http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html Beth DeSombre: Blog Jannis' PHPRss class - http://www.jannis.to/ Wed, 29 May 2013 07:43:25 -0700 http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/harmonic_function_of_speech_part_ii
The other thing Pat Pattison talked about in the final week of the songwriting class was the relationship between the pitches we use when talking and the melodies we should create when creating music for lyrics. The idea is that our speaking voices make use of pitches (even in a non-tonal language like English) and that those pitches suggest to us what the melody might look like.

He gave a number of examples of cross-cultural pitch patterns in various things that you’re trying to express. Apparently we wine and tease (across many different language groupings) in minor thirds.

He also argues that we each have a natural tonic — a pitch that is essentially home base for our speech (and he showed how you might find yours, by focusing on certain less important parts of speech), and that speaking in that tonic shows trust and belief. The tonic represents “honesty, fact, statement.” The subdominant (4th) represents motion away from the tonic and the dominant (5th) represents motion towards the tonic.

The stressed syllables in speech show a relationships with the tonic that demonstrates the sentiment they contain. We’re happy in major thirds and ask questions in major 5ths, and we tend to threaten each other in the 5th below the tonic and plead (“I don’t want to die!”) in the 7th.

Throughout the course his point has been good songwriting mirrors speech and so we need to pay attention to how we actually do things when speaking naturally. This melodic bit is an extension of that argument, and he demonstrated it extremely well in the videos.

It also made me think of the times that I hear a phrase in my mind (which is how my songwriting almost always starts) and it more or less arrives with a melody attached to it. There are definitely parts of my songwriting where I’ll go hunting for a melody and try out various options until I come up with something I like, but almost always at least some part of the melody suggests itself. I now wonder if it might be doing that based in part on the harmonic functions of speech. And it does suggest, when I’m stuck melodically, how to consider which types of intervals in a particular context might be good ones to try.

He concluded the entire course with reference to a book by Joseph Jordanian called Why Do People Sing? It argues that music has been key to human survival, that tones came before words in communication. Pat talked about the value of singing together and urged us to “write a song that is capable of engaging the tribe” (with a simple, singable chorus). Which is, regardless of the evolutionary logic, a good thing to remember to do.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/harmonic_function_of_speech_part_ii Wed, 29 May 2013 07:43:25 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/not_questioning_whether_you_can_do_it
This time, for no particular reason, I’ve been increasing my mileage to distances I haven’t run in more than a decade, with little difficulty. When I posted a recent run distance on facebook a friend of mine responded with awe, saying that she “couldn’t even run a mile.” I realized that it helps that I know I can run — both generally, and the kinds of distances I’ve been running lately.

In fact, part of what has made my (surprising, even to me) recent running regime work has been, I think, the fact that I haven’t questioned whether I could do it. Each time I go running I run a half-mile further than I ran the previous time. A half-mile isn’t that far; if I can run 8 miles, I can run 8.5 miles. And, relatedly, I don’t wait to see how I feel to decide how far I’ll run — I set out for the specific distance in question, so that’s the plan from the beginning, rather than having to decide whether to run a certain distance when the option of running less is present in my mind.

Apparently both determination and obsessiveness run in my family (and in my family running); not only did my father run his first marathon a mere four and a half months after the first time he ran once around the block, but he had a stretch of time years ago when he didn’t miss a day of running for more than two years. His argument was that if you don’t stop to dither about whether you can, should, or want to do something and instead just do it, it’ll happen.

So what does this all have to do with music? Well, among other things, my friend’s comment (about not even being able to run a mile) is in part what made me realize that not stopping to agonize over whether I can do something or not is the best way to actually do it. One of the best things for me about all the songwriting challenges I’ve participated in over the last year or two is that I now know that I can write a song — a good song, even — on extremely short notice. That removes the stress of self-doubt that actually increases the ease of writing one, and the likelihood I’ll be able to write a good one.

I was thinking about that a couple weeks ago when I was playing another of those collective songwriter shows in which the previous month’s audience gives an assignment to the next month’s songwriters who have to show up with a new song on that topic. The topic I had to write on was “tequila drinks” and since it was the end of the semester I hadn’t even thought about what I would write until the day before the show.

