Cold Eye, Warm Heart

A procession of ants invaded our kitchen not long ago. We sprayed, we cleaned, and the ants retreated. They were back a few days later following a slightly different path. It has been a month now and we've conceded that maybe these ants are smarter than we are. Their intelligence is collective, of course, but does it matter?

The truth is I’ve had no real will to exterminate them. In fact I admire them. I feel sympathy for these hard working creatures that won’t be deterred. I imagine them going home to their ant children, their ant aunts and uncles, and saying, “Don’t worry. Tomorrow we’ll get back in there and bring home the bacon.” I was moved almost to tears by the thought as I watched them die in the chemical spray. How strange.

My brother Eric sent me a quote from R. H. Blyth, “We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” Precisely. Here I was being foolishly sentimental about my ants and yet God certainly had no tenderness for them because He invented the ant eater.

I’ve always admired writers who avoid being sentimental. This seems to be a talent the best southern writers naturally possess. Perhaps it’s the harsher climate and the way the light is keen in the dust.

The world was like a distant storm
I could feel it on the breeze
But it made so little difference here
Just a whisper in the trees
Mending fence for room and board
Was mostly all I’d done
For I was still a prisoner here
In nineteen-sixty-one
The sucker rod on the windmill creaks
Now and then you hear a car
There’s thunderheads across the southern sky
But they won’t get this far

(“Six-Year Drought” by James McMurtry)

Sentimentality is wrung out of this and left to evaporate on the parched earth. McMurty’s lines are as hard and pitiless as the Texas plains, and yet they still touch something pulsating with life inside. I bet he sees his struggling ants and sheds no tears for them.

While I hold McMurtry's standard in the highest esteem and wouldn't change a word of it, I suppose I’m just a sucker. I’ve flirted with sentimentality all of my writing life, and maybe I’ve even crossed the line sometimes. The truth is it’s damn hard not to cross it if you feel any pity at all for the world.

Softer art for harder times? Probably won't fly. Yet we must feel something in order to be human. There must be emotion when it is warranted, and there is indeed a perceptible difference between emotion and sentimentality even though it sometimes takes a microscope to see it. After all, it’s our compassion that keeps the human race going, and we don’t want to lose that.

In the writing we can err both ways. On either side of the good, observant narrative there are pitfalls; effusiveness or stolidity. The line between is walked with a cold eye and a warm heart.


copyright 2009 by craig bickhardt

Country Dignity

Where are the real people in country songs? Where have they gone? There's dignity in country people. Yes, they have trucks and muddy jeans out there, although most Music Row songwriters apparently never leave their condos long enough to see for themselves. If they did, they'd meet someone rather surprising.

Country folks have hearts and souls. They rescue the lives of colts and calves birthed in breach. They fix the roof and dig the well. They save and sacrifice to marry off daughters or pay their college tuition. They send sons to war or give them a parcel of the family land to farm. They stop and talk with strangers while they mend fences. They raise a neighbor's barn and lend tools to each other. They tell very funny stories. They grow strawberries and give hayrides at Halloween. They aren't always drunk at the bar down the road or drunk at the lake. Where are the real people in country songs?

I believe a songwriter should be a poet. He should speak the timeless truth and find the wisdom in simple actions. A song lyric doesn't need to lead the listener down the path like a dumb cow on a tether. It can be an invisible sword that wounds the heart without drawing blood.

By contrast, here is the kind of cheap limerick-verse we get from Nashville these days:

There were two karaoke girls drunk on a dare
Singing "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher
Yeah, life was good everywhere

My reaction to these lines is that life is pretty pathetic in some places. This is, in fact, what urban people do when they have no life. What about the stuff that really makes life good everywhere? Why does the working stiff need to aspire to this obnoxious spectacle on a Friday night? Can't he, for once, go to a town meeting and debate healthcare reform? Or do you think he's too stupid to do that? Go on, urban cynic, poke fun. Let's see you dismantle a tractor engine and have it running by sun-up. Let's see you run a family business on fumes and a prayer.

