something like “All out of the blue”, catching me again. It’s always interesting to find themes in your work you didn’t intentionally set out to do. In lyrics it’s blue, in poetry and paintings it’s architecture and in literature it’s dead mothers (despite my mother being very much alive). There’s something very satisfying about making work about the same thing over and over again, finding new ways to talk about it, to alter it. A million songs about love and we eat it up every time.

I often dream I’m walking by the ocean. Particularly a beach that was by a restaurant my family and our non-American friends would go to for Thanksgiving. It’s the closet I’ve come to what people imagine when they think of Californian beaches. A big blue sea with golden sand. I always dream I’m there at dusk or nighttime, probably because that’s how I always saw it after dinner. When I write about blue it’s the particular blue of that ocean.

I’ve been missing Northern Californian beaches lately. Cold, windy and uninviting. The pitch blackness during a sleepover at a friend’s house in the Santa Cruz mountains. The sleepy mountain towns, vomit inducing roads, brown grass. Overlooking the bay, dark cars for a split second lighting up, a quick glimpse of a joint, orange glow.The sky at the overlook is dark blue, airplanes flashing. In the mountains before everything goes black, it’s all dyed blue. My friends faces, their house, our clothes, even the dog. The bluebelly lizards we chased down. I’m missing a place I never liked. I suppose that’s the definition of nostalgia.

Sometimes I see videos of long forested roads, always set to Bon Iver’s Rosyln, always rainy and dark blue. It’s funny how a song basically became its own genre. Same happened with Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place. Winter cities, trains, rain (always rain). I see a thumbnail and know exactly what song will be playing over it. I have a collection of these videos saved, because I find the idea of a song as a video genre interesting. It’s all about evocation. Beautifying and romanticising mundanity.

I’ve not touched the guitar in months, but I’ve been listening to a lot of acoustic music and it leaves me with a feeling that I should finally get this “learning guitar” thing over with. Maybe get some rhythm. I want to stop wasting my time imagining myself doing things and actually do the hard part. Working though frustration is one of the most rewarding parts of being creative, yet I avoid it for fear of disappointment. That I will never be able to perfectly capture a feeling (which is true, but that’s a part of the fun, is it not?). Your circumstances, abilities, tools, all offer an alternative to the image in your head, which can end up more interesting and gratifying. Whatever I imagine, what if the realised thing is so much better? My imagination is limited and the possibilities are endless.

I thought I should write a song without any cynicism. Something that does not try to excuse itself. There will always be the fear of “cringe”, but I know I’ll never get better if I don’t own it. I keep listening to Julie Byrne’s Hope’s Return. I’ve been thinking about writing about love like it’s god, relentless worship and devotion. I’ve been thinking about cannibalism, needing someone to be so close to you that the only solution is to eat them (the film Bones and All has fundamentally changed me as a person). I realise this year I’ve been watching a lot of psychosexual films (thanks Cronenberg) and it’s made me think a lot about desire. How a song is the ultimate yearning. Flexing your vocal cords, distorting your tongue, to call out to a place, a thing, the colour blue, a person. The body as a device for music and desire, to serve a function as a way to connect to something beyond itself. It’s making all these things external, because to hold it in would drive you mad. Think about the love confession, even when it seems hopeless, perhaps knowing it is unrequited, one has to say it anyways. You must take it out, lay it down and hope someone picks it up. I think Florence Welch said something about all music being about love or death (or both). Running to one whilst running away from the other.

A song I keep coming back to this year is Party by Daughter. There is both a feeling of satisfaction and annoyance, because it captures almost perfectly the last couple years of my life and relationship to drinking. I wish I’d written it and also feel I have nothing to say on the subject now that it exists. I suppose that is one of the great parts of music, hearing songs written as if taken from your own life, that this feeling is shared. Closing the between the isolation of those feelings and the rest of the universe.

I should sit down at my keyboard again, drone out some notes. There is blue paint splattered on the desk I’m writing this at. It proves to be inescapable. Drag out my voice, I love to sing but seldom do. For a minute, I had a roommate who always sang to themselves and I was jealous how easy it came to them. I have always loved living with musicians (5 and counting), home felt like a living thing. I’ve lived with two banjo players, one who would play early in the morning, sometimes in our back garden, the song flowing up into my room like smoke.

I don’t know if I’m going to make songwriting into a habit, but I like the idea of setting aside a day every couple weeks to just sit and practice. No set goals, just to be in it for awhile.

Thank you for reading,

Enya x