But that didn’t stress me out. I had set aside some time in the afternoon to work on the song, and wrote a draft of something I’m quite happy with (there are some placeholder lyrics in a couple places that I’ll probably refine but the concept, structure, and melody are all things I like a lot, along with some of the specific lines). In part that all worked because I know that there are plenty of times I’ve only had a few hours to come up with a song (during February Album Writing Month, or the Fearless Songwriter Challenge) and have come up with fantastic songs. I knew I could do it. And so I didn’t waste time and energy worrying about whether I could, and just got down to the business of doing it.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/not_questioning_whether_you_can_do_it Sun, 26 May 2013 10:46:09 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/harmonic_function_of_speech_part_i
He thus characterized phrases as front-heavy or back-heavy. Front-heavy phrases begin (or have their first stressed syllable) on the downbeat of the bar. They’re declarative, and therefore stable. Back-heavy phrases begin after the downbeat of the bar — that puts them in motion towards another beat, and makes them unstable. He illustrated with the different ways you could say “Where are you going? What did I do?” that make it declarative or searching (or different combinations of that) depending on how you actually say it, how the beat falls.

There are finer gradations of front- and back-heavy that he went into, all having to do with where the beats are most emphasized in a measure or across multiple measures (for instance, something that comes on the downbeat of the second measure, called “weak-bar phrasing,” has elements of back-heaviness or instability, despite the fact that it’s on the downbeat, because the second measure functions essentially like the second beat in an individual measure, and thus is weaker than the first measure.

This concept was completely new to me. It wasn’t even one of those “oh yes, I’ve been using it; I just didn’t know what to call it” experiences I’ve had in this course. And in principle, and in his demonstration, it makes sense. Today I finally worked on applying it, for the final songwriting assignment, and realized its sheer brilliance.

I was dubious of the last big concept he gave us that I hadn’t previous known about, the idea of stable or unstable tones (although the feedback on last week’s assignment suggested that my peer graders were convinced that I’d demonstrated in convincingly in my song for the week) — or at least felt the way he used it in his example song detracted from the overall quality of the song. I do think the consciously (but judiciously) used unstable tones I put into my song worked, though.

So this week we’re supposed to use front- and back-heavy phrasing in that same song. And I just picked up the song to experiment with it, and figure out what it would be like to use it. The song itself is mournful intentionally unstable in meaning, so it’s ripe for this tool. First, it was interesting to discover that (again, without knowing it) I’m using some strategic weak-bar phrasing.

And then I played around with back-heavy phrasing in places the sentiment of the song called for it. And the difference was immediately clear. What it does is make things sound uncertain, or resigned. It’s basically a way of inserting hesitation (by, musically, inserting a tiny rest before a note). So the phrase “leaving no place to go” becomes much more emotional when it’s presented as “leaving no place to [break] go.”

In a way it feels like a presentational thing more than a songwriting thing per se — especially for someone like me who doesn’t write out the musical score to the songs I write. But that doesn’t make it any less important (and sometimes it might, in fact, involve really moving phrases around in ways that would be more noticeable as melody). It’s a tool I wasn’t even aware of, and will almost certainly consciously use as a figure out how to write and present a song.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/harmonic_function_of_speech_part_i Sat, 20 Apr 2013 07:14:00 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/best_audience_member_ever
At the break I told the other artist about him — how engaged with the music he was. And then he came up to talk to me, telling me how much he’d enjoyed my set. He said he appreciated the way I wrote about working class people, with compassion and clarity, something he said few artists seem to do. He said that he was working class and he rarely felt represented in songs. He said he hoped that it was okay that he was singing along, and I told him that he had been my favorite audience member that evening, which he seemed genuinely touched by.

And he said that my song Dandelion Wine, inspired by depression-era food, reminded him of some lines of a poem (which turns out to be called “Pantoum of the Great Depression”) by Donald Justice, that he wrote out for me:

We managed. No need for the heroic.
Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus,
And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.
We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.
And time went by, drawn by slow horses.
People like us simply go on.

