So what would I cry for?
On a special Zoom event, agnostic gospel music, songs and ads that make us laugh or cry, Nick's book, Chris Rea's song, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein song that is on our minds right now.
Zoom event: If you want to hear us talking songs, writing and songwriting, sign up here for a free Zoom hosted by writers’ organisation 26. (6.30-7.30pm on 13 June.)
NICK
So last time we shared ‘Sooner or later’, complete with a Charlie Chaplin video (edited from his 1915 film The Champion).
First, to talk briefly about the writing process, this was another one that started off with a common idiom. I’ve talked before about how I find idioms a useful starting point (see also From time to time and Cloud cuckoo land), and I believe other songwriters have done the same over the years. ‘Sooner or later’ just felt like an interesting title to work with, and I idly strummed while reaching for slightly stupid internal rhymes like ‘sooner’ and ‘opportun-er’, or ‘later’ with ‘this weight u-’.
The nice thing about ‘Sooner or later’ is it sets you up with a structure—so the first verse begins with ‘sooner’ and the second verse flips it round to ‘later or sooner’. Then the bridge introduces a fatalistic shrug of ‘Hopefully sooner, probably later’, again with a hint of internal rhyme in ‘whatever the universe decides’. And the sheer act of reaching for rhymes led me to ‘God provides’, which is a pretty bold statement, but I’m not sure it lands that way—it’s more like the singer’s trying to convince him/herself of something.
My memory is that I wrote it a few years back, before we started this project, and I was in a pretty downbeat state of mind about songwriting and my creative output in general. So even though it’s an upbeat song, I feel like it has this self-doubt and melancholy woven through it—mainly in that ‘probably later’ aside, and talk of ‘this weight upon my mind’.
Despite the ‘God provides’ part, it hadn’t occurred to me that you could read this as a kind of agnostic gospel song. But, as always, you’re good at shaping the music in a way that’s sensitive to the words—I love the jauntiness of the opening, the swelling church organ in the bridge, the gospel-style chant as it continues, and the key change that seems to come from nowhere after the second bridge.
KATE
I’m interested that you talk about the melancholy within the song—because, this time, I decided that my challenge would be to make the arrangement very straightforwardly cheerful! I thought of a conversation I had ages ago, when another writer suggested that ‘great’ works of literature tend to be tragic rather than happy.
(Now, I don’t think this actually translates to music. Sure, some would argue that even great ‘happy’ songs are tinged with sadness—for instance, You’ve Got a Friend, where ‘nothing, nothing is going right’. And I’m sure many perceive upbeat pop to be less ‘serious’ than moody indie. But who’s going to argue that I Want to Hold Your Hand isn’t a great song? Or September, especially when sung by a cockatiel?)
Anyway, I leaned into the cheerful vibes. Hence the trumpets! And the glockenspiel! Which I’m pretty sure would have frightened us off when we started this project. The dotted rhythm helps the song to feel jaunty, too—and making the guitar crisp, with a bit of silence between strums, helps to keep the accompaniment nice and bouncy.
But maybe the most cheerful thing is the key change you’ve mentioned. For me, it’s answering the singer’s prayers in a small musical way. So, after the first bridge, where the singer hopes that ‘God provides’, we return to the beginning of the song—the same key, the guitar strumming like before. But, while I tried to make the second bridge sound the same as the first, it actually takes us to a new key. I wanted it to feel like something big has changed without the listener even really noticing. As if the universe has delivered and is just waiting for you to realise. This is probably the biggest musical trick making the song sound hopeful.
Do you have a tendency towards melancholy or cheerfulness when you write? And do you think writers sometimes tend towards tragedy, in a bid to be taken seriously? Bringing the conversation around to brand world, do you think there’s anything of this in the recent craze for ‘purpose’, which you dissect rather brilliantly in your new book The Road to Hell?
NICK
Ha, nice pivot to book promotion!
First, I love how you talk about that key shift at the end of the second bridge, like the music is raising the singer up without them really knowing about it. Thematically, it’s perfect. And I like how the video (another found and roughly edited copyright-free film) reaches a turning point just as the key is changing and the dog decides to return his master’s past kindnesses by defending him in the ring. Good dog.
