I never used to listen to lyrics. I could hear an album a dozen times, so that I knew every instrument's part by heart, but the best I could do was hum the vocal line. It was like a foreign language to me: when music was on, I spoke in notes.
That started to change when I started singing, because humming the whole time was pretty boring. Lyric booklets helped, and if the CD didn't come with one I'd sometimes make one myself. I learned hundreds and hundreds of covers and got a pretty good understanding of some different ways people write songs, not to mention a warehouse-sized lyric memory. Trying to write my own songs just pushed me further into the world of words, to the point that now if I don't have anything else on my mind I'll just be repeating interesting lines to myself, figuring out how they do what they do.
All this to say: I take words seriously. I put a lot of work into mine, and I hope it shows. I use the posts on this blog to set down what I'm thinking about as I make music, so I can see how my ideas progress and my concerns change over time. I'm going to look at one of the songs from Little Gwaii called "Do You Know CPR?" and see what the heck I was thinking about when I wrote the lyrics.
I started working on the song with just the title, which is from a story my mom told me once. Her little brother (my uncle) was born with a congenital heart defect that meant that his life expectancy wasn't good. The last time she visited him in the hospital before he died was after he'd had a succession of heart attacks, but they'd managed to stabilize him. She thought he must have known that something was going to happen to him because at one point a propos of nothing he asked her if she knew CPR. Here's the song:
His eyes shift over from the window to the chair
Holding off death with a get back stare
He says "Sis, it's all right,
I won't go gentle into that good night"
Well no that's not what he said
No one quotes Dylan Thomas in a hospital bed
Especially not a kid of 17
Circles under his eyes, encircled by machines
This first part is supposed to launch you directly into the song world by going as visual as possible and giving the kind of cinematic direction of camera and dialogue that Elvis Costello uses in the second verse to "Watching the Detectives" (Cut the baby taking off her clothes/Close-up of the sign that says 'we never close'). I'm imagining the scene from fragmentary details, and my writing reflects this, starting with a pair of darting eyes and building my world outwards.
Spoken word is a new style for me, so on this record I sometimes felt more comfortable alluding to specific lyrics I liked from the genre. The first line approximates a line from Soul Coughing's "Moon Sammy" (And automatically your mind moves from the stairwell to the chair), and the third is straight from Serengeti's "Teenager" (I said 'sis it's all right'/'You know you gotta watch your mouth when your parents are in sight')
And then, instead of using another song, the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas. I like this because it undercuts my credibility as narrator, something I was feeling acutely as I was writing the song. What do I know about death? Nothing, really, and you can tell since English lit is my reference point. I don't know what it's like, what people say, and I don't want to pretend I do. But I want to try and imagine, and if I get it wrong I'll try again, this time with concrete facts (17) and a visual bit of wordplay (circles/encircled).
Born with a hole in his heart
Sometimes he needs more just for it to start
Lately it's been stopping a lot
Like stopping a watch, like stopping a clock
When you fall down 36 times,
Rising up 35 is a pretty good record
A pretty good record but the stakes are too high
A pretty good record and he's still gonna die
The first two lines borrow an image from "Blue Eleanor" by the Old Canes (I've got a hole in my heart/And it needs more for it to start/Feeling alive, feeling alive). "Like stopping a watch" I got from Donnie Brasco, the scene where Lefty's son is in the hospital and he tells Donnie "His heart stopped. Like a watch. That's what the doctor said, just like a watch. They had to wind it back up. Who knows, maybe next time...they can't."
So I expand on that idea of multiple heart attacks by reversing a lyric from The Streets' "Going Through Hell" (Fall down five times, rise up six). And I never lose an opportunity to work in a lyric that can be taken out of context as a commentary on my craft, like "a pretty good record [LP] but he's still gonna die". The band Metric does this on most of their radio singles; you can read them literally or you can interpret certain lines as describing their place and concerns in the music industry.
Is that fair? What's fair?
This is real life
And no doctor here would dare
To put him under the knife, so
Back to the room without poetry
Big sister at the edge of the bed
His eyes flicker upwards hopefully
Then you know he whispers he says
The thing about the type of heart defect my uncle had was it would be completely fixable at birth today, with better surgical procedures. But at the time, there was nothing they could do for him.
Chorus:
Do you know CPR?
I can feel it in my heart
Do you know CPR?
Could it really be that hard
I like it when choruses are somewhat open in the interpretation of their lines. Here "I can feel it in my heart" is meant to work as my uncle speaking about his feeling of premonition and also me empathizing. "Could it really be that hard" is my uncle saying CPR can't be that tricky, and also me incredulous at how hard a decision it would be to not continue to resuscitate him when there was no hope of improvement.
I generally time my completed first verse and chorus to give myself an approximate idea of how many verses I'll need for the song's runtime to hit 3-4 minutes, and try to plan content accordingly. In this case my first verse was quite long and a double chorus felt natural, so I knew two verses would be enough.
As virtuous men pass mildly away
And whisper to their souls to go
Scared young kids who just wanna live
Can whisper to their sisters "no"
'Cause this is not John Donne, don't be the one
Who watches as his breath expires
And if doctors and parents all agree there is
No hope then call them liars
I like symmetry from verse to verse, sometimes I've used the same rhyming syllables from verse to verse. In this case for the second verse I just pulled out my #2 English lit poem on death, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne.
I got the idea of doctors and parents as a reason-based unit (as opposed to other kids who have real sympathy) from a line in Ted Leo's "Me and Mia" (Not doctors nor your mom and dad but/Me and Mia, Ann and Ana/Know how hard you try).
Rage cause he got nothing like a fair shot
But still has the will to fight
He's not noble or cowardly, just minutely/hourly
Dreaming he'll live the night
E.C.G. blinks in the dark
Beeping to the beating of a heart
E.C.G. whines on a line
Supine in a box of pine
Another thing going on in this song are the ethical questions that the death of someone close can raise. "Why him? Why not me?" I'm trying to argue here that we shouldn't moralize about things beyond our control. It's not more noble to accept the inevitable than to fight it; things happen, or don't happen, and we can only grieve.
I modified a rhyme from "Lock the Locks" by the Streets (No more alarm that barks in the dark/With the beeping like darts to the heart) for the ECG stanza. I also incorporated a sample of one of those machines as part