The rule of thumb in Nashville is: make her crude, make him dirty, put them in a truck (with a six pack sometimes), and it's a country song. Keep listening to country radio and you'll hear plenty more where that came from:

She wants her nails painted black
She wants the toy in the crackerjack
She wants to ride the bull at the rodeo
She wants to wear my shirt to bed
She wants to make every stray a pet
N' Drive around in my truck with no place to go

Real or bogus? "Wanted desperately: one goth redneck woman. She must have no idea what fun is, and prefer being thrown from a 2000 pound bull at the end of the date. I will shower her with little plastic Crackerjack toys (hopefully one will be a ring!) and affection. In return for winning my heart, she can waste my hard earned pay on $3 per gallon gas driving around aimlessly in my truck (which I never need), and keep every animal she finds along the way. Waiting anxiously for the woman of my dreams!"

It's time to call this what it really is: bogus parody- and cynical parody at that. Let's bury it. Let's pronounce it dead. It's anti-poetry, anti-heart, anti-reality, and anti-country.



copyright 2009 craig bickhardt

Polarity Of Mind

I’ve just returned from a ten day road trip that included a few days in Nashville. I might blog about the trip next time, but for now I’m following up on my last post, Deep Creativity. I came upon a wonderful series of articles by Merlin Mann on the same subject called “Making Time To Make” (note this link is only Part One of the series, see the other two parts at the 43Folders Blog). In it he quotes novelist Neal Stephenson on the subject of Internet (and general) distraction:

“Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless."

The four-hour time block is one that I grew accustomed to in my days of routine songwriting. Even if you have a day job, this is something you can squeeze into a weekend or maybe a quiet evening if you happen to have an easy day at work. You must begin by feeling relaxed about the length of time you’ve set aside to work. Even if you end up discarding an hour’s worth of failed effort, you still have ample time to go deep into the zone for a solid verse or chorus.

Don’t be in a hurry to commit to an idea. Turn off the ringer on the phone, don’t check your email, and if possible, try to get the place to yourself (send your spouse to a movie or pass up a party you won’t hate to miss). Don’t jot down thoughts in a hurry, re-think your concepts, clarify and distill the language. Work your way inward until you pick up the faint trail of a solid idea. This metaphor is appropriate: you are in the wilderness of the imagination. Don’t expect to find the well-worn path. If you do find it, be suspicious.

I emphasize this because it’s often the case that a real breakthrough is only possible in deep concentration. Short bursts of time-effort can sometimes yield a good spontaneous line or on rare occasions a couplet, but a tight lyric cannot be written one phrase at a time while multi-tasking. Your brain must be firing on all cylinders. You must have the complete resource of language, metaphor, rhyme, and imagery focused like a laser on the task, and the focus must last for as long as it takes to finish the job (the verse or chorus you’re working on).

Another way I think of this is as a kind of unified “polarity of mind”. It’s as if all the neurons are pointing in random directions when I begin a writing task, and I must first harness the “magnetic” current to get the thought process flowing in one direction : toward the goal. As long as part of my mind is occupied on a different problem, I’m not unified, not fully focused. I can tell when the focus is there because there’s a physical sensation of tremendous mental power aimed at an invisible target—I know the target is there, yet it eludes direct perception at first. Gradually I begin to see an outline, then as concentration increases I can see the bull’s-eye. There is also a sense of expectation, an “aura” that precedes the discovery of the right line or word—you can feel it emerging just before you pounce on it.

Writing is not free-association, scribbling down the thoughts as fast as they come to you, although this can be useful at the start of a writing session. That’s like drawing the treasure map. But you must still follow the map, and what you discover as you follow is the stuff that makes the song. Great lyric writing isn’t just singable language. Go deep and find out what you can make of an idea, don’t just skim the surface between emails.


copyright 2009 craig bickhardt

Deep Creativity

We multi-task our days away in a whirlwind of keyboard activity, and we’re even programmed to enjoy our interruptions-- that’s what the researchers have discovered. Interruptions increase adrenaline and the kick is addicting says author Maggie Jackson in her new book “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age”. We’d rather get an email or a Tweet than focus deeply on anything because the short-term rewards are greater.

This got me thinking about my own distracted life, and about the music I often hear. Most of the time I get the impression that the writer of a song I’m listening to has not experienced deep creativity at all, but has rather effortlessly jotted down his/her first thoughts about a subject in rhyme/stanza form. Sometimes it isn’t bad, but rarely does it move me. Yet, there is a level of creative concentration at which truth and emotion get tapped. This depth can be reached as a result of a sudden plunge (an event or an emotionally over-wrought time in a writer’s life), or it may require some digging and focus to arrive at the artery that leads to the heart.

