Songwriting Strategies

by Mark Simos

  FIG. 8.8. Motivic Aspects in Harmonic Rhythm

  Motivic structure is not deterministic; it can be emergent and ambiguous in the ear of both composer and listener. And the counterpoint of structural patterns can move at different paces in different elements and facets. Of course, in writing a song, you don’t think about all this consciously, at every moment. Since we can delve endlessly into the interactions of these patterns, there’s no way to figure them out completely anyway! The point is that by working independently with material in different facets, and following different pathways, you can build up sectional structures with rich, interlocking patterns to delight and intrigue the listener’s ear, mind, and heart—even when the elements appear simple on the surface.

  CHAPTER 9

  Using the Compass:

  Further Steps

  We’ve now toured through the four songwriting facets and the central aspect of structure that unifies them. With the songwriter’s compass as a lever, and a place to stand on, you can now move the world—with your songs. (Sorry, Archimedes.) In this final chapter, we’ll revisit the compass model and discuss some implications for further steps you can take to advance your songwriting using 360° strategies.

  Revisiting the Compass

  A model need not be true in all respects, but it should be useful. Having worked through the material in this book, my pictorial model of the songwriter’s compass may or may not resonate for you. You may believe I’ve left out some essential facet, or that structure, or content and the World should be facets in their own right. You might need to shift the model if your concerns are broader than songwriting in the strict sense I’ve taken as my scope for this book—such as songwriting in connection with production and sound design, or in the dramatic context of opera or musical theater.

  Nevertheless, the model as presented here offers a rich set of strategies to help you write better songs, and to advance the productiveness, innovation, and versatility of your writing. Here are some ways to go deeper with the facets and pathways of the compass.

  The Compass as a Unity

  The circular arrangement of the compass is intended to illustrate that facets are not in a hierarchy of importance, but are peers or comrades: knights of the Songwriter’s Round Table. (My last mixed metaphor, I promise.)

  The circle’s unbroken circumference further suggests that the divisions or boundaries between facets are inherently fuzzy. In fact, facets undeniably do form a continuum or seamless creative space. This matches the intuition of songwriters who experience verbal and musical materials as a seamless whole. Words dissolve into rhythms; melodies move toward chords or towards words. A given musical expression can flow from pitchless rhythm to rhythmic melody, to harmonically driven melody. Songwriters employ intermediate forms between verbal and nonverbal material, as I’ve approximated with tools and techniques such as “word buds” and “syllable buds,” dummy lyrics and melodies, etc.

  The 360° songwriting approach and the structure of this book reflect a general learning principle in artistic work: sometimes, we break up a unity into isolated aspects in order to gain better control over the elements. As you master these elements and their relations, you can gradually move back toward a more seamless and integrated way of working. At the end, the isolated elements might appear as inseparable as you experienced them at first—yet, you have become a different writer.

  From Compass to Tetrahedron

  Since every facet is creatively equidistant from each of the others, any flat rendering of their relationships, as in the compass picture, must fib a little. Geometrically astute readers may have gleaned that a more precise and accurate spatial arrangement of the songwriting facets requires three-dimensional space, with the circle as a sphere. In this space, the facets are inscribed, not in a flat plane as with the compass, but as a tetrahedron—a pyramid with a triangular (rather than a square) base, and four points (or vertices). The points correspond respectively to rhythm, lyrics, melody, and harmony.

  FIG. 9.1. The Songwriter’s Tetrahedron

  You can flip this tetrahedron around, putting any point on top, with the others providing the base. Each facet is a viable jumping-in point from the world; each facet touches that world of content directly; and there is a pathway from each facet directly to each of the others. And, if you’ll bear with me, we’ll see that each aspect of this more well-rounded spatial metaphor illustrates more advanced songwriting strategies that you can cultivate. This is 360° songwriting in a nutshell (or a tetrahedron).

  Facets: From Vertices to Edges

  Continuing our geometrical analogy: a tetrahedron has four vertices, but six edges (lines between vertices). These correspond, in terms of songwriting, to six distinct connections between facets: for example, the pairings of melody/lyric, or harmony/rhythm.

  In this book, we’ve explored some of these “edges” in a directional sense. We’ve seen, for example, that the creative process of setting from a lyric to a melody is dramatically different from moving the other way, from a melody to a lyric. The term “setting” has been an intentional oversimplification of (or placeholder for) a repertoire of different techniques for combining material along the various facet “edges.” These include the following:

  •Generate. Starting with a seed in one facet, create brand-new material in the related facet in response to that seed material. This involves a kind of free association, an intuitive leap to generate responsive material.

  We can always take this intuitive strategy one step farther and generate material in a blended form at the start. For example, when jamming over chords, it’s natural and comfortable to blend melody and lyrics. As we’ve seen, it’s also a good skill to be able to isolate these, for example, to refine lyric or melodic ideas. That skill should increase your ability to generate in a more organic way as well.

