On "a little ditty"

Well, I was late on my first assignment.  That was much more difficult than I expected. Writing the lyrics was agonizing and slow.  And at the end of the day, I hate them. I got pretty sick of the music too.  That said, the sugary sappiness of it had me in the BEST mood all week.  Makes me a little worried for when I write a sad song.

Anyway, in this post I'll try to go over my process and what I learned from it.

This was actually my second attempt this week.  For the first, I couldn't think of a single lyric.  Maybe that one will turn up in a later week.  But while I was ignoring the first one, I started humming this happy-go-lucky melody.  I hum all the time, so this isn't unusual.  But because I'm doing this project, I paid more attention to it and let it develop further in my humming.  At some point, I grabbed my mandolin (a pretty new instrument to me, as evidenced by the simplicity of the part) and figured out the chord progression that the melody was suggesting.  I don't know many chords on the mandolin yet, so I just used the bass note.  And it seemed to fit the mood to have minimal accompaniment.

The first lyrics were "when I close my eyes".  No idea where they came from.  I think when I'm singing aimlessly, I'll sometimes just grab some random cliche line and sing that.  The lines "let's sing a song, if you like you can hum along" were next, and were deliberately chosen because they fit the sing-songy tone, and I was starting to get an "I'd like to teach the world to sing..." vibe from the music.

At this point I started visualizing what the song might be about.  The music made me picture Zooey Deschanel frolicking around a color saturated dream meadow, leading someone by the hand, showing them around.  So I guess it's about inviting someone to look into into my imagination, which is mostly full of musical things.  Now that I think about it, that's kind of what I'm doing with this whole blog thing.  Woah.  Having a reference image definitely helped me come up with more lyrics, but often I would try too hard to drive the direction of the lyrics and get stuck in a corner.

There's a concept in improvisational theatre called "yes, and..." (read Impro, by Keith Johnstone - you won't regret it), which basically means, always accept whatever your scene partner improvises, and add to it.  This can also apply to how you manage your internal creative filter.  The mind is a much better random content generator than we realize.  The trick to improvising is to recognize what your brain is offering, accept it without question, and run with it.  Both the recognizing and the accepting are difficult, but presumably get better with practice.  I think I should apply this to writing lyrics as a way to generate content to work with.  I can always fix it up later, or make more than I need and swap stuff in, out and around.  That said, I did a very poor job of heeding my own advice this time around.

Here are the lessons I'm taking away from this week:

1. If a lyric comes to mind, write it down. No matter how dumb, embarrassing, weird or whatever.  I wasted a lot of time fighting lyrics I didn't like that I ultimately kept.
2. Work faster, or at least give myself more breaks from the song.  Not sure exactly how to do this, but boy did I get sick of the song by the end of the week.
3. Plan a little more time for recording, not at midnight - it's not nice to my roommates.