Notes on Songbird
On fickle lovers, punchlines, happy-sad songs, song editing, sonic flatness, dawn choruses, melody vs rhythm, birdsong, bridges and ba-dums.
SONG
WRITINGS
NICK
So we shared this song in the last post. Now we’re going to warble pleasantly about it.
From my side, it began with a vague idea that ‘Songbird’ would be a nice name for a 1920s-style song. I liked the range of rhymes or near-rhymes it suggested: wandered, wrong bird, squandered, onward.
By following those rhymes, you get the outline of a story: the idea of a guy wandering along, unreasonably blaming the bird for not warning him that his lover was about to leave him, sighing that he may have squandered his one and only chance of romance, and then proving to be comically fickle by the end as it turns out he’s met someone else.
I think of it as a light-hearted song, with the bird representing the idea of songs in general, and how we project our own dramas onto them.
Did any of that come across when I first sent it to you?
KATE
The thing about the story that first struck me was the punchline, ‘I think I’ve met someone’. That fickleness really made me smile. It made me think of Romeo and Juliet—how on the day Romeo meets Juliet, he’s pining for a completely different woman.
(Speaking of musical ‘punchlines’, that brings us back to lieder and the ‘sting in the tail’ poetry of Heinrich Heine… I stumbled across this old blog post with some interesting examples.)
I love what you say about the bird representing the idea of songs. That’s absolutely the beauty of music, isn’t it? The same piece can appeal to millions of people because we each hear our own life in it. Makes me think of my husband Leo—someone with a pretty positive outlook—who insists that Radiohead’s No Surprises is ‘a happy song’…
Which also makes me wonder: do you think about the different ways in which people appreciate songs? How maybe some people listen to the music without worrying too much about lyrics, and others vice versa? As a writer, do you ever listen to certain artists and not worry about the words?
NICK
That Heinrich Heine post is fascinating—the “I don’t believe in heaven” lyric reminds me of Nick Cave’s opening line ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’.
And I love Leo’s take on No Surprises—it is a totally happy song musically, with that innocent lullaby melody. You often get a nice effect when you have sad lyrics with a happy melody. For some reason, So Lonely by The Police comes to mind, where it switches from the reggae verse to this driving, major key chorus all about feeling lonely.
I often listen to songs without paying much attention to the meaning of the words, because it’s not necessarily the main thing. Paul McCartney once said “I don’t root for meaning all the time. Sometimes it just feels right.” But then there are other songs (not least in Tin Pan Alley) where the meaning is so central you can’t really ignore it.
Going back to Songbird, the original version I sent you had four verses and two bridges. The missing second verse was: Songbird / maybe you’re the wrong bird / for the early morning slot / What else have you got? / Yesterday had a twist in the plot / Oh songbird, you need to change your tune / and preferably soon.
But we quickly worked out between us that three verses would work better, and the two bridges could be combined into one. It’s much better that way—there’s a reason all those old songs used that verse-verse-bridge-verse structure. And the second verse had some fun lines, but didn’t really move the ‘plot’ along at all. The fact that it could be cut so easily was a sign it probably needed to be cut.
KATE
I feel like we could fill a whole post about sad songs that sound happy. I remember being horrified the first time I heard the full lyrics to You Are My Sunshine.
That McCartney quote… It’s interesting to me because so much of my day job as a copywriter is about finding the meaning in something. And not just the meaning, but the very sharpest point of the meaning. (Of course, it doesn’t mean that the meaning has to be expressed in a literal or boring way. Sometimes, a truth is best and most beautifully expressed by a metaphor, say.)
It makes me think about writing where every word has to earn its place. I’ve been in novel-writing classes where people have had to delete whole scenes, whole chapters of beautiful, lyrical prose because—however lovely—those sections weren’t moving the story along. You see screenwriters making sure that every scene has a purpose: inciting incident, midpoint, climax.
Funny to think where this translates to music, even when there are no lyrics. Even when it isn’t telling a linear ‘story’, music has direction, forward motion. For a long time, I couldn’t get on board with minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, where there’s often lots of repetition and a feeling of stasis—almost a kind of sonic ‘flatness’. I just couldn’t see where it was going. (Although maybe my need for direction is a product of our restless, distracted modern world, and maybe that kind of meditative music is exactly what I need!)
In terms of the lyrics, I must admit I actually like your original song structure. But I think the musical concept (more on that later) would have been harder to sustain over a longer song. Maybe that’s why the structure feels ‘right’ to us now, because we’re no longer looking at the words alone.