Those lines fit perfectly with what I was trying to say in the song; he heard it clearly the first time he’d been introduced it.

He told me that he went to a lot of the arts events on campus. He lived nearby and wanted to take advantage of the offerings. He said he made a point of going to the student music recitals, because there were usually so few people there to listen and they deserved an audience.

The artist I was sharing the bill with was offering her CDs on a “pay what you want” basis and I had decided to do the same — but from the stage I urged anyone who didn’t already have a CD of mine to take one for free, because I felt bad that I really didn’t have a voice to share my songs that evening and I wanted them to hear me actually sing. I told this audience member that I really hoped he’d take a CD, and he said he would, but that he insisted on paying me for it because art should be supported. As the break was ending he asked me to tell him after the show which of my two CDs he should pick.

After the show we talked a bit more, and he asked me if he could recite me a poem. (It was another one by Donald Justice, though I don’t know the name.) He recited it beautifully, fully embodying the words he was saying. It was as good a performance of any art as I’ve seen.

I couldn’t decide which of my CDs he should take; the song he’d initially commented on was on the first CD, but the second one may be more representative of my current songwriting. So I told him I really wanted him to have both. At first he deferred but then agreed. He handed me some money, saying that he hoped it was enough, because it was all that he had. I put the money in my pocket and checked when I got home: he’d given me $8; the most valuable CDs I’ve sold.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/best_audience_member_ever Fri, 12 Apr 2013 08:07:35 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/writing_a_song_the_pat_way_part_ii
The form of the song he was demonstrating was verse/refrain, verse/refrain, bridge, verse/refrain. So he explicitly waited to write the bridge until he’d written the verses, since (true to the metaphor of its name) its goal is to bridge two things; you need to know what needs to be connected before you connect them.

Bridges also want to sound different (and so far the only sounds we’re working with, since there’s no melody yet, is melodic rhythm) than the verses. So for his bridge he had just three lines (preserving the instability — it felt like there should be a fourth line that rhymed with the second, but that would make it too stable and not create the movement that a bridge should), and the first and third were only one word (“sing”).

Also bridge-related (consistent with, but a different concept of how bridges have been explained to me in the past): the bridge is a place to fill in other details that are important to the song but haven’t been fully fleshed out otherwise. So, building off the “hymn” rhyme that turned up at the beginning and with a few other hints throughout, he wanted to push the idea of the musical nature of the wind. And it hadn’t been made explicit, so talking about singing in the bridge could do that.

OK, next step: melody. That’s the most different from my process, in which melody and lyrics tend to develop simultaneously; only once or twice have I ever written the lyrics to a song before the music. He also introduced the concept of melody being stable or unstable (theme of the entire course: stability vs. instability).

I’ve thought about the feeling of the chords used — not just major or minor, but the chord position (tonic, dominant, subdominant, etc.) and where they want to lead, and could see how that relates to stability. But Pat’s message here was that the positions of actual notes in they key provide stability and instability.

Most stable, of course, is the tonic (followed by the octave). Then comes the 5 and the 3. (the quiz we had on this was ridiculously easy; all you needed to do was figure out which was the 1,3, 5, and 8 note in a scale and any question asked about them required labeling them “stable,” and all others “unstable” (with varying degrees of instability).

Pat then proceeded to write a melody for his song, ending the most important lines on unstable notes. And it created a song that had a nearly un-singable melody — so much so that as he was demonstrating, he kept having to cue himself to the note he was about to sing (those particularly unstable ones) by hitting them on the keyboard as they were approaching. I suppose the whole thing felt unstable — which was his point — but it didn’t sound like a song I would want to sing or listen to. (It made me absolutely certain that I would write a song I wanted to sound stable for this week’s assignment!).

It’s funny; I’ve always used “what it feels like I should be singing” as a key to what the notes should be — not to write the melody, but once I’ve sketched it out, if I keep having trouble heading to a note I’d written (or automatically take the melody somewhere else) I’ve used that as a sign that I needed to follow my instincts on what it should sound like.