  •Match. With a disciplined approach to seed catching, we have another option any time we need to set to a new facet. We start with our source seed in one facet, and turn to our “catalogue” of seeds in the target facet. For example, given a melodic line we might glance down a list of titles, hooks, or individual lyric lines, looking for a hit or a match. We can “scan and match” many combinations of seeds in this way until we get something we like. This can also lead to surprising but effective juxtapositions that we’d not get to by generating material responsively.

  By extension, if we’re ever stuck with writer’s block, or simply want to write and have no particular project or task to write to, we can always practice matching seeds in different facets via chance collisions. This can also be a great skill-building exercise, or an ice-breaker or warm-up for a co-writing session or team writing “camp.”

  •Transform. We can also move along a facet-to-facet edge by transforming material in an incremental way, by degrees. Rather than taking a generative “flying leap,” with this strategy we traverse the edge as a continuum, along which we can create hybrid or composite material, including “composite seeds” that blend the facets involved. This was the approach explored in the chapter on “Melody/Harmony Connections.” This was not really “setting” in the sense of putting chords to a given melody or melodies to a given progression, but transforming a given melody to be progressively more or less “chord-driven,” or revising a chord progression to be less dependent on an implied linear melody. This skill is essential in later stages of writing, when we want to polish, revise, or respond to critique.

  Facets as Faces: Facet Triads

  We’re not quite done with our tetrahedron analogy. You’ll be happy to know the tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic19 solid, with one unique feature: it’s the only regular solid with an equal number—four—of corners (vertices) and sides (faces). Thus, we can visualize our Fab Four friends as not vertices but faces (hey—facets!) of the tetrahedron.

  This flipped view asks us to pay attention, not to the vertices, but the faces. Each face is, in effect, a triad: a triangular area bounded by three distinct ver
tices, the elemental facets we’ve been working with up until now. Just as the six edges represent intuitive combinations of songwriting elements, the four faces of the tetrahedron correspond to four distinctive, higher-level songwriting strategies. Some of these “triad” strategies match familiar, intuitive ways that songwriters work, and well-known and very practical writing practices. Others suggest more innovative possibilities and techniques.

  Another way of viewing each triad is in terms of the individual facet that it excludes or withholds from foreground attention. This is fairly intuitive: in many ways it’s easier to work on isolation skills by thinking about what you’re not working with. When you try to write “melody only,” it’s always an abstraction and a fiction to some degree. There will inevitably be a harmonic and rhythmic aspect to your melody. But you can at least hold back the lyrics. In effect, you’re now working with the “triad” of melody/harmony/rhythm, sans lyric.

  This grouping actually corresponds pretty closely to our conventional associations of “the music” of the song, with lyric being the facet held back. This strategy reflects the traditional composer/lyricist division, used from librettist and composer in opera through musical theater, Tin Pan Alley, and the Great American Songbook era. Of course, in much contemporary songwriting, the writer is both composer and lyricist. And much co-writing, whether of band members in the Lennon/McCartney model or the Nashville “two writers in a room with guitars” model, involves collaboration on both lyrics and music by all partners. Much of my task in this approach has been to give writers a more integrated way to work on these elements of songwriting. The foundation 360° songwriting skills and strategies should make you a stronger and more versatile composer and lyricist, solo songwriter, and co-writer.

  Two other triad groupings correspond to strategies that reflect real songwriter practices for which there are no familiar names. Consider melody/chords/lyric sans rhythm. This is how you work when you have the “bones” of a song but are keeping strict temporal decisions fluid—time signature, phrase lengths, harmonic rhythm, etc. It’s working your song in a rhythmically malleable, mercurial state. Recognizing this as a distinct strategy helps you apply it more effectively: to shift rhythmic settings of melody or lyric in flexible yet prosodically sound ways. A good example of how critical such rhythmic reshaping can be to great songwriting is “I Can’t Make You Love Me” by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin—a breakthrough hit song for Bonnie Raitt as a slow ballad, but first written as a fast bluegrass-tempo song.

  Similarly, you can work with rhythmically spoken lyrics over a chord progression, while holding back melody. This helps you steer clear of a throw-away “filler” melody that tracks too closely to the chords, especially when your attention is focused on the lyrics. If you temporarily hold melody in abeyance, then later explore alternative melodic settings, you have a better chance of finding that compelling, unexpected melody—perfectly complementing the lyric’s emotion and meaning, while moving independently with and against the chord progression.

  Lastly, let’s consider melody/rhythm/lyric, sans chords. Surprisingly, this is a good description of the practice of contemporary top-line writing. The topline writer creates lyrics and melody set to a distinct vocal rhythm; the chords (along with many timbral, orchestration, and form decisions) are generally the province of the “production track.” Topline writers typically develop their melody, lyrics, and vocal rhythm simultaneously and improvisationally. However, the more fine-grained 360° songwriting skills and strategies can be helpful here, e.g., to refine a lyric beyond easy “filler” cliché lines, or experiment with subtle rhythmic shifts in the hook. Your effectiveness with any of the composite-facet strategies discussed here will be greatly augmented by the work with the individual facets we’ve done in the main chapters of this book.

