Tag: Composing Song Lyrics

Mosaic

So, we’re now onto the last of the songs from my module that I’m going to show you. It’s a version of Blur’s ‘On Your Own’ – or part of it – entitled ‘Mosaic’, although ‘Collage’ might have been a better name. It’s a mish-mash (and that’s a technical term) of phrases and images with no meaning whatsoever. I’d put some degree of thought into each of the preceding three songs, so I wanted to close my assignment with one that made absolutely no sense. Having a completely blank canvas was slightly daunting, as is always the case, but I was looking forward to seeing how absurd my imagery could get and what the limits of my imagination were. These verses are therefore pretty weird, since I wasn’t taking them seriously, but I hope you don’t either. Enjoy!

(Verse 1)

All the lemons stowed away in their chip paper

Embraced by the flowing summer sun

Oh, it’s all in the past, no-one cares now

Little amethyst assassins on the run

Now you’re on the telephone

But you’re talking static

As the big glass door slides shut automatic

And did I leave the gas on in the attic?

Lose myself in the dense yellow mist

Floating on away

 

(Chorus 1)

And now the flies

Keeping a surprise

It’s in their feet

And it’s in their eyes

Just hibernation

Resting at the station

Galactic sleeper

But no Grim Reaper

I’ll ride on home, inflate a dome

Light the stars in airplane fuel

We’ll be starting a blaze in the head

 

It’s food for the soul

For the soul

 

(Verse 2)

And the sky is raining rods in shades of emerald

The grass is growing high around the hogs

Sniffing hungry round the eyeballs

Of a kitty

And eating the bread the man’s thrown onto the lawn

On the emerald lawn

 

Mason

 

 

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Stay Tuned To Find Out

Before Christmas, I shared my altered version of Coldplay’s ‘In My Place’, which I called ‘Endless Miles’. It accompanied three other songs as part of a submission for my Composing Song Lyrics module, which I handed in just last week – I therefore feel that now is a good time to show you the second of my songs, ‘Stay Tuned To Find Out’. This is an adaptation of Jamiroquai’s single ‘Automaton’, from their 2017 album of the same name, and it was included in my collection because I needed a song with attitude, something that contrasted with ‘Endless Miles’ to provide variety in my lyrics. The title came first, during a seminar, and I then had the idea of writing something about a person’s past sins coming back to haunt them – the words you are about to see reflect that. As with the last song, you can listen to the original and see how well you think they fit. There is a full rap verse in the Jamiroquai version, which I’ve attempted to start here as I was running short on the overall line count, but I wasn’t confident and I decided to stop before I made a fool of myself:

(Verse 1)

Up or down?

Now stay tuned to find out

Coming round

As all hope just bleeds out

Feel his heat

Breath burning your back

Avoidance of doubt

(avoidance of doubt)

Turn it on and up you get

 

(Chorus 1)

He’s not turned your corner yet

Blood-boiling, sizzling walk of sin

No matter where you check, you cannot run, no you cannot hide

From the march of fate

Out of the dark, into the light

Oh, when the judgement day is done

You’ll have your mind and soul destroyed

Stay tuned to find out

 

(Verse 2)

Out of luck?

Thirty second head start

He’s on his way

Hears the beat of your heart

It’s on the wind

Now pray for mercy

Oh, you can lie and you can cry, the end is nigh

(just stay tuned to find out)

Revenge is coming for you

 

(Chorus 2)

He’s standing right on your doorstep now

Eager to stare you in the face

Sets things the way they’re meant to be

And puts you in your place

Now come outside, time to pay your debt

Will he forgive all that you’ve done?

You’re past the point of no return

Stay tuned to find out

 

(Verse 3 – beginning of rap verse)

Now he’s got you pinned to the ground

Tied up hard howling like a hound

Will he leave you there just starved and bound?

