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

A Song For Father's Day

Sorry for the lack of postings recently, I've been very busy promoting the new CD and on the road a lot this spring. Here's a little tune I wrote with Jack Sundrud and Helen Darling that's appropriate for this weekend. I hope it's a small consolation for my absence from the blog!

Little Miracles

A great song is essentially an inspired idea. There’s a loaded word: “inspiration”. Who would dare use it inside the profane halls of Music Row these days? The music industry has found the commodity of mediocrity quite sufficient for its purposes, and if you go around talking about cosmic things like inspiration you better be prepared to be laughed at.

I don’t mean to imply that nobody’s working very hard. On the contrary, everyone is very industrious. The problem is that great songwriting, and great art for that matter, transcends a “job”. Inspiration isn’t the product of work. Yes, we must work in order to sustain ourselves so we can ultimately arrive at some moment of inspiration. But you cannot tweak mediocrity into greatness by perfecting its vapid shell. There has to be something inside the shell first. You cannot pick the first serviceable idea that happens to come along and build an artifice around it and expect the world to call it a shrine.

There seems to be a lot of confusion between sound and substance these days. Perhaps substance is an acquired taste. Maybe butter and white bread are delicacies to a certain kind of palate, I dunno. Me, I need flavor. I don’t give a damn how high that Idol kid can sing or how well his hair products hold up under the TV lights, or how in tune and full of attitude he or she is. I’m not impressed by the fact that the hook and the verse of a hit song tie together cleverly as long the whole idea is as dumb as Cheese Whiz and half as nutritious.

The greatness of anything is contained in the inspired idea itself. That’s true of the telephone and of the great song. If it’s truly great, it was born of a glimpse and an impulse. The impulse was an unstoppable desire to bring a vision to life (inspire literally means to “breath into life” a creative endeavor). If we acknowledge that life is a miracle, then the process of inspiration and creative results is also miraculous in its own way.

Who would argue in retrospect that the best Beatles records weren’t creative miracles? Does anyone really believe that you can get four really talented musicians into a studio and turn them into the Beatles? If not, then logic, hard work and formula cannot replace the mystical and all-important element of inspiration. The chemistry of creativity is as important to its success as the chemistry of life is to the thriving of an organism.

Time after time I find myself listening to songs or records and thinking, “Why did anyone bother to make this?” There is certainly nothing even remotely inspired about it.

When an inspired song raises the hair on the back of your neck, you know you’ve encountered something wonderful, even miraculous. But the vast majority of songs and records today are simply labored into existence at great expense of time and energy. They are pure works of work, not works of art; neither inspired nor required.

This isn’t to say to you, o lowly songwriter, that you shouldn’t make the effort to write on a regular basis. On the contrary, practice is essential, and so is keeping the “machinery” well oiled. Write enough songs so that you can discover the moment of inspiration, because without knowing what inspiration is, you will never be great at what you’re attempting to do.

You will not discover inspiration immediately. None of this magic “just happens” one day after you’ve written a couple of exercises. To the seasoned songwriter, the inspired idea feels like inspiration because he or she can sense that it’s above and beyond previous limitations (the level of mediocrity we can all hit on any given day), and we can feel the irresistible urge to tackle it, as well as the confidence that it can be tackled.

Giving something life isn’t as simple as baking a cake or painting a wall. You don’t give a dead idea life, you put a living idea into a song. How do you know it’s a living idea? It pulsates with possibilities; it demands to be born; it’s a part of you, sustaining itself in your mind like a gestating being. The gestation of a great song to the writer is almost as miraculous as the gestation of a child to its mother.

So laugh all you want about inspiration, Music Row. The last laugh will be mine because I know when I’ve witnessed a little miracle.


copyright 2009 by craig bickhardt

The Radio's Echo

If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.
- Andrei Tarkovsky

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
- E. B. White

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
- Stephen Wright

There are at least two ways of approaching a creative endeavor. The first is to look around you to see what everyone else is doing and try to take a little bit from here or there in order to conform to the general tone of things. The second is to shut all of that off and go within to find your own voice and muse, and only emerge from the cave when the job is finished.

If you've been confused by too much critical advice, it's probably because you've approached your work using the first method. Almost everyone in the industry can spot this type of song. It has all of the flair and style of the Emperor's New Clothes. It sounds like the radio alright, but it sounds more like the radio's echo.

As hard as it is to understand, you will not be successful until you digest all of the elements of commercial music until they are in your very fibre and blood, in your cells, and then ignore every bit of conventional wisdom you hear and write from who you are. Your contribution will be unlike everyone else's and yet it will find a symbiotic place in the ecosystem of commercial music. It will fill a niche no one knew existed until you came along. This is exactly how it is.

