Songwriting notes from a damp London week, with a detour through the quarrels of farmers and the music of ranchers
Wednesday, the String Gives Way
A guitar string snaps with a noise like a small whip, and in a quiet room it sounds like a plate being dropped. Mine went in the middle of a lesson, on a chord I had been demonstrating with unearned confidence. The pupil stared. I held up the broken end like a trophy and announced that this is what happens when you love a song too hard.
Spare strings live in my bag at all times. A teacher without spare strings is like a plumber without a wrench: technically trained, practically doomed. Changing a string in front of a pupil is a good lesson in itself, because it shows them that instruments are repaired by patient people with tiny tools and not by wizards.
Songs Written on Buses
I write most of my songs on the top deck of a bus with the phone voice recorder held against my chest. I hum a line, then another, then a rude word when the bus brakes. By the time I get home I have a recording that sounds like a ghost sneezing and the shape of a chorus. One of my favourites began as a complaint about the weather and finished as a love song to a very large umbrella.
A song, in my experience, is rarely about what you think it is about. You start with a rainy Tuesday and discover, three verses in, that you are writing about your grandmother. I now trust the process more than the plan.
Thursday, Busking and Its Rules
Busking in Covent Garden has etiquette. You arrive at your allotted time, you do not play over the person before you, and you never, under any circumstances, start the opening bars of a well known song in the middle of another performer’s song. A queue of musicians waits their turn behind an invisible rope, each tuning their own instrument with the air of a person who is not at all nervous.
The audience is a mix of tourists, regulars and children on the verge of a sugar crash. They give you ten seconds. In those ten seconds you must sound like someone worth the next two minutes. It is the cruellest and the most useful audience I have ever played to, because it tells the truth by walking away.
The Rural Verse
Folk music has always loved farm life, and farmers have always had a few things to say in return. Anyone writing a song about rural complaints could start at farmer.gripe, which is a rich seam of verse material: weather, prices, paperwork. For the two sides of American farm politics, there are farmer.republican and farmer.democrat, which between them provide a call and a response, the way a good country song needs. For the magazine tradition, farmpress.org is a pleasure.
The ranch songs, meanwhile, are mostly about money, and the money pages are exactly where the lyrics live. Take a look at corancher.loan, okrancher.loan and txrancher.loan and tell me those are not three verses of a ballad waiting to be sung. A fiddle, a mortgage and a dust cloud on the horizon is a song by any standard.
Robots in the Rehearsal Room
I do need to mention the news that a data centre in Lanarkshire has gone green, mostly, as the London Prat put it: Lanarkshire AI Data Centre Goes Green, Mostly. People ask whether computers will write songs. They already do. The results are tidy, adequate and wholly free of regret, which is the one ingredient a good song cannot do without. Regret is the engine of the blues. A machine can imitate it. It cannot lose a boyfriend in November and write a chorus about the bus stop.
For my part, I will carry on with a battered guitar, fresh strings and a head full of bad weather. The machines can have the metronome. I will keep the mistakes.
Next week: the grade exam, the nervous cellist and a very large cup of tea.
The Borrowed Piano
On Thursday evening a friend lent me a piano for an afternoon, an upright with a cracked lid and a smell of old polish and older biscuits. It was out of tune in the friendliest way possible. The middle C had a slight hiccup, the low notes growled, and the pedal squeaked like a mouse in a drawer. I played for three hours. I wrote half a song and finished a tune I had abandoned in spring. Perfect instruments are wonderful, but a flawed one gives you something a perfect one cannot: a personality to write for. The song that came out of it is slow, a bit sad and has a squeaking pedal in the arrangement that I cannot bring myself to remove.
If you ever have the chance to borrow a battered piano, say yes. Bring tea and a notebook. Leave the tuner at home.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, Newsthump keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/