Time to find out…

 

Mason

Endless Miles

I’m writing this sat alone in the Learning Cafe, having just finished tinkering with one of my essays, due on Friday. There is almost total silence, save for the background hum of a generator an annoying high-pitched whine I can’t quite trace the source of. Despite my solitude, I am happy, since I have a Christmas meal at Lara’s flat with all of the gang to look forward to tomorrow, and I’ve just listened to the new Coldplay album, Everyday Life, which is simply brilliant. Once I’d taken my headphones off at the end, I started thinking about my own adapted set of Coldplay lyrics, which I’m working on for Composing Song Lyrics.  I had to take them into class earlier this week so they could be critiqued by everyone, which is always a nerve-wracking experience. Even though I know it’s highly unlikely, I always expect everything I write to be completely torn to shreds, so you can imagine my relief when the lyrics came back with only a few notes for improvement at this stage.

My version of ‘In My Place’, entitled ‘Endless Miles’, is an intentionally cliched love song. Since I greatly admire the original, I was worried about accidentally making a mockery of it with my own words, but I knew I wanted to include it in my portfolio – and that any other lyrics I wrote for it would probably be no better. We are, of course, discouraged from including cliches unintentionally, but as long as you can justify your use of them, anything goes. Cliches can help to make a song more relatable or accessible to a listener, and as you might expect, they can be beneficial when you want to parody something. I wasn’t trying to do that, but I still found some of my lyrical choices laughably cringeworthy! I include ‘Endless Miles’ here for what I hope will be your enjoyment – although I haven’t made any of the changes that have been suggested just yet. Listen to the original track as you read these lyrics, and decide for yourself how well they fit:

(Verse 1)

Endless miles, endless miles

I’ve driven looking for you

Following your trail

But in the end, in the end

I rounded the final bend

And I saw no more

 

(Chorus 1)

There, the last call to let you go

There, no footprints left in the snow

There, the curtain to end the show

I go

 

(Verse 2)

Coming home, coming home

No-one and nowhere to roam

No-one on the phone

Is this love? Is this love?

You’re dropping me down from above

Down into the rain

 

(Chorus 2)

Here, the next chapter of my life

Here, when will I be free of strife?

Here, you cut me just like a knife

A knife

 

Darling

Why? Why? Why?

Why did you have to go?

No, no

Why don’t you say you’ll stay?

Now, now

Come on and talk to me

Please, please

I’m here at home

 

(Verse 3)

Endless miles, endless miles

I’ve driven looking for you

Now we’ve reached the end

The end.

 

Mason

 

Outer Space, Outer Space

I’ve recently started a new project, creating the 120-150 lines of song I need for my next Composing Song Lyrics assignment. Unlike others in my class, I don’t sing or play, so I’ve taken what is supposedly the easiest option by choosing to rewrite existing songs instead. The first step in all of that is choosing the tracks I want to work on, and as I write this, that’s still very much a work in progress. I do have one song set in stone, which I rediscovered my love for a few weeks ago thanks to Spotify’s random choices – Coldplay’s ‘In My Place’ (song titles go in single inverted commas, apparently). However, the only issue with being able to choose songs you enjoy is that you risk butchering musical masterpieces with your own mediocre words, and that was definitely at the front of my mind as I started to think about mine.

We’ve been doing various writing exercises in seminars over the last few weeks that we hope will get our creative juices flowing. Many of them have involved writing about different unrelated emotions or scenarios in prose or loose verse, so that we can pluck certain words and phrases for later use. In my case at least, some exercises have been more fruitful than others, but a few words, lines and images have helped me to get started. Last night, I went to the library to begin my new version of ‘In My Place’, and because the song has a relatively simple syllabic structure and rhyme scheme, I had written a draft I was satisfied with in around half an hour – giving me 39 lines of lyrics. A blank sheet of paper is daunting for any writer, so I initially focused only on getting started and committing to an opening line. What I came up with was “outer space, outer space”, which mirrors the repetition of the title in Coldplay’s original, since I felt a degree of pressure at first to be faithful to it. It had the effect of evoking something better, though, so I soon replaced it with something else. From there, the rest of the piece seemed to flow nicely, and my portfolio was officially underway.