My own experiences with deep creativity were numerous in the days when I was not part of Internet culture. They have diminished proportionally with my immersion in e-promotion, e-commerce, email, e-distraction. There were long beautiful days in the 1990s when time was all but meaningless. I would dive into a song idea early in the morning and come up for air in the early afternoon just long enough for 30 minutes of laps in the pool at the local recreation center. Then I couldn’t wait to get back to it. It was heaven for me and I wonder why I have so thoughtlessly subscribed to this invasive never-out-of-touch culture at the expense of my deeper creative life. Could it be I’m afraid I’ll miss something? The problem is, I am missing something—my deep creative experience.

This doesn’t just apply to lyrics. Sometimes I’m working on the music and it’s as if I’m trying to crack a walnut with my teeth. There’s something inside the song that I just can’t get to. I can assemble chords and sing melodies that sound pretty good to my ear, but there’s a level of feeling missing.

I remember distinctly the experience of trying to write the music for Carrying A Dream (see my new CD). I was in mourning for a dear friend, and his words were burning in my brain. But the music… ah, the music… I tried it every which way I could, but all in vain. I was searching for the melody that set loose a flood of emotion, I wanted to feel my loss and make those lyrics bleed like I was bleeding in my soul.

It took three days to find the magic key that unlocked the door to that pure cistern room inside. When I found it, the melody to Carrying A Dream poured out in about ten minutes. But those ten minutes were the result of a fixation and a struggle to feel something in the music for days. In the process I probably wrote several versions of the song that would have passed muster if I’d never had the experience of being moved by my own creative Muse. But once you know what a great creative moment feels like, you can never go back to being satisfied with less.

This is why distraction and e-living have damaged the music. There’s so little music out there that moves us because we’re all moving too fast to create it. It turns out that being moved requires a thrill greater than the adrenaline rush of a Tweet or an email. In a sense, we are being moved in the opposite direction by the song. The Internet and multi-tasking pulls us outwards (or at least sideways), but the song pushes us inwards, ever deeper inwards.

If we want to have the experience of deep creativity we must make the time for it. We all must make time for it. The quality of the time spent searching your heart and soul for a song is not as exciting as a new iphone app or the thrill of a gossipy email, but then again how shallow is a thrill anyway?


copyright 2009 by craig bickhardt

Rhyming Your Way Through It

I’ve learned something from almost every collaborator I’ve worked with. Sometimes I learned what not to do. But more often I learned something like this: the essence of a great lyric lies in the concept behind the line as much as in the words themselves.

Teaching yourself to think in concepts isn’t easy. We begin our little journey as songwriters toying with rhymes. We learn how to unbox ourselves by rhyming clever words, by staying away from moon, June, spoon or love, dove. But some of us never learn to chase a concept rather than a suitable line that ends with our pet rhyme word.

It takes a little practice. When you get hung up (fixated upon) a rhyme pair that seems to go nowhere, you’re thinking in terms of rhyme rather than a concept. I’ve watched writers spend weeks trying to rhyme two words with some meaning attached. I’ll get several versions of a couplet that keeps ending with the same two words, and keeps failing to say something significant. This is always clear evidence that the writer isn’t looking for a fresh concept. He’s rhyming his way through.

Thom Schuyler is the best concept lyricist I’ve ever written with. Here’s a brilliant verse from “Who Needs A Hummer”, an acerbically funny protest song from his brand new CD:

You can always go to Kosevo,
Damascus or Iraq
Just take that beast, point it east
And please don’t bring it back
It’s well equipped to make that trip
Hell, it’s fitted out for war
But it always will be overkill
For runnin’ to the liquor store

Clearly Schuyler had a complete concept when he started this verse. In spite of his challenging rhyme scheme: AABCCB, he has a solid destination in mind. He isn’t writing blindly, searching for rhyme words and lines that connect them. Without presuming too much, it’s easy to see that he had the punch line very early in the process of tackling this verse, and he thought backwards to the beginning. I suspect he spent some time juggling the imagery, but the concept dictated a clear direction: the ideal place for a Hummer, the military purpose of a Hummer, and the absurd use. And there’s the wonderful word “overkill”, which is a wink and a nod to his inner punster. The entire verse hangs on a clear statement, the purpose of which is to make us laugh at the absurdity of a war vehicle “runnin’ to the liquor store”.

Schuyler’s brand of humor is very much in the tradition of Will Rogers, Mark Twain and Woody Guthrie. But his source material is straight out of personal observation. He mentally records the images he sees in his daily life and files them away in his mind for future use.