I think the film shares some of the ambiguity of the song—it’s partly a happy story about karma paying off in the end, but also involves Chaplin blatantly cheating by turning his lucky horseshoe into a hidden weapon. I love his agonised look to camera and heavy sigh as he glances up to heaven and hopes God doesn’t mind.
But enough about him, let’s talk about my book. Or at least for a little while. I think you’re totally right that commercial brands are drawn towards more po-faced, tear-jerking advertising because it somehow feels more serious and credible, even though it often leads to unserious and not very credible results. And maybe there is some parallel with songs, in that it’s hard to write a good song that’s purely happy or laugh-out-loud funny, and it feels more serious and ‘arty’ to write a break-up album or wistful love song.
That said, I think a lot of great lyricists are really good at humour. Morrissey knows how to tell a joke, Bob Dylan has written some outright funny songs (like Bob Dylan's 115th Dream or Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat) and Tin Pan Alley was full of witty lyricists. But often the wit was combined with darker moods. There’s a lovely line in Anthony Burgess’s book ‘This man and music’, where he writes about the Tin Pan Alley lyricist Lorenz Hart, who led a pretty dysfunctional and ultimately doomed life. Burgess writes: “With Hart and his followers there is a certain ambiguity of feeling, wit in the service of frustration or neurosis”. I like that turn of phrase—”wit in the service of frustration or neurosis”—you could certainly apply it to Morrissey.
I suppose I should mention that my book shares its title with a Chris Rea song. That has a pretty dark lyric, come to think of it. “And the perverted fear of violence chokes a smile on every face / And common sense is ringing out the bell / This ain’t no technological breakdown / Oh no, this is the road to hell.”
He seemed happier on the road to Christmas.
Anyway, two questions for you:
– Is there any song, or specific part of a song, that’s guaranteed to make you laugh/smile? And any that’s guaranteed to make you well up?
– Same question for ads. (And for all my wider purpose scepticism, I think its totally understandable to well up at ads—just as long as it’s not WeBuyAnyCar.)
KATE
Hmmm, to be honest I’ll cry at anything. Especially if I’m allowed classical options, like Janet Baker singing Dido’s Lament (Jeff Buckley did an incredible version of this) or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing Angels Ever Bright and Fair. Also a struggle to get through Roberta Flack’s Do What You Gotta Do and Sammy Davis Jr’s Mr Bojangles.
Funnily enough, I was listening to Everyone Into Position by Oceansize yesterday, and I was reminded that the last track makes me weirdly emotional. Then, thinking of songs that made me cry when I was a kid—Puff the Magic Dragon, Bright Eyes, The White Cliffs of Dover (things we used to sing at school, for some reason)—I realised they all have something in common… Without getting too technical, they use a particular harmonic shift very prominently: the shift between the first (or ‘tonic’) and third chords of their respective keys. In major key songs like these, going from the first chord to the third means moving from major to minor, which is partly why it sounds so melancholy. This same thing happens in the tear-jerky soundtrack to Edward Scissorhands. Listen here, from 1:10. I’m clearly a sucker for this musical trick.
(Going back to the Oceansize track—lyrically, I love how the album title creeps into the vocals unexpectedly, at what feels like an unusual point in the phrase: a surprise, like when you’re out walking and you suddenly come across an incredible sunset.)
As for songs that make me laugh or smile… Love Sensation by Loleatta Holloway makes me feel pure joy. Same with Wilson Pickett’s version of Hey Jude. And I adore Carole King’s You’ve Got A Friend, which I’ve already mentioned. But songs that make me actually laugh are trickier. The first that comes to mind is a goofy example: Fatally Yours by Alkaline Trio. It describes a failing relationship:
I don't hear from you no more
But I get the message
You crashed your car through my front door
I pulled you from the wreckage
You told me that you missed me
But you meant with the grill and hood
(You'd kill me if you could)
I just love the audacity of starting a song with what is essentially a Dad Joke.
When it comes to ads, I might go for an oldie. And a musical one: the Burger King 1812 overture ad. As a kid, I used to look forwards to seeing it because it made me laugh so much. Especially the little parp eight seconds in. A genuinely brilliant kazoo performance. I’ve spent years trying to persuade myself that what I like in comedy is acerbic, Stewart-Lee style social commentary but I should probably just accept that the things that really make me laugh are funny noises and people falling over.