Whenever I encounter a writer trying too hard to "be commercial" I tell him/her that the worst kind of song is the song that's clearly written for the money. A song can earn tons of it and still be a very original piece of work. But if you write for the money you are playing it too safe to succeed. What do "Wooly Bully" and "City Of New Orleans" have in common? Both are hit songs, both are nothing you could have ever imagined writing yourself, and neither one was written for the money.

Focus on your craft and learn everything you can about songs and songwriting. Become a better musician, and a better singer if possible. Study the writers who have forged their own path, but don't imitate them. Learn from them how to be you. Songwriting is like a personal instinct-- mannerisms, quirky expressions and gestures. No two people express themselves in quite the same way. If you are having a dialog, do you imitate the other person's accent? Do you say the same words, make the same gestures, lean the same way? Do you answer predictably? Do you repeat everything you heard yesterday or do you think for yourself? Songwriting is no different. We learn the language, we learn the musical scale, we learn what chords work best, we learn what's legal and what isn't. But nearly everything else is a reflection of the individual.

If you've got the page numbers done, don't think the rest is just a matter of filling up the blank spaces on the paper with readable sentences. Give us some reason to turn the page. You'll find that reason in your head, heart and soul, not in someone else's.



copyright 2009 by craig bickhardt

Song or Sonic Collage

Ansel Adams used to say that before he took a picture he'd already factored every aspect of photography and dark room expertise into the shot. He knew what film ISO he'd need to use to get the proper effect, what Aperture and shutter speed would be required to capture the light and detail, what lens he'd use, what time of day the shot needed to be taken, where he'd probably have to dodge and burn in the dark room to get the light to pop, etc. Nothing was left to chance, even if chance ultimately played a role in the final product-- creative accidents still happened, but their opposite (creative disasters) were minimized. For Ansel Adams, "craft" and "skill" were paramount to the "art" of his pictures. The three were inseparable, and there were no shortcuts.

In today's world of digital photography, it's possible for anyone to achieve certain professional effects with the camera. No longer does the amateur have to study the craft of photography or spend years in the dark room learning about the volatility of chemicals and photo paper because virtually any effect or operation can be applied to a raw digital shot to give the photo some of the same effects it took Adams many hours to create. Because creative disasters have been virtually eliminated with "undo", creative accidents play a much greater role in the final products of amateur photographers. In general, there's more experimentation, but less knowledge of the fundamentals. More haphazard shooting because it's inexpensive, less planning of the shot.

Does this mean anyone can be Ansel Adams? Hardly.

Of course, this is a songwriting blog, so why am I writing about photography? I can think of no better metaphor to explain what has happened to the art of songwriting since "craft" and "skill" have gone the way of the dodging wand.

I was recently asked to coach a songwriting duo who were planning to do a CD. A friend of mine was producing the duo but he felt the songs were not up to par so he asked me to take a listen and make some critical suggestions. Once again I found myself in the position of trying to explain the difference between songwriting and something I call the sonic collage. The songs had some fine moments, but they weren't focused, they were full of lyric contradictions and irrelevant lines. The melodies sometimes had catchy phrases but they weren't repeated or they were in places that distracted from the main melodic themes (if there were any at all) or they didn't draw attention to the hook. The songs were all too long-- not just by commercial standards, but by any standard of human interest (the self indulgent factor). They were obviously written in a stream of conscious method, probably in less than an hour or two, with no re-writing attempted.

I made my comments to the pair in a carefully worded email. My friend said the duo was very interested in what I had to say, they even agreed with some of it, but ultimately they just wanted to get into the studio and cut the CD they'd already written. The money was burning a hole in their pockets and after it all, it was their record label...

Why study songwriting when you can make anything vaguely resembling a song sound good with Protools and judicious editing? I'm sure my friend will cut a decent CD, but they'll spend more time cutting, pasting and undoing than was spent writing the tunes. In fact it seems that a song is now just the vehicle that gets you to the cutting, pasting and undoing part. It's all about how soon you can get in there and piece it all together into the sonic collage, better known as the modern song. Then you can either go home and learn the song off the record that you've made, or else you just perform to backing tracks. And the best part : almost anyone can do it. All those boring years of study, all those highly educational creative disasters that can't be "undone", the lessons that teach you to do the work before you spend the money, the "skill" and the "craft" that goes into the art of song; unnecessary.

Unnecessary until one day you get on stage next to someone who has spent the time learning the skill and craft behind the art, and put the energy into the song before spending the money on the record. Then you will pull out your sonic collage and sing in earnest, trying to convince the audience they are being communicated to. But your sonic collages won't stand a chance against the real songs. The real songs will hit their mark while you send out lilting melodies and random thoughts like bubbles in the breeze.

Do you think I'm wrong?

Come and sit here on the stage with me...

copyright 2008 by craig bickhardt