The lesson is: observe, record, process, write. I think the average writer does it this way: stumble onto an idea, write, re-write, get a collaborator. Searching for concepts after you’ve plunged into the writing is dangerous. I’ve often had to tell a writer that his idea is a one-verse song. Spend more time observing, recording (mentally) and processing. Then the writing will come easier. You’ve heard the expression “the song practically wrote itself”. Here’s wishing you a slew of those.


copyright 2009 craig bickhardt

The Vital Vision

We can't sell a product people don't need. A song has to either move the audience, make them laugh or cry, or it has to become the soundtrack for their lives-- meaning it must be a song they fall in love to, or heal to, or commiserate with somehow. It must grow into something essential that they can't live without. This requires a motive on the writer's part, and some vision. Vision is the sense that connects perception to significance. It's when you see something, know why it matters, and convey that meaning to others. When the writer shares his vision, the listener begins to perceive what's behind the song.

Great songs don't usually happen by accident. They are deliberate acts of creation motivated by genuine emotion and a fascination with the process. You can't search for buried treasure unless you go to the right beach with a metal detector and begin scouring. Writing without purpose or vision is like sitting in a chair in your den and hoping there's treasure under the couch cushions. You'll just end up with a few nickles and dimes-- a cheap song.

I was thinking about a verse from Townes Van Zandt's "To Live Is To Fly". Here it is :


It's goodbye to all my friends
It's time to leave again
Here's to all the poetry and the picking down the line
I'll miss the system here
The bottom's low and the treble's clear
But it don't pay to think too much on things you leave behind

The thing I like about this verse is the wacky reference to the PA system. I get a sense of purpose from those lines. Clearly Townes was writing with some vision, otherwise why refer to a sound system in a club? Why give it significance? Well, maybe because it represents the highs and lows of the troubadour life in a detail that the rest of us overlooked. The purity and depth in the sound system equates to the ideal moment in a traveling musician's life-- after driving thousands of miles, eating fast food and sleeping in noisy hotel rooms on mattresses that are too soft or too hard, he gets those precious 90 minutes on stage during the best gig of the tour. Townes' motive was to accurately convey how this kind of life feels, and his vision made the connection. The chorus says:

To live is to fly
Low and high
So, shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes

Having been on the road myself for many years, I can tell you this is not only accurate, it's perfect. There have been many days when the detachment of the road has felt like flight. It's an addiction. I'm never more alive than when I'm in flight, and the lows and highs on the road are more extreme than when I'm perched safe at home. Flight is freedom, but freedom sometimes means sacrificing a bit of security. Townes was living this song in the moment of it's creation (or re-living it, which is still valid). The remarkable thing about this simple chorus is that it captures some emotion and a rather profound philosophy in four graceful lines. How can a writer do this unless he is actually experiencing the song? We can't find the key to this type of communication unless we have vision. Vision is vital.

Where are you on life's journey? Can you show us? Can you open a window that allows me to see and feel what you see and feel? Do you have something in mind, something in heart, something in soul? Townes says later in the song:

We all got holes to fill
Them holes are all that's real

Songs fill the holes for many of us, or at least they clean the wounds so we can begin to heal. That's their purpose. But the world is choking on songs without purpose-- clever gimmick titles that strain at anything to say nothing. I hear tons of them and they never move me or touch me or make me smile or cause me to shed a tear. They just play in my ear for a few minutes and then they are forgotten.

Don't invent. Observe. Show us what you see. Much is revealed by the song in the end. As writers, we can't fake it. A great, true, core idea, and a deep emotional experience is the lifeblood of a song. Find the vital vision and follow it. See life and feel the words.


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt
photo copyright by wolfgang staudt (creative commons approved use)

Marriage In Meter

I had a friend once named Jack Keller. Jack passed away a few years ago, but I think of him often. He was a Tin Pan Alley trained songwriter, born and raised in Brooklyn. He took his craft to Hollywood for a while, writing for the Monkees and cranking out themes for TV shows, ultimately landing the theme songs for "Bewitched", "Gidget" and "Seattle". He wrote plenty of other hits, some you know and some you don't. He ended his days writing in Nashville for the same publisher I wrote for (EMI). This was back when EMI was just a fledgling company doing business as Screen Gems-Colgems-EMI in a little cottage at 1207 16th Ave South.

