Making song lyrics out of journal scraps
Give yourself a list
I recorded my first album (Boom & Bloom: Part 1) during the early part of the pandemic when the shutdown encouraged me to prioritize solo work. I imposed numerous creative limitations on myself in the creation of that album, most notably having to do with instrument selection (only field recordings, drums, percussion, drum machine, and a children’s xylophone). I experimented extensively with recording methods and envisioned the album as more akin to a soundtrack than to something song based. I combined a range of sound recording fidelities to make brief musical sketches. The result: textural if scrappy sonic worlds framed on a foundation of rhythm.
I’m currently in the final phase of mixing my second record as a solo artist. With this one, I attempted to lean more into recognizable songs, vocals, and longer form pieces (at least for some of the material). I once again benefited from imposing creative limitations on the instrumentation, only allowing myself the use of drums, keys, vocals, and field recordings. From the outset of the project, lyrics presented themselves as a significant hurdle. As a producer, many artists that I work with struggle with lyrics. For some writers this involves debilitating focus on a word or line, while for others it has more to do with big picture hangups around meaning or intention.
In these songs, I was not trying to write to a specific audience or style, so in that sense I had more room to move. I was exploring a process, and as I mentioned in a previous post (Easier to help you than me), this one involved mining old journals to identify source material that I might vocalize. This sounds obvious enough except that my journals read as anything but singable. The words emerge as processing, poems, notes, fragments of a story, gibberish, a catchy line or image, some type of analysis, or random observations. I love these aspects of journaling but they are not necessarily musical. I needed a strategy. So I came up with a short list of questions to apply to any passage or piece that caught my eye as I scanned through the old notebooks. They are as follows:
Is there something catchy in this language, an emotional charge or spark within the words, an image(s) or meaning that still resonates even if my initial written delivery fell short?
What is the mood of this passage/piece/fragment?
Can I hear any specific way to deliver this as a vocal? Spoken, sung, chanted, rapped, heavily processed (slowed down, pitch shifted), heavily effected (echo, reverb, distortion). Does the writing encourage variations in the character voice or is the character voice consistent?
Do the words evoke any specific instrumentation (percussion, bass, synth, Mellotron, organ, guitar, piano, vocals, Ableton, horns, strings) even if I’m not the one who will play the instrument?
Does this piece invoke any specific textures or processes (re-amping, pedals, tape delays, tape/cassette/phone fidelity, field recordings, grandaddy recordings, mechanical filters, Ableton processes)?
Are there any specific rhythms that this piece suggests? Tempos?
Does the passage call for a tempo-free “cloud-bloom” or a clear groove? Are there chords suggested? Is it melodic?
There were a few additional criteria that I used as sub-filters but this conveys the gist of it. This specific list may or may not be applicable to the music you make, but what I want to convey is that it worked well to have some sort of self-generated metric against which to evaluate lyrics, a point of reference to help direct how a given writing scrap or lyrical seed might unfold in a musical context.
Very interesting to read of your process for this particular recording relating to vocals. I'm trying to remember the last time I fit lyrics to music and what that was like. Before I knew you I'd just write words and music completely separately with no thought of the other with a few exceptions. Invariably, writing a guitar part will suggest some kind of vocal harmony or phrases but when I found I relied on that for creating lyrics, those were universally weak (in the context of my own writing). At that time, I wrote frequently enough that I had a surplus of options and I'd just literally try to fit words I previously wrote to a piece of music I was currently writing and, if it was feeling compatible, I'd just pare, reshape, and heavily edit the words to become more connected to the music. I felt the words, if read on their own, would be stronger because they started out being their own thing and not something written with music in mind.
My lyric hangups include avoiding line rhymes as much as possible (I love what I call "ghost" rhymes or implied rhymes), not necessarily sticking to a meter and the sung phrase(s) don't have to match the section of a song (for instance I could start a phrase in the refrain, but the actual completion of the phrase could be the chorus, or 10 seconds later after an instrumental break or whenever). So, unfortunately I'm a terrible pop / rock vocalist.
If I were a more of an actual or natural singer, the lyric hangups might be much less restrictive because obvious vocalists write their lines much like any other instrumentalist writes theirs and their freedom and dexterity are more on display and can help take a song to an unforeseen place. I wish I had a little of this.