Not because there’s some automatic right-ness about automatic responses, but because mine are conditioned by a lifetime of listening to the kind of music I want to be writing. And if it’s too hard to make my melody go where I’m trying to get it to go, it’s probably because I’m trying to force it to go into a place where it shouldn’t go.

This piece of the process was the first time I’ve not found value in a piece of the lesson. I do think that there are notes that are more or less stable (just as there are chords that are), and that’s a useful idea — but it can be vastly overdone, as it was here.

A couple more melody suggestions: the chorus (Bernice’s wedding dress, from the analogy way back at the beginning of the course) should be the most glorious part melodically, AND it should go to a melodic point that hasn’t been used before. Second, the melody should reflect the sentiment of the lyric — so if the line is describing something in motion, it should move around more melodically than if it’s describing something stable. Both of those make a lot of sense.

Finally, “setting adjustments” — adjust notes or words to make the whole thing fit together well, and then back to the bridge (again, the last thing) to put a melody to it.

A fascinating method, that is quite different from my approach. It bears some similarities to it — I pay a lot of attention to what he calls the “sonic fabric” (the internal sounds) of the verses etc.; I just get to it differently. I do find the worksheet concept (searching for whole families of sounds before you write) to be interesting and potentially useful. And although I really didn’t like the results of his using musical notes to induce instability, I do think that thinking about the character of the notes you’re using in a melody (and where they’re leading) does make sense in a melody. I’ll have to try writing a song the Pat way — in fact, I will have to, for this week’s assignment.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/writing_a_song_the_pat_way_part_ii Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:05:37 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/writing_a_song_the_pat_way_part_i
Although many of the techniques and tools we’ve been learning in this course are familiar to me, his songwriting process is conceptually different from the way I do things. Again, though, within that unfamiliar process are things that are familiar — that I’ve probably been doing without necessarily identifying that I was doing them.

It’s an interesting approach, and one that’s worth trying, so I’m going to set it out here for posterity. First step involves choosing a title, which is implicitly a metaphor, and something that will “gain weight” (develop) through the verses. Pat’s title was “Hobo Wind,” a more poetic way to express something about the wind that is out there traveling.

The first “aha” moment I had when hearing about this process was his thinking about where the stresses fall in the title line (hobo wind). Both “ho” and “wind” are stressed but wind has a stronger stress than “ho.” So when you think about a song in 4/4, you want the strongest stress to fall rhythmically where the strongest stress in a measure should be. Which would be on the 1 (rather than the 3). Which would involve starting the phrase on the 3 of the measure so that the “wind” would fall on the 1. That was something I hadn’t thought about before, wouldn’t have thought to do, and made the sound of the phrase more effective.

Then run that through the “boxes” — three sections in which you lay out the basics of the idea that develops through the song. You then figure out whether the sense of the song is stable or unstable (he decided that this was an unstable idea).

Next comes a worksheet. Before doing any writing, come up with concept words that are likely to be in the song (starting with the words in the title) and look up rhymes for them, including (especially if the idea is unstable), non-perfect rhymes. This process led him to some interesting sets of words, like “hymn,” which led him down a path of thinking about singing. (That was my second “aha” moment of the process, because that was a useful word that I couldn’t imagine getting to without following that process.) He looked for a bunch of “ho” based rhymes for hobo, even though it wasn’t likely to be in a rhyming position. Others, too, like wander, which might be what the wind is doing.

The idea for these words is that once you start writing the ideas you want to convey you not only have a set of possible words to use for rhymes, but also for what I might have called internal rhymes, but he called “the sonic fabric” of the song. Things sound like they belong together when they sound alike.
Once the worksheet is done, the next step is to start the actual writing, but even then it’s provisional; whether you keep them will depend on how they move, what they say or imply. I’ll skip the details about the writing of the first verse, except to say that that’s where you set up the expectations for the other verses (which generally match) and so things like what the rhyme scheme or line lengths are will be determined there.

Another interesting moment in his illustration of the song came in the breaking up of a line into two pieces (previous line was “you make your way between the cracks” which was followed by “I hear you moan, I hear you laugh” which was less stable because of that subdivision.