Jack could often be heard behind some closed door lecturing a young writer about his poor prosody, "Dat's not da hit ! Here's da hit (plunking single notes on the piano) da, da, da, DA, da, DA. Ya got too many syllables. Dat don't work. It's da marriage, I'm tellin' ya, da marriage!"

I wrote with Jack enough times to know that once he found "the hit", you didn't mess with it. He was a stickler for every line being perfectly constrained to the melody he'd composed. It didn't matter how good you thought your line was, if it didn't match syllable for syllable with his melody, he'd shoot it full of holes then calmly smoke his pipe until you thought of something better. His melodies were little gems of simplicity and distinction, nothing generic about them at all. Each note held it's place with purpose. But, man, did he ever insist on doing it his way.

Maybe you're saying to yourself, "What a stubborn guy". Thing is, he wasn't merely stubborn. He was right, maddeningly right. Every time I worked with him I learned more about the art of how NOT to compromise a hit melody for the sake of a line of lyric. His restrictions made me (gasp) a better lyricist! It forced me to find not just the right concept for a line, or the right rhyme, but the sequence of words that made the melody, concept and rhyme shine brightest.

Before you begin dismissing me with arguments about Bob Dylan and John Lennon, yes, I know. The discipline is broad. But hear me out for a moment. There are plenty of writers you can study to learn about loose meter, but few examples these days of the true Marriage.

You see, lyrics can to be both meaningful AND metered strictly. That is, in fact, the immortal challenge of both songwriting and poetry. Anyone can say a thought, but only a great writer can say it so concisely that it can never be said better again.

Classical composers use a rigid, almost mathmatical theme-and-variation approach to melody. Once the theme and variations are establish you don't deviate. Beethoven wrote his Ninth in the rhythm : "dit dit dit DAH. dit dit dit DAH." Not "dit dit dit DAH, dit di-dit dit DA-DAH". This theme business is one of the hallmarks of good composition. Many barriers have been broken since Beethoven, but we haven't always improved things. What is it that makes a song memorable to begin with? Isn't it a certain amount of repetition along with deceptively employed variations of that rhthmn? Are we really helping ourselves by pushing the envelope of theme and variation to the point where the average listener can longer even find it? The echoes are essential. The melodic echoes are the DNA of a melody. Without echoing themes a melody unravels too far.

I break the rules, too. I like Dylan as much as anyone and when I take liberties with the meter, I usually tell myself I'm following some branch of the songwriting tree that sprouted from his work. Sometimes I'm happy with the results, but many times my weak meter is just because I'm too lazy to get it right. Do you break up the Marriage with intent or out of laziness? Many writers seem to not know the difference. It takes some objectivity. You've got to know where that pulse lies and pick it up throughout the song.

The next time you're cramming all those extra syllables into your verse lines because you just need to get all the information into the song, ask yourself if it can be pared down for the sake of the meter, the pulse, the DNA of the melody. You won't be sorry you tried. Maybe you'll hear old Jack Keller's ghost say, "It's da marriage!"


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt

Van Ronk's Last Cigar and Other Fables

Dave Van Ronk's last cigar is now just a small circle of ashes scattered around a bush in the middle of a park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. That's where songwriter David Massengill smoked it after holding onto it for a couple of years. Van Ronk gave it to him shortly before he died in 2002. It was Dave's last cigar by his own admission, dug from the back of a dusty shelf at a party. Massengill, being the true sentimentalist, just couldn't smoke his friend's parting gift without due ceremony. He thought of smoking it often, but the cigar took on legendary significance among a close circle of mutual friends, so he couldn't. There were anniversaries and other times when it almost seemed proper, but no.

Finally, almost burdened by the acquired weight of it, one night on the road he said "what the hell"... in Grand Rapids of all places (I was too entertained by this tale to ask him why he'd brought the cigar from NYC to Michigan). He partook of the sacred rolled leaf with a friend who was also a songwriter. There they shared it in reverence, blowing smoke rings at the moon and invoking Dave's ghost. Then they gathered up the tobacco ash, every speck of it, and made a gray ring on the earth around a bright shrub in loving tribute to a musical legend. Thus was a small piece of Van Ronk's history laid to rest under a conspicuous bush in Michigan in the form of a big fat cremated cigar.

Now, try to forget this simple story. If you're like me, that may be a difficult thing to do. Fortunately my friend David Massengill has turned it all into a beautiful tribute song on his latest CD "Dave On Dave" just in case you manage to forget it.

