There’s a common experience that all great songwriters have had, and if they haven’t had it, they’re not great songwriters. It’s the magical feeling of having a song appear, as it were, out of nowhere. Melodies, lyrics, composition…yes, they’re something you can work on and refine, sometimes for years. But often the first spark came like lightning, or the whole song appeared fully formed all at once.
Here’s how Paul Simon put it when discussing a few of his greatest songs:
The Sound of Silence was the first song I wrote which seemed to come from some place that I didn’t inhabit. At age 23, it was unusual, well beyond my age and abilities. Then it happened again throughout my writing. Bridge Over Troubled Water was another song that came mysteriously. So did a lot of Graceland. I wrote Slip Slidin’ Away in 20 minutes – usually, it takes me a couple of months to get a song. There are other examples, like Darling Lorraine, of songs that came from someplace else … A mystery, you could call it.
Bob Dylan put it like this:
I’m not that serious a songwriter. Songs don’t just come to me. They’ll usually brew for a while, and you’ll learn that it’s important to keep the pieces until they are completely formed and glued together…I’m not thinking about what I want to say, I’m just thinking ‘Is this OK for the meter?’ But there’s an undeniable element of mystery too. It’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and it goes away, it goes away. You don’t know what it means. Except the ghost picked me to write the song.
And like this:
I don’t know how I got to write those songs…Those early songs were like almost magically written. Darkness at the break of noon Shadows even the silver spoon The handmade blade, the child’s balloon Eclipses both the sun and moon To understand you know too soon There is no sense in trying. Well, try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that.
One of my favourite songwriters, Noel Gallagher, likened songwriting to fishing:
I still think tomorrow might be the day that I write the greatest song of all time. It's like going fishing. The guitar is your fishing rod, and if I'm not fishing for that song, fucking Bono will get it, and if he's not, Chris Martin will.
The topic of divine inspiration among artists is an old one.
Plato discusses it in his great dialogue, The Ion. The question there concerns a rhapsode who is an expert in performing Homer. Is his rhapsody or inspired recital of epic poetry an art (a kind of knowledge), or is the rhapsode inspired by the muses and thus out of his mind (and hence not exercising knowledge?)
It would seem that if rhapsody is an art, than the rhapsode should have knowledge concerning the matters about which the poets speak. But the poets speak about everything and therefore the rhapsode should have comprehensive knowledge of human and divine affairs. Socrates shows that this is not the case with Ion, who thus prefers to have his activity explained as divine possession.
Surprisingly, however, even the claim to divine possession is subtly undermined in the dialogue, and Ion’s “inspiration” is ascribed to lower, more vulgar motives, like wanting to please a paying crowd. But as the quotes above show, we can’t dismisses the phenomenon of divine “musical” inspiration altogether in all cases. It is too well attested to.
I’ve always been interested in the mystery of where songs come from. Not the kind of interest that wants to solve the mystery but the kind that is in awe of it.
I myself have had the pleasant hobby of songwriting for many decades now. And while I don’t claim divine inspiration, I can relate to some of the mystical “unknowing” that surrounds the birth of a song. Let me quickly tell you why.
I’ve rarely ever sat down to write a song in the deliberate manner of crafting it, reworking it, refining it, revising it - everything you might think goes into the deliberate, intentional production of a musical piece. (Maybe I could have been somebody musical if I had been less lazy in that respect!)
99% of the songs I’ve recorded in my life, which I still continue to listen to and enjoy, just came out of me in exactly the amount of time it took to sit down and play them for the first time with the recorder running. In other words, I literally “hit record” on the recording device, whether it’s my cell phone or my home recording studio, and capture the song that comes out on the spot.
That has always amazed me. It makes me wonder how many more songs there are inside (? or above? or below?) that are waiting to be released and captured, or else how many songfish I’ve had bite before but had to throw back into the sea because I didn’t keep the catch, didn’t “hit record.”
An important caveat before I provide an example or two. With the exception, maybe, of an old friend I used to write with, I am my own biggest fan. I’ve always liked my music, partially because of this mysterious quality it has. I simultaneously think I’m a genius (because some of the songs impress me that way) and trash (because I am an unworthy vessel for them, never recorded well or sang well, never made anything of myself musically, etc., etc.). So there are bands that are better, better looking, more skilled, more polished…and I’m not only the biggest but pretty much the only person in my no-longer-teenage fanclub. So if you think the examples are bad, that’s okay. But for me, they’re still telling. Keep in mind that I did not sit down and pre-write these lyrics. Unfiltered, I sang while the device was recording, and that was that.
So here’s the first example. I don’t remember how long ago I recorded it but as I recently found it again and archived it, I was impressed by the lyrics. It’s called APLOMB:
when you're whisked away amidst a total lapse of calm
a loss of sense and sensibility exploding like a bomb
the world's a dizzying ensemble
a thief who's stolen your aplomb
you're in a panic and you're falling
everything is going wrong
your limb is breaking from a tree
you're stuck and struggling, you're fighting to get free
your time is running out, you only want to scream and shout
and you pray to god, you feel bedevilled
you haven't shaved, you look dishevelled
you're seeing double, you're in a daze
you're in some trouble, you're in a rage
when everything's conspired against you
and nothing's coming to your aid
when fortune's guns are trained right on you
and all your shields have given way...
what are you to do?
