Lyrics Writing and the Subconscious

Sometimes I"m really surprised how accurately writing lyrics, one can capture your current emotion of existensial dillemma without any forthought or intention on the part of the Author. I mean these words that pop into my head, that alone seem quite meaningless, but eventually coalese into a concise summation of 'my lot' without a single conscious thought in that direction. Does that happen to you?

At times I will even be specifically trying to avoid writing a song abotu a particular subject, and yet when I look back over it it really captures the sentiment of what you are avoiding. Io the extent that I"m shocked how accurately it does and that I didn't mean for lines or words to be about that subject.

posted by mary8nne (5 comments total)

I know that, for the past few years, I've gone pretty much all-subconscious when it comes to writing lyrics. I'll work up a skeleton of a song (usually some half-baked collection of riffs and chord changes) and take it into practice; the band'll play through it 3 or 4 times and it'll either sink or swim. If it's swimming, by run-through 4 I'll just start freestyling lyrics about whatever's on my mind (which is how I wind up with songs about huffing jenkem or whatever book I just finished reading). Then as the arrangement gets worked out over the next few weeks, I also sort of refine the lyrics on the fly as we go, and the whole thing just solidifies over time.

I won't claim to be writing the songs that'll change Western civilization, but I really do think the output's gotten better since I went on autopilot like this; before, I was guilty of a bunch of overwrought songs where I'd sat for hours trying to figure out exactly how to tell the world some Really Important Thing.
posted by COBRA! at 8:25 AM on July 27, 2009

My lyrics generally develop in three different ways: (1) out of the gobbledegook I sing when I'm writing the vocal melody; (2) where I have a title that has triggered something (I have a long list of titles that are awaiting something) or (3) where I get most of it out in one go - like a dam bursting. But that's not the norm - although, strangely enough, a piece I'm currently writing has come out in that "rush". The norm is that the main "writing" happens when the red light is flashing and I'm recording the proper vocal (rather than the guide vocal I always construct tracks around) and trying to make sense of the bollocks I've been singing up to that point! I've only ever written one lyric beforehand with no idea of the music - it was called "Riverface" (about growing old) and it didn't really work that well - I uploaded it here a while back.

Frankly though I'm melody and texture-centric. I don't really give that much of a toss about the lyrics, so long as they're not really crap. The main criterion for me is that the words can be sung without fucking up the melodic line. Personal taste I know - a lot of people really value lyrics and that's cool. I'd happily relinquish the lyric writing to someone else so I can concentrate on the music.
posted by MajorDundee at 3:10 PM on July 27, 2009

mary8nne, something like you describe happened when I recorded this song holden/elie. I set out to write a goofy, sarcastic song mocking the 'givewell' guys--one of those metafilter sagas from a year and a half ago. It should have been one of those 'inside joke' songs, but it ended up sounding wistful, which in the end was better than smug, I think.

But the reason that it sounded sad against my will was because I had just found out that my mom had been diagnosed with, well, something really serious and rare, and was going to have to have really risky brain surgery. So even though the lyrics were about something completely different, I was in her home, playing her banjo, and now when I listen to it, I think about how it captured that moment, rather than the topic of the song. She's fine now, and ended up not needing the surgery, but at the time, I didn't know that.
posted by umbú at 6:02 PM on July 27, 2009

I rarely end up writing anything that corresponds directly to my gut; most songs end up growing out of a random line that I think has some promise, with the rest built around that. Sometimes I was sitting down to Write A Song About X, but more often it starts at random and turns into songwriting when I realize I've got something worth chewing on.

I have every once in a while recorded something while genuinely moody, and that usually ends up pulling out some revealing, uh, pathos in my actual performance—this Wilco cover was the end of a just crappo day and ended up being very unlike how I would have recorded the song if I'd been in any kind of normal mood—but for the most part once I get into process of writing and arranging and recording a song, I tend to be so self-aware of the process that it's hard for unexpected emotions to slip in edgewise for me.

If anything, a lot of my recordings are probably a bit to the manic side of baseline normal, because I tend to get recording and just Go Go Go until I'm done. But that's production, not writing; lyrics come when they come and I have a hard time forcing them in any quantity, so it's rare to have them come out of a single specific mood since I'm probably not in a specific mood throughout the whole life of the song if it's something that takes any time to write.
posted by cortex at 6:38 PM on July 27, 2009

I'm sort of surprised at how often whatever I sing over a chord sequence becomes the lyrics I use. But, you know, play three power chords and shout something exciting, it's sort of hard not to want that to be a song.
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:44 PM on July 30, 2009