"We took to the road and he showed me the ropes
'Never count the house* kid, keep dreaming your hopes
And keep an eye open for the bizarre'
Lessons I learned from Dave Van Ronk's last cigar"
(Copyright 2007 David Massengill Music ASCAP)
(*i.e., don't count the number of people in the audience)

The story and the song both demonstrate that it's the quirky romance of life that makes it all worth talking about in the first place. It isn't the mundane rituals of our day, not the false romance we like to delude ourselves with-- the cliched candles and wine; not the ruts we're stuck in or the dashed dreams.

It may be too idealistic of me to expect this of everyone else, but before I write my next song I'll ask myself if I have a story to tell. Is the story worth repeating, and would I tell it to a stranger in a bus station at midnight?

If you have one, and if you would tell me, I will listen. Give me the strange, the beautiful, the haunting, the unlikely. I'm thirsty for it.

The best stories are usually the unnoticed incidents that gain significance in the story-teller's words. On the surface they are events hardly worthy of a sentence in the newspaper, yet told properly they resonate deeply and make the daily headlines seem crude and transitory. It's what we make of our tales, how we mythologize them, not how grand they are in reality.

My friend James Keelaghan sings one called "Kiri's Piano". I challenge anyone to find a simpler and quieter, yet more compelling story than this: Kiri's Piano lyrics.

Nashville used to tell us good stories. Tom T. Hall was a master. So were Johnny Cash and Shel Silverstein. Darrel Scott, when he manages to get one cut, still reminds us of what Nashville used to be in the days when artists weren't afraid to portray authentic characters in songs.

Today it's all about the artist, not the story song. Everyone seems desperate to define who they are in a genre with 150 other singers who sound just like them, but they make the mistake of trying to create unique PR rather than having unique stories to tell and unique characters to play in their music. As a result, the differences between popular artists are as deep as page one of the tabloids. It's the fear of being swallowed by the whale of consolidated media, I suppose.

Yet I still have hope that some mainstream artist among the crop of younger torch bearers will finally realize that story-telling and role-playing made Johnny Cash, and Marlon Brando great. Oh, please stop trying to tell us how different you are in your bio, and just be different when you pick songs.

Find your stories.

Stories give us the barest implications about the mysteries of life-- the life that we never seem to fully grasp. The big picture is too large for our frame, we must have it scaled down to viewable size. A story is a way to attach tangible form to our least definable emotions. It's part of the eloquence of life's quietest truths.


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt

Voices of Comfort and Protest

My recent experience as a judge in the Mountain Stage Newsong contest has redeemed my faith in songwriting as an art form. Although there seems to be a tendency in general for artistic writers to enter contests while the more commercial writers do not, that wasn't the case with Newsong. What I found instead was a group of writer-artists passionately pursuing personal expression whether aimed at mainstream Nashville or a slot on the Mountain Stage radio show. The contest atmosphere breathed familiar somehow until I recalled my early days in Nashville and realized that the exchange of creative energy in those days was very similar to the virtual exchange taking place in this Internet based contest. The competition wasn't so much for the fist full of dollars as it was for the title of 'best communicator'.

There is an art form thriving out there, we just have to look in some unlikely places to find it. You certainly won't hear it in the mainstream media. You may not even hear it so much on satellite radio, where many repackaged mainstream acts have retreated.

I was most curious as I judged the entries as to where the act was working and what, if any, measures they were taking to promote themselves. It ran the gamut. There were tight bluegrass acts working two nights a week in local watering holes; there were closet songwriters who'd worked in complete obscurity for 30 years before finding the nerve to go public; there were self-promoters with some flair and obvious previous training; there were even nationally touring acts that had managed to stay below the radar somehow.

I was taken with the one common thread in all of it: honesty. A writer can say true things: the sun rose today. He can also say honest things: the sun rose today but I didn't care. The difference is striking when it comes to a song. It all goes back to who you are, how much you know about yourself, how willing you are to be vulnerable and open, whether you'll risk saying what you feel, think, perceive, and hope for in life. And saying it all with that inner voice we only seem to find in desperate moments.

I wrote about character last week, and this is where the bullet meets the bone. It's easy to spot a song that's superficially packaged to appeal to a world in denial. It's also easy to spot a song that's so evasive as to be inconsequential, or so shallow as to qualify as a jingle rather than a song. What's so bad about evasive songs and jingles? Nothing really, unless that's all we hear. Then those songs contribute to the wash of opiating culture we're all going numb under. As the world gets more irrational, the opiates get more powerful. It becomes more rare for honesty to break through and shake us back to consciousness.