When it comes to songwriting, do you feel like your lyrics have to keep moving? Or are there times where you feel it’s OK to linger in a lyrical moment, just because you can?
NICK
I guess I like both. As you say, most songs don’t have a ‘plot’ as such, so I don’t think there necessarily has to be a progression from first to last verse (especially when people aren’t listening closely to the words anyway). And I do like songs that circle around a theme, rather than progressing in a linear way. A lot of Tin Pan Alley songs do that—they take an idiomatic title as a cue and then explore its different meanings. For example, the song Mean to me starts out ‘Why must you be mean to me’ and ends ‘You shouldn’t, for can’t you see / What you mean to me’.
With Songbird, the real transformation you wrought was musical. I’m sure you’ll describe it better than me. But the interesting thing is that the basic melody I wrote only emerges in your version about halfway through the second verse, and then becomes the lead melody by the last verse.
I think of your version being like turning a camera lens, so that it starts off focusing on the background melody—all the layered harmonies of verse 1—and then you gradually twist the lens so that the foreground melody emerges through verse 2, then comes fully into focus in verse 3.
It’s a lovely effect that mirrors the guy’s journey through the song, from yesterday to today to tomorrow. And the layers of harmony remind me of a forest full of birds tweeting away, especially in the bridge. Can you describe how it came together in your head musically?
KATE
Love the camera metaphor! (A twitcher’s camera, maybe?)
I thought about what it means when a singer is described as a ‘songbird’, and how it’s maybe about melody. Ella Fitzgerald seems the archetypal songbird, a singer who not only has a charming voice but makes long lines and daring leaps sound effortless. Listening to her on something like Misty, you hear her extraordinary talent for melody: both in celebrating it and elaborating on it.
But plenty of popular songs aren’t centred on melody at all, even from contemporary female singers who have great voices (songbirds?). Listen to Look What You Made Me Do or Bury a Friend. Or New Rules. You might say that rhythm is more important.
So, I wanted to play with melody. Which is why, even though you’d created an extremely catchy one yourself, I decided that I’d only introduce it after the bridge! In the first verse, the voices move in such a way that there isn’t really a ‘main’ vocal line (harmonies inspired by Imogen Heap!). But the melody creeps in and the song becomes more ‘traditional’, complete with a little vocal improvisation here and there.
Also, it’s a simple thing, but I imagined the melody—which is so chirpy and upbeat—as a signifier of happiness. So, it’s completely absent at the beginning. But, by the end, when the narrator has moved onto his next love interest, it’s front and centre.
It’s quite an unusual approach—but you’ve always seemed very happy to let the music be a bit experimental. Do you think having the very formal structure for the lyrics is what allows us to be a bit more relaxed about the music? Lyrically, do you ever feel like not worrying about structure at all?
NICK
I could definitely imagine doing something less structured, but right now I’m enjoying the challenge of doing something formal and traditional, especially after years of writing looser Realtime Notes. I feel like I’m deliberately schooling myself in writing songs to a time-honoured formula, even if that seems a bit eccentric and backward.
Speaking of formulas, I mentioned the bridge earlier, and it really is my favourite part of the song—especially the second part. ‘This morning I’m walking in sorrow’ is a shorter line that allows some breathing space for the backing harmonies to unfold, before ‘You’d better find another fellow to follow’. And the little ‘so-rrow… so-rrow’ harmony on top sounds totally like a bird chiming in from a higher branch. The whole thing reminds me of a growing dawn chorus.
And one thing I haven’t mentioned yet is the ‘Ba-dum’ part after the bridge, which is loosely based on the whistled section I had in my version—I really like how it’s an instrumental break, but the instrument is the voice.
That seems like a distinctive part of what you do musically—this thing of exploring the voice as an instrument. Maybe we can broaden out in the next post and talk about that more—how we think about ‘voices’ generally in music. I guess traditionally we tend to think of instruments doing the ‘music’ bit—creating the soundscape, rhythm and harmonies—and the voice being the part that delivers the words on top. But the voice is obviously a sonic instrument in itself, and it gets used in wildly different ways throughout popular music. I imagine you have lots of thoughts about that.
Those thoughts will have to wait for the next post. Thanks for reading these extended warblings—we’re really enjoying putting these songs and writings out into the ether. Feel free to throw comments, shares, questions, brickbats and/or bouquets our way.