Because I’m rewriting something existing, it is imperative that the new song exactly matches the syllabic count of the original. In some cases, there may be an opportunity for an extra syllable in a line where one has been stretched by the singer – but I have to try and remember not to get greedy. I have a feeling that whatever the next four songs are, their new words won’t come quite as easily as the first set did, and I’ll have a lot more to consider before I can make them work. Each submission has to be accompanied by a 30-second recording explaining what you were trying to achieve with it, so there are both technical and emotional aspects to think about. Even so, I’m finding the study of lyrics less highbrow and much more accessible than I did traditional poetry last year. I can only conclude that that must be because of the nature of popular music as something which is designed to be cherry-picked and enjoyed by anyone, regardless of age, experience or background.

Mason

 

Bum Notes

Ahead of starting my new “Composing Song Lyrics” module next semester, I wanted to do something different here and review the next album I listened to for the first time. That way, I’d have something to go with my review of the film Whiplash, which I posted here at the end of June. It was my birthday on Sunday, and at my request, Louis gave me one of the albums that I needed to plug a conspicuous hole in my vinyl collection – I was missing the final three Oasis records, of which Dig Out Your Soul is the last. Released in 2008, this seventh studio effort was also the seventh consecutive album by the Manchester icons to go to number one in the UK, and their last hurrah before their abrupt split in August 2009. As we have now arrived at the tenth anniversary of the event, it seems apt for me to tackle their last offering now, even if this did come about entirely by coincidence. Louis tells me that he chose Dig Out Your Soul because out of all my missing Oasis albums, “it had the prettiest cover”.

Dad plugged my record player back in – after it had spent the last couple of months in the garage following my return from university – and I listened to the album from start to finish with my notebook to hand. I tried to write something about every song, even if it was just a few words or a single sentence. For the opening track, “Bag It Up”, I wrote “raw, repetitive, lumbering juggernaut of a riff begins the album. Liam’s vocals are crisp but full of attitude.” As I soon discovered, those words presented me with a considerable problem – namely that I could pretty much say the same for every song. I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but as I got further into the album, I struggled to muster anything more adventurous, to the point where it felt like I was scraping the bottom of the barrel out of desperation at times.

I can see the decline in the notes I made. Of “The Turning”, the album’s second song, I was able to say that its opening was “soft and more subdued, with gentle drums and keyboards.” From this point, though, I can tell that I was gradually running out of any kind of valuable insight. All I could offer on “Waiting For The Rapture” was that it was “stylistically similar to the opening track”, and a throwaway reference to the fact that Noel Gallagher apparently wrote it about meeting his wife. It got even worse by the time of “Ain’t Got Nothin'”, another song full of attitude that only received a response of “typical Liam!” from me. I did redeem myself to some extent with certain judgements. I managed to specify that “The Shock of the Lightning” was “a great, unashamedly rock and roll anthem that would have been great to hear live”, and “I’m Outta Time” was a song that seemed to “unknowingly foreshadow” the fate of Oasis itself. Overall, though, my attempt to thoroughly review Dig Out Your Soul fell flat on its face – there were several songs about which I could say nothing at all.

I don’t think that’s a reflection on the quality of the album at all. There are only a select few records I’ve ever heard that I’ve categorically disliked. It’s more a reflection on my own reviewing abilities, and the fact that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the depth I was looking for. I didn’t feel confident enough to try using any musical terminology either, and the end result was a set of notes that couldn’t have looked less knowledgeable if they’d tried. They’ve given me a reason to go back to the drawing board, but I’m going to look at that as a positive thing. Maybe my upcoming module will give me the insight into the songwriting process that I need to confidently discuss how music is made. At the very least, it’ll allow me to think about adding another string to my writing bow, and including more reviews here. Mum has told me they’d be well worth doing more often, so maybe – for once – I should take her advice on board!

Mason