Yet that's how I feel today after listening to dozens and dozens of young and not so young artists being honest, if nothing else. I feel as if I've been taken to a remote compound and fed gallons of coffee, been slapped about the head, had a few glasses of cold water thrown in my face. I feel as if I've been shown dozens and dozens of microcosms I didn't notice before. I've seen short "movies" of daily life in remote places where real issues meet real lives and the result is a life and death struggle for an entire community. Ask yourself when you last heard a song that made you care about the ecology of a remote mountain valley, or the fair use of a waterway in Appalachia, or the death by late spring frost of a farmer's crop?

Whether any of these songs actually wins the contest isn't important, and I don't have final say about that. What's important is that these songs were written.

I may be fighting a losing battle here, but I'm not alone. It could be that some of you reading this wonder what all the fuss is about. I'll tell you. The very survival of the art of songwriting. If you can go back to your day job merrily and turn on the radio humming the latest tunes, I'm not talking to you. But if you feel a genuine loss of quality in your life because great honest songs are hard to find, keep reading, I'm with you all the way.

Songs used to comfort us in times of crisis. We are in the midst of a terrible crisis as I write this. Need I elaborate? No, I don't think so. Where are the songs to comfort us?

Songs used to protest injustice. We are being oppressed by an aristocracy of politicians and CEOs who won't be happy until they bleed us dry. We are being screwed by HMOs and other insurance providers, lied to by our government, conned by financial institutions, over-taxed, over-worked, over-opiated. Where are the songs of protest?

Where are the songs of protest and comfort? Where is our voice? Where is our honest song?


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt

The True Character's Voice

The true character has a voice. I don't mean simply male or a female vocal chords saying something. I mean a voice as distinct as one human being from another, no two the same. The voice will ring genuine.

Today the Voice has largely disappeared in the Nashville commodity song. We hear tune after tune featuring the same indistinct characters; the one-size fits all "proclaiming her independence" diva, the bad-ass southern boy...

I can always tell whether a writer is inhabiting his character or not. He will discover things that can't be discovered any other way. If you find yourself thinking about words rather than digging into your character, you're too much at a distance. Your character will be weak, and your song will be less because of it.

The character is revealed by how he says what he says, by how he does what he does, by how he appears to himself in the lyric. Small words can make a huge difference. The art operates on many levels:

"Well I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast
Wasn't bad so I had one more for dessert
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes
And found my cleanest dirty shirt
And I shaved my face and combed my hair
And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day"
(Kris Kristofferson "Sunday Morning Coming Down")

We must become the song we're trying to write. We must find the voice.

Forget the superficial "commercial" goals if you want a true character. These calculations only enter the picture after the hard work is finished. You can always back away from a risky proposition in a lyric, but if you don't allow yourself to find that proposition first, you aren't really writing.

"Just like the sun over the mountain tops
You know I'll always come again
You know I love to spend my mornings
Like sunlight dancing on your skin

I've never gone so wrong as for telling lies to you
What you see is what I am
There is nothing I could hide from you
You see me better than I can

Out on the road that lies before me now
There are some turns where I will spin
I only hope that you can hold me now
Til I can gain control again"
(Rodney Crowell "Till I Gain Control Again")

The true character's voice will speak distinctly; he will be three dimensional; he will come to life for a three minute duration and be unforgettable afterwards.

At times it can be hard to hear the character's voice. It will be drowned beneath the voices of the commodity music industry, or by the advice, the endless well-meaning advice and criticism. Sometimes 16th Avenue itself seemed to have a voice when I was writing in Nashville. I had to learn to turn it off and find the essential voice, the only one that knows what the lyric must say if it's to be an honest song.

If all of this seems abstract to you, perhaps you haven't considered what a character is. A character is not an exterior creation. You don't picture someone leaning on a lamp post and say,"Ah, a character!" You must go inside and find someone you know, an alter-ego of sorts, someone drawn from accumulated observation and experience, but not the Ambassador you present to the world. The Ambassador isn't very interesting. He's safe, smooth and packaged to prevent the need for damage control.