  Curiously, this same functional grouping—melody/rhythm/lyric sans chords—also takes us into a very different genre and cultural context: folk music. As discussed in the chapter on melody/harmony connections, the a cappella songs and ballads and archaic dance tunes in many world music traditions were, by and large, composed without dependence on harmonic accompaniment. The melodies are often modal or pentatonic in quality; because they’re composed and learned only by ear, they also rely strongly on motivic rather than harmonic structure for their interest and integrity.

  Unlike the contemporary topline writing/production split, this is not just division of labor leaving chords to a different collaborator, or a process strategy of holding back harmonization until later stages of composition. Here the final song or tune can stand alone, performed without chordal accompaniment. Yet these songs and tunes require close integrity with lyric and/or rhythm. Thus, despite their independence from harmonic underpinnings they represent, not melody in an isolated and abstract sense, but melody, lyric, and rhythm as a unity.

  Even more curiously, these two worlds of production-driven, topline writing and traditional modal folk may have more common ground than either camp suspects! From a musical perspective, I think it’s more revealing to consider much contemporary popular music in modal terms, rather than from the standpoint of functional harmony. (And don’t be surprised if some fiddle tune toplines hit the charts soon!) But there’s also an intriguing link in process terms.

  In mainstream pop writing, the current convention is for track writers to develop tracks first and for topline writers to compose melodies and lyrics in response to those tracks. In theory, you could flip this process, writing toplines first and then creating the track. Some production companies specifically request “a cappella toplines” with the intent of adding the final track later in the pipeline. In practice, this works more via a kind of pivoting: a topline is written to a track, then the track gets swapped out (perhaps by prior arrangement, perhaps through the vicissitudes of production and pitching), and another track matched or written to the topline.

  When I first heard about this emerging creative/production model, I was mystified by the question: what about the chord progression? If a topline is written to a track that embeds a progression, wouldn’t any swapped-in replacement track need to copy that progression? What I learned—from practitioners I consider highly informed—was that “a good topline hook melody shouldn’t be dependent on the chords.” That response gives me the hope that foundation questions we’ve wrestled with in this book—such as how to write a great melody that isn’t driven completely by preconceived chords—are absolutely relevant to issues in contemporary songwriting.

  From Counterpoint to Irony: Back to the World

  We’ve applied and stretched the concept of counterpoint to various aspects and levels of songwriting: first, to interactions of vocal melody with the chord progression of the song; then, to motivic patterns within and across facets. At higher levels of phrasing and form, the same principles are at work when counterposing cyclical with narrative structure. After all, no motivic patterns contrast more strongly than aaaaaaa and abcdefg!

  Through all these explorations, I’ve avoided speculating about what given structures “mean” or assigning them direct emotional connotations. In my own writing and in teaching, I encourage an experiential approach: play with structures, create interesting effects, then attend to your emotional and associative reactions as a listener to effects created, to determine how and where to use them.

  Nevertheless, all these forms and interactions do create emotional responses and thematic associations. The very presence of audible structure itself, and the degree of intricacy of that structure, is a “telling detail” with prosodic import. However we arrive at the final song, we certainly seek integrity in those responses. A tacit implication might be that all elements should tell the same story in the song—providing an unambiguous, compelling emotional experience for the listener.

  But it’s not quite that simple! Interactions of a song’s elements are not always direct. They can be complex and subtle, ambiguous, shifting through repetition, even apparently contradictory. I reserve
the term irony, as distinct from counterpoint, to refer to tension or mismatch between emotional connotations of varied musical or lyrical aspects of the song and theme or content. Irony need not involve detailed motivic counterpoint as discussed in the “Structure” chapter. It can be expressed in overall relationships between melody and lyric, for example, or between lyric tone and subject matter. The key is that tension kicks in through contrasting and conflicting content or emotional associations.

  Sometimes, we’ll intentionally mismatch elements for purposes of humor, disorientation, surprise, or shock value. Extreme ironic effects invite little “explosions,” often humorous in effect. When you write a happy, jaunty song about a tragic murder, you’re probably trying to be funny (or perhaps you’re just a bluegrass musician). If you write a lyrical, sexy torch ballad from a potato to a potato, you’re likely going for a laugh (“I Only Have Eyes for You”? “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”?). But ironic juxtaposition need not be humorous or obvious in effect. Consider how the soothing lullaby-esque music of John Lennon’s “Imagine” sets off the lyrics—which ask us some of the hardest and most thought-provoking (in the best sense) questions a songwriter has ever asked.

  Acknowledging counterpoint and irony as an integral aspect of songwriting broadens our vision of integrity in the song. This world is a complicated and bewildering place. If our task as songwriters is to be “on call” to write in a songwriterly way about any aspect of the world, we need to be able to convey confusion and contradiction as well. In that noble work, it’s fine for us to be just as confused and conflicted as our fellow humans—about life. But it won’t hurt to be a little less confused about songwriting.