Not bad for a completely improvised and spontaneous song, in my opinion.
Let’s look at another “classic” (in my world, as pretty much the sole listener of these songs, there are still classics, and every song is a story with a story).
that map of old europe that you keep in your pocket / visions of days that would not be the last / it's a phosphorus world with a heavy hand / you see much better when you put out the lights / imprisoned by a promise, impossible to keep / a long unbroken vow you shatter every time you speak / you came, collapsed, exhausted, crying, as I washed your feet / the space between your iris and the back of your mind / i made a daily expedition just to see what i'd discover there / and the stars of distant galaxies / that spun with you in synchrony / sunk ships they should have guided through / the restless seas of infamy / a passing abandonment left as a trace / that you cannot imagine or ignore or efface
You don’t have to love that to wonder at the fact, as I do, that it just came like that out of nowhere. It’s not like I was fighting to find the lines as I scribbled them into some little poet’s notebook. I just hit record and sang whatever came to mind while it did. To repeat, that is true of 99% of everything I’ve written. Where did these songs that I continue to enjoy decades later come from? What is the right way to understand this phenomenon of songwriting, if you can even call it that? Are these songs? In what sense did I write them? As I’ve joked before: all credit to the muse, but send me the cheque. I have over 160 songs archived on my music site, and that’s not all of them. Suppose only 5% are good. That would still be 8 good songs that came from God knows where. Some songwriters never get that many.
One more example, because it’s one of the first cases where I really thought wow, what’s going on here? I used to write love songs (no surprise there) even when I was not in love. They were not about anyone. They weren’t even inspired by anything. They were just songs that were coming to me. And this was one of my earliest favourites:
everything i've ever said or done meant nothing without you / everywhere i've ever been or left meant nothing without you / i can feel it, i know you feel it too / when i'm with you it makes me feel so sorry that i left you / don't you know that everyone around is just a walking refuge? / don't you understand that everyone around is walking 'round with their head in their hands / and ain't it plain to see that you are the only one for me? / you know it brings me down girl / but it always brings me back around.
Okay, that’s not genius. I know. But it’s a “good song” that was written on the spot, without a referent (there was no obvious “you” I had in mind, and after I “wrote” this, I even thought, damn who is this person I am writing about?)
Last example. I don’t want to bore you, or myself. This is something more recent. And it’s not about nobody. It doesn’t completely lack a referent. But it is another case where absolutely nothing was pre-written. I had 5 minutes when I could turn on the recording device without my kids screaming like crazy in the background (which you will hear in many of the demo recordings if you ever listen to them). Everything was completely spontaneous and extemporaneous. That’s what surprises me. That’s why I have this strange feeling when I listen back to the recordings and enjoy them. They’re “me” and “not me” at the same time. “I” wrote them, “I” recorded them, but really they’re just some fish I caught, some ghost who came to visit.
I've been waiting for a time when I can say what's on my mind to you / Now it's finally arrived, yet I don't know what I'm gonna do / you're a distant memory to me / a distant memory that I can't see / you're just a fading dream / it's never what it seems, you know, to me / I've been waiting, I forgot what I was saying / So I put my head, I'm praying / In my hands, I'm done explaining / Let's go back to where it all began / Waiting in the rain for the time to pass and you to come back / But you did not return there now / And I turned and went my way / And I'm glad I did 'Cause we soon found out / You'd gone back to someone who used to smack you around / And I found my way to a better place / But oh who knows what tomorrow brings / I count the times we nearly died / I turn around and go back inside / It's me and you, what are we gonna do? / I'm always there inside of you / It's a hard pill to swallow It's a hard road to follow / I've been down but I don't wallow / I just... I just... / I just stop and think of you
Is that a good song? Damned if I know. I like it. And I like that it came out of nowhere. It speaks to me, and if I consider it completely objectively, there are parts of it that I do find “brilliant” (the ending). Even if no one else ever will. So what the heaven and hell is songwriting? As good a mystery as I’ve ever known.
As a closing reflection on this topic, I do want to say that I have always been attracted to “the mystical” in music and in my own music. That will mean different things to different people, so let me explain. I’m not talking about hare krishna or mantras. I used to love a band called Spiritualized, which as the name alone might suggest had something to say about (drug induced and yet repentant) spiritual life. The Brian Jonestown Massacre, another band I loved then, had its own combination of initiatory wisdom and mental illness (must songwriting consist of them both?)
In my own music, you’ll find songs like Pray, Faith, Angel, Lord Let Me Down, The Formation of the Universe, Raymond Lullaby (get it?), Messiah, Taste of Heaven, God Is On Fire…showing the prevalence not of “religious themes” but of the holy in my madness.
Well, I suppose the final word here should be not on the madness and method of songwriting as a musical phenomenon but on the broader, classical relationship between song and law, both called nomos in Greek.
Maybe you must have a songwriter’s soul, attuned to the divine mysteries, to truly appreciate the meaning of law?
Who do you say gave you your song, a god or a man?
Lean into the magic, I think our human rationalness blocks this out, or our fear of acceptance or imposter syndrome etc. when we open up to it, that creative process we tap into something really special.
Made a video on this topic: https://youtu.be/hMPREmUDcmI