"Pack up all your dishes
Make note of all good wishes
Say goodbye to the landlord for me
That son of a bitch has always bored me
Throw out them LA papers
And that moldy box of vanilla wafers
Adios to all this concrete
Gonna get me some dirt road back street"
(Guy Clark "LA Freeway")

We must be more than keen observers. We must absorb life in order to embody a true character.

"Mansion On The Hill" (Bruce Springsteen)

"Millworker" (James Taylor)

More than anything I can think of, it's the voice of the character that defines the great songs. Are you censoring that voice or allowing it to speak?


copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt

8 Tips For Writing Compelling Lyrics

TIP 1 - Use Strong, Sensually Stimulating Opening Lines. The best time to capture your listener is as soon as the vocal begins. A descriptive image with an emotionally compelling couplet works well :

"Half the moon is shining tonight
And half the moon is pitch black
And I’ve got half a chance that you might
Turn around and come back"
("Half The Moon" by Hugh Prestwood)

TIP 2 - Make The Lyrical Hook or Title Obvious, and Fresh. A hook is your BRAND IDENTITY. If after the first chorus I'm still asking myself ‘What’s this song called?’ There’s an identity problem. Here's a link to 500 songs that shaped Rock And Roll. Go to this site and notice how most of the titles will bring the hook melody to mind immediately.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0150472.html

TIP 3 - Be As Specific As Possible, Yet Target the Universal Audience. Make lines and images more specific, but use specific images that are Universal, not obscure. Notice all the specific imagery in Steve Earle's classic, yet none of it is obscure :

"Gotta keep rockin' while I still can
I got a two pack habit and a motel tan
But when my boots hit the boards I'm a brand new man
With my back to the riser I make my stand"
(Guitar Town by Steve Earle)

TIP 4 - Get the most out your Metaphors and Analogies. Extend your metaphors, clarify them, use them cleverly. This will Unify the lyric.

The roller coaster ride we took
metaphor for an up-and-down relationship
Is nearly at an end
extended by giving the “ride” an “end”
I bought my ticket with my tears
extended with “tickets”
That’s all I’m gonna spend
Extended with price of the tickets= emotional cost
(“Red Rubber Ball” by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodly)

TIP 5 - Use Rhyme And Assonance Cleverly And With Variety. Look for internal rhymes, fresh rhyme endings. Rhyme should fall naturally and conversationally in the lyric. Alter the Rhyme sounds as much as possible. Use masculine and feminine rhyme for more variety. Rhyme creates emphasis, unity and memorability in a lyric.

"I blew out my flip-flop, stepped on a pop-top
Cut my heal, had to cruise on back home
But there’s booze in the blender, and soon it will render
That frozen concoction that helps me hang on"
(“Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffet)

TIP 6 - . Show Action, Rather Than Tell Narrative. Use Action to bring a scene to life and convey your emotion. Notice how in the Example A below we’re reading a lyric that’s more like a storyboard sketch.

A.
She was just a waitress
In a small Ohio town
Feeling trapped and desperate
That job just brought her down
She did the same old routines
And lived from day to day
And dreamed she’d hit the road someday

Now in Example B the action brings the same scene alive. We’re SHOWN the emotion in the scene with action rather than TOLD the information in narrative form.

B.
She poured cups of coffee
In a town where nothing stirred
In quiet desperation
She never breathed a word
She was picking up their quarters
And holding back her dreams
And staring out the window in between
("Dancing With The Wind" by Craig Bickhardt and Jack Sundrud)

TIP 7 - Use devices such as Alliteration and Onomatopoeia to create sound harmonics. Note the "s" sounds at the beginning of many words in the lyric below. That's alliteration (any letter can be used):

"And it's sad when they sing, and hollow ears listen,
Of smoking black roses on the streets of Belfast
And so say your lovers from under the flowers
Every foot of this world needs an inch of Belfast"
("Belfast" by Elton John and Bernie Taupin)

Note the way the following couplet about the waves sounds like crashing waves. That's Onomatopoeia:

"The crashing waves like cymbals clashed
Against the rocks and sands"
("Lay Down Your Weary Tune" by Bob Dylan)

TIP 8 - Use precise language. The exact right word can put a spark in a couplet and make all the difference between a lifeless lyric and a lyric with impact.

"There’s a frost on the wind
As it scours the town"
("Painted Pony" by F. C. Collins and Craig Bickhardt)

"Beneath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp"
("Sounds Of Silence" by Paul Simon)

Happy writing!
copyright 2008 by Craig Bickhardt