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17 June 2002
More Mind Games
Two more games for the stuck songwriter:
Something weighs on your mind. Find a writing surface (the stranger the better -- dot-matrix printer paper, the margins of a local newspaper, McDonalds napkins). Pick up the pen and write continuously; don't worry about rhyming or meter or development of a theme. Write as though you were composing a rather pretentious overblown journal entry. Metaphors, exaggerations, distortions, flights of fancy, tangential ideas, everything's valid. Then go to the piano and sing it, line by line. Something snags on a chord: one sentence, half of one, two words. It's the first part of a chorus. You have a beginning.
Take a song you like (or better yet, one you hate) and analyze it to death. Write out its lyrics slowly, painstakingly, as though they were your own. Consider alternate wordings. Change the chords. Slow it down; speed it up; play it as a polka, a jazz ballad, a national anthem of some imaginary country. Realize that all songs were once experiments, works-in-progress, anything but inevitable in their final form. Forgive yourself the same struggle.
- VT
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