Probably the most interesting observation in this process was the importance of using sense-based language in the first verse (“I hear you”) with specific details. Specifics and senses are generally a good thing in songwriting. But what was revelatory here was the idea that you can get away with being more general later if you’ve been specific and sense-based initially — because the listener will bring the environment you’ve created or invoked to the later verses, but the reverse wouldn’t be true.

So you can get away with lines like “I wonder where you’re going / I wonder where you’ve been” in the second verse, in a way you couldn’t in the first verse.

Next step is to complete sketching out the words in the verses. And there’s so much more to cover that I’m going to break this post up into two pieces and continue the technique in the next one (probably tomorrow).]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/writing_a_song_the_pat_way_part_i Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:22:40 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/meter_and_rhythm
The concept of the week was the importance of following the natural flow of language in your songwriting. I love the way language sounds, so that has always been a driving force of my songwriting. But what I realized this week is just how hard it is to teach someone to hear the natural flow of language (or, more importantly, what isn’t natural) in songwriting. Both in the course forums and in some of the discussion groups I’m part of, people have been struggling to understand what syllables should be stressed or unstressed.

Most of how Pat teaches about rhythm (in language) is by getting you to hear how words would sound if you were saying them conversationally, and then making sure that you put them into music that way. (If the natural rhythm of the words doesn’t match up with the rhythm of the melody in a song, you need to change one or the other.) But it’s almost impossible to get someone to fix incorrect rhythm (or not get it wrong in the first place) if that person can’t hear what sounds wrong.

Two things were particularly interesting to me in this week. The first was that he did take it one step further, in a way that might actually be a start at reaching people who can’t naturally hear how the language sounds. For one-syllable words, he grouped them by part of speech to indicate whether they should be stressed or not. Articles, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns (unless the goal is to indicate emphasis) are unstressed. Those with meaning — nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, are stressed. I’d never thought of it that way, and it makes sense.

The best thing in the week was videos of a master class he did with a songwriter. She played her — quite lovely — song that had, in subtle places, emphasis on the wrong words as she sang it. And he stopped her each time and suggested a fix — sometimes a word change, sometimes a melodic rhythm change. And it’s true that if you’re distracted by melody, you might not initially notice that the language rhythm is off. It’s equally true that in the master class it was noticeably better every time she changed back to the feel of natural language.

It’s my contention (and I suspect Pat would agree) that getting the rhythm right is the cornerstone of good songwriting. Anything on top of that is what makes a song great or not, but it’s unlikely to get there if it distracts the listener from the beginning by an unnatural language rhythm. And, as with everything I seem to be learning in this class, it all comes down to listening and internalizing. I’m sure there are natural abilities that predispose people to be able to hear how language should sound (especially in music), but the best thing you can do is spend a lifetime listening.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/meter_and_rhythm Sat, 30 Mar 2013 08:54:30 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/utah_tour
The reason it’s Utah is because two summers in a row I’ve been a finalist in the Susanne Millsaps Performing Songwriter Competition and thus have been given the opportunity to play in the showcase at a big festival. (Two different festivals: the first year it was at Snowbird; the second year it moved to Salt Lake City.) In addition to playing at the festivals, I’ve attended the day-long song school associated with it, and met additional people there. So I had some fans and some friends in the area.

I was invited to play one house concert — the fantastic Magpie House Concert series, although it is in the process of winding down as a series and organized my trip around that, adding a second house concert the day after the first. I decided (for home reasons) not to stay all the way through to the second weekend, which limited my playing options, since most shows take place on weekends.

I did accumulate additional musical activities, though. First, since I was in the area anyway I arranged for a photo shoot with Anita Crane (Photography by Neets), who I met through the song school and whose photographs I love. I’m a terrible photography subject, but I’m certain there will be a couple photos that worked out. Stay tuned for the results.

I also (through musician connections) arranged to go to MacNichol guitars where the owner shot videos of me playing portions of my songs on the guitars in the store. It’s a great idea — he does a lot of business with folks who can’t come into the store, and that way they can hear what the different guitars sound like. And doing it by having musicians play the guitars gives them publicity (he puts our websites on the videos) and hopefully drums up interest.

The video shoot was a lot of fun. How bad can it be to sit around and play your own songs on a bunch of fantastic guitars? And Michael, the owner, was a great guy. He also paid me in store credit, so I ended up with a bunch of useful gear to bring home (good thing I didn’t have room for any guitars), though the TSA was suspicious of one of my new capos . . . .I’ll post links to videos when they’re up.

I had also planned to play at an open mike the night before I left, but none of the friends who were also going to be playing at it were able to go, so in the end I decided to spend the evening trading songs (and in particular, critiquing songs in progress) with my friend Alicia McGovern, the closest friend I have in the area, and one of the best songwriters I know. That was a great way to spend my evening, even though it turned into a late night as we couldn’t bring ourselves to stop swapping songs.

It was a good, and productive trip. Both house concerts featured real listening audiences who bought CDs and signed my mailing lists. The first one had more people than we were expecting, the second one fewer, but I played well and felt good about the shows. I had been worrying about playing to a full room without amplification for a whole show, but it seemed to work without trouble.

My goal was to break even on the trip — at this point, venturing that far from home as a musician is much more about exposure than about making money. And I definitely did, ending up with photos and music gear to boot.

Most importantly, I felt taken seriously as a musician. I wax and wane about whether a music career is a realistic thing for me. I have a day job I’m not likely to give up, but the real issue is whether other people take me seriously as a musician rather than as a dilettante. And on this trip I felt like a real musician.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/utah_tour Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:26:40 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/rhymes_rhymes_all_the_time
The broader context is that rhymes (as with other things like line length) create expectations, so how you work with those expectations influences the feeling in the song. The first part of rhyme is the rhyme scheme — which lines rhyme with each other (or don’t) and what kind of a feeling those patterns create.

The most interesting thing here that I hadn’t previously thought about was that the idea of a couplet (two matched/rhymed lines) is extremely stable, but so much so that if you assemble a verse or chorus from couplets (a/a/b/b) there’s a stopping point at the end of each couplet that creates a break between the two ideas.

For that reason, an a/b/a/b rhyme scheme creates more motion, because once you get to the end of the first two lines you don’t feel done yet. Also, playing with what your ear expects can call attention to parts that upend those expectations. So a version when the first three lines don’t rhyme leads you to expect that the fourth will rhyme with the second; if it doesn’t (if it, say, rhymes with the third) it will surprise you and catch your attention.

The rhyme scheme that creates the most instability (one I’m not sure I’ve ever used) is a/b/b/a. Will have to look into that one — possibly for the assignment this week.

We then moved onto types of rhymes, which move in a spectrum from most stable to least stable: perfect, family, additive, subtractive, assonance, and consonance. The idea of rhyme type builds on the fact that in singing, vowels are emphasized, so vowels are more important in what we hear and expect in rhyme than consonants are.

Perfect rhymes are what we think of when we think of rhymes (and what the rhyming dictionary would give you). Family rhymes aren’t perfect, but they’re close — there’s a complicated formula of how consonants are formed that I won’t go into here, but make some of them (mud/rut, love/rough) sound more alike than others.

This classification is not something I consciously knew about (and in fact Pat Pattison gives himself credit for bringing those concept to songwriting), but I suspect I understood it intuitively and made use of it when looking for possible close rhymes (when a perfect one wasn’t available).

Next comes additive and subtractive rhymes, in which PART of the syllable rhymes but the second part adds more (cry/bribe) or takes some away (as in the title of this post: rhymes/time). Adding sound is more stable than subtracting sound, because you have a perfect rhyme with an additive rhyme and then some extra, whereas you don’t with a subtractive rhyme. I also hadn’t thought about this idea consciously, although I definitely was aware of its effect — I’ve particularly used it for adding extra syllables at the end of a rhyme.

