What Is A Melody Like?

Since this Fall, I've had a twice-a-day, one-hour commute on a train. So naturally, the question emerged: how can I direct this time to writing music? My usual comfort zone centers around using the keyboard to find interesting harmonies with minimal notation. Thus, my train-time centers around using my inner ear to find interesting melodies with standard notation.

It's been very good training for having a better sense of line. By line, I mean horizontal continuity. The Prologue from Into the Woods has a tremendous sense of line, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. What path does, say, an 8-bar melody take from beginning to end? How big a harmonic space does it move through? Does it move swiftly or without assurance? Does it suggest its destination? Does it actually go there? Is it light or heavy? Does it seek variety or repetition? Does it even care? These are the sorts of choices that make a melody what it is (whether they're made by the composer or the melody is another question).

The homogeneous appearance of notes on a page can distract from these distinctions. It helps to find a way to embrace their actual heterogeneity, to get intimate with your materials. Synesthetic language admittedly doesn't translate well between people (hence the lack of examples here), but it's proven a good tool for this job. This much I can say without any confusion: there are profound possibilities in melody.

How to Write a Song

Before I dive into this one, I'll let my good friend Gulley Jimson have at it:

But one day when I was sitting in our London office on Bankside, I dropped a blot on an envelope; and having nothing to do just then, I pushed it about with my pen to try and make it look more like a face. And the next thing was I was drawing figures in red and black, on the same envelope. And from that moment I was done for.

It's just that easy! Really. For quite a while, I had a very positive, but not too intimate relationship with songs. I listened to them, sang them, had some opinions, but write them?... no, I could never do that. That's something only other people do. How do you even do that?

Then one day, I had my Gulley Jimson moment. It was a little less dramatic — I was sitting at a piano — but it felt similarly sudden. I was doing what one is supposed to do in a situation, a temptation appeared, I met it, and now my friends are extremely patient with me.

This trip down memory lane was triggered by some recent housekeeping. Despite my background in composition as an exercise in dot-drawing, my song notations have been very informal.* I work in a spiral-bound, college-ruled notebook with disposable ballpoint pens. I like this arrangement for its frugality, simplicity, and unpretentiousness. The pages have space enough to work and pre-marked margins. They don't distract from the work at hand. I write lyrics with chord symbols. As ABBA (via SM) said, if I can't remember my own melodies, who else will?

One built-in of this notation scheme is that songs can become a little organic. I find this ultimately benefits the quality of the writing. However, it's been a little over two years since my Gulley Jimson moment and I decided it was time for a little more precise notation. My memory is sure right now... but I wanted to get things down while they're still sure. So, I fired up Sibelius and went at it. It was fun. I saw what improvements I've made at this or that. I found some moments where it seemed like I was really listening. I was proud of those.

Back to the original question: how do you write a song? My photography teacher in high school offered us a cheeky definition of art: it's whatever artists make. To that, I offer a corollary: you make art by making art. I don't want to underplay the ineffabilities inherent to the process. The sourceless surprises are part of continuing pleasure of it, but there's no denying the dumb earthiness in it. You want to draw a face? Well pick up yer pigment and press it to paper. You want to talk technique and other niceties, that's really a separate conversation. Songwriting became possible for me when I recognized those were separate attitudes.

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* What impressionable young experimentalist wouldn't find reading Cage's Notations a radical experience? For all that was in that book, what does it say that my strongest memory of it, what seemed like the most radical notation, was its inclusion of "The Word," lyrics only, attributed to "The Beatles"? (That I was at risk of becoming a songwriter?)

Why Rhyme?

The wag in me wants to ask the question in a broader existential sense (such as how someone with bipolar disorder would ask "why get out of bed?"), but let's start small. More specifically, beyond the effect of "words that sound like other words," what tools do rhymes provide to a lyricist? A few for your consideration:

The sex you're trading up for what you hope is love

Is just another thing that he'll be careless of₁

In the most basic sense, rhymes connect words and give them some kind of larger shape. The rhyme here makes a long thought feel whole. The connection between love and of, however, is essentially utilitarian.

Having her on my brain's like getting hit by a train

She's gonna kill me. Oh Celeste, oh Celeste.₂

Here there's a little more meat in the connection. It illuminates something less familiar about the words being rhymed.

I'll pretend I'm jealous of all the fellas

And if that don't do then I'll try something new₃

Smokey Robinson makes those connections with the sort of language you'd use in casual conversation. That's why he's a great poet.

On a ferris wheel looking out on Coney Island

There are more stars than there are prostitutes in Thailand₄

You can't talk about rhymes in songwriting without mentioning funny lyrics. The rhyme sneaks up on you and snaps the joke into place.

I'd go to hell for yuh, even Philadelphia!₅

Sometimes the joke's in the rhyme itself.

Although she's none the wiser, although we've barely met

I can recognize her from the treatment that I get₆

Rhymes have a kind of gravitational pull that you can align with musical phrases.

Look at the day dressed in copper lamé and it's trying your glass slippers on

I sit in the dark and I listen to Mark asking where has that last firefly gone₇

In this way, harmonious combinations of words can become their own kind of music, something interesting to chew on with the melody.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Hopefully, it points to some of the magic in words that can get you to pick up the pen every day.

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₁Aimee Mann, "You Do"

₂Old 97's, "Timebomb"

₃Smokey Robinson, "I'll Try Something New"

₄Stephin Merritt, "Strange Powers"

₅Lorenz Hart, "Any Old Place with You"

₆Jon Brion & Aimee Mann, "I Believe She's Lying"

₇Franklin Bruno, "In A Sourceless Light"