NICK
Yes, I’ll always prefer Vic and Bob hitting each other with frying pans over the more cerebral stuff. (And I always liked their Cadbury’s Boost ad—slightly rippled with a flat underside.)
That Burger King ad has to be one of the best ads-without-any-words—such a pure idea communicated in sound and music. Love it.
Oceansize—never heard that one before but can totally relate to the sense of melancholy expressed through the medium of loud guitars. The drum pattern near the start reminds me of New Grass by Talk Talk, which is fairly high on my blubbing list.
Weirdly, I remember having Puff the Magic Dragon in my head a lot as a kid—I’m only finding out now that it was a Peter, Paul and Mary song, and it was a proto Toy Story narrative about a little boy growing up and no longer believing in his dragon friend. I’m not sure I ever knew that as a kid, but definitely picked up on the vibe. As you say, the shift from major chord to its third chord (so C major to E minor) is the main part of it—definitely something I recognise that as one of the go-to shifts in sadder songs.
As for funny songs, I guess there are lots of great country music titles. How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?, I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Just Like Having You Around etc. My main smiling moment is probably in Morrissey’s Suedehead—the agony and archness of the last line in this part: “You had to sneak into my room / Just to read my diary / It was just to see, just to see / All the things you knew I'd written about you / Oh, so many illustrations”.
And sad songs—could list so many, but if I was an actor who had to cry on demand, I’d probably think of Bruce Springsteen’s Walk Like a Man, written about his father. “Now the years have gone and I’ve grown / from that seed you’ve sown / But I didn’t think there’d be so many steps / I’d have to learn on my own / I was young and I didn’t know what to do / When I saw your best steps stolen away from you / Now I’ll do what I can / I’ll walk like a man”. Probably too saccharine for some, but gets me every time.
ANYWAY.
We’re both writing this during the time of Klopp’s departure from Liverpool, which hits hard for us both, and brings to mind an actual late-Tin-Pan-Alley song, originally written for the musical Carousel—You’ll Never Walk Alone. It’s good isn’t it?
KATE
Ha, a song that will make us both smile and cry. It’s such a great one for a football crowd to sing. The lyrics, about standing together in adversity, are perfect for a sporting setting. And, musically, the song feels like one long build—the melody starting off low and soft before reaching up to those stirring high notes at the end.
I really like this video, in which a Broadway producer explains how the music pulls away from its harmonic home at important moments such as words like ‘storm’, and how the ‘sweet silver song of a lark’ ends up being quite distant, harmonically, from where we started. Almost as if the song is saying: it might be quite a journey, but things will get better in the end! As the producer says, harmony can ‘move us around emotionally’, which I guess is exactly what we’re trying to do in ‘Sooner or later’ too.
One thing the video doesn’t mention, which is one of my favourite bits of the song, is the line that creeps chromatically upwards, the first time you hear the words ‘you’ll never walk alone’. You can hear it in the strings, both in this Broadway recording and in the Gerry and the Pacemakers version. When a musical line moves chromatically (in other words, using all the notes of a scale, with no gaps) upwards, it’s as if the line is creeping steadily higher—which makes us feel like the tension is being ratcheted up. (I guess it’s not dissimilar to the steadily rising pitch / tension you get from Shepard tones, like in the movie Dunkirk). For me, it’s the perfect build up to the determined final lyric, repeated now, ‘you’ll never walk alone’.
NICK
Yes! Love the way you’ve described that. I agree about the chromatic ascent—feels like slowly edging your way up a mountain path, or a league table. Always seems weird that a song with such vocal range can become a terrace favourite, but it somehow works.
And at the risk of sounding bitter, it’s way better than Manchester City’s Blue Moon, also by Richard Rodgers, but with a Lorenz Hart lyric that he deliberately phoned in as a ‘will this do’ joke. It’s a song about a loser feeling sorry for himself until some random act of magic turns the moon into oil money gold, so maybe it’s appropriate.
Seems unlikely, but it would be nice if ‘Sooner or later’ was taken up as a terrace chant: ’Sooner or later, my hour will come’. I might try belting it out on the Macclesfield Town terraces, but you may have more luck up in Burnley.
Thanks everyone for reading and listening—and please join us on that Zoom if you can. For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (writer, D&AD Masterclass trainer, musician, first novel ‘And He Shall Appear’ out soon with Fourth Estate) and Nick Asbury (writer, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, purpose critic, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.