Finally, there’s assonance (vowel sounds are alike) and consonance (ending consonant is alike). I wouldn’t have thought of these as rhymes, so much as ways to create appealing sound connections — and Pat agrees that they’re not really rhymes, but rather connections. I tend to use these tools (often unconsciously, but when they turn up I note them and make a point of keeping them — and sometimes I’ll go looking for assonance or consonance), but much more for internal line sounds. I don’t yet know if we’re going to get into that in the course.

What I wonder, though, is how much great songwriters think to themselves “OK, I want this to be reasonably stable but not all the way, so I think I’ll use an additive, or family, rhyme here instead of a perfect one.” (I find it more likely that people will intentionally play around with, or chose, a rhyme scheme for how it makes the lyrics move or feel than rhyme type.)

If Pat is right — and I’m sure he is — about the sorts of feelings that these different types of rhymes create, then it should surely be an option to consciously deploy them: choose, for instance, to make your rhyme less perfect to make it feel less stable. But this level of conscious choice doesn’t square with my experience of songwriting. Sure, it gives me a clearer idea of which less-perfect rhymes might be more or less useful when I can’t find the perfect rhyme I want to say what I need to say. But most of my songwriting is neither that slow nor that deliberate.

I was recently listening to an amateur songwriter who I know has taken these kinds of songwriting courses. And I found myself listening to this person’s lyrics and noting that they felt like they were written as a songwriting exercise, in which rhyme scheme and type and line length and number were used, as if in an assignment. It’s my contention that when you notice those things when you’re listening to a song it’s not a successful song.

I’ve come to the same place I reached at the end of my last blog post. I think these tools are central to songwriting. But I think they primarily work when you’ve internalized them (though listening deeply to many great songs), rather than when you consciously deploy them. Sure, having some tools to use when you’re stuck for a rhyme or wonder how to create more motion in your verse can be extremely useful, and I’m glad to have names to put to these concepts. But for the most part I think we use them to describe, rather than create, successful songs.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/rhymes_rhymes_all_the_time Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:10:25 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/line_number_and_length
The week’s topics are organized around the idea of stability and instability. Whether things are matched or unmatched create stability or instability — and emphasize different things. A lot of that comes from what we expect to hear, and how playing with what we expect has an effect with how it makes us feel.

Take the number of lines, for instance. An even number of lines feels stable, balanced, resolved. An uneven number of lines feels unstable, unbalanced, unresolved; it creates forward motion.

The similar thing is true of the length of lines. We expect lines to be matched, balanced. When they’re not, we take notice. Making lines shorter than we expect creates forward momentum (you want to get to the thing that comes next). Making lines longer than we expect creates a spotlight on the extra bits — calls our attention to them.

All of that sounds pretty simple and it is. Which is why it makes it so surprising that I’d never consciously thought about it before.

But I immediately realized that I already knew it viscerally, and had used it in my songwriting already (especially in the past couple years). To take one example, one of my February songs (the one I wrote on the banjo) works with both of these tools.

The verse has seven lines, in a way that both calls attention to the last line and moves you forward to the chorus:

Little sparrow in the window
Tell me where you’re going
And when you come flying back here
Tell me where you’ve been
Just a few more hours till you
Fly away and leave me
Never to return this way again

The chorus, also plays with line length (though it has four lines and so is balanced/stable in that way). The second line is longer than you expect and the forth shorter:

And we are looking for a better place
Never at rest, wondering if we’ll forever roam
But if we yield to joy and welcome grace
Maybe we’ll find a way back home


The thing about songwriting is that, if you listen to enough music, you learn how to write songs without knowing that you’re learning how to write songs. I’ve started to write unstable lines because they felt right for what I was trying to accomplish in a song, but not knowing why they felt right. So it’s useful to have it framed for me.

But ultimately, it reminds me that the best songwriting education is the education you get by immersing yourself in songs. (It’s like the importance of reading for learning how to write.) And the thing I have done, since I was three years old and learned all the verses to Darling Clementine, is listen to songs, with all my being. Which is how I learned to write songs, without even knowing it.]]> http://bethdesombre.com/blog.html/line_number_and_length Wed, 13 Mar 2013 10:50:02 -0700 New songs that spring from old traditions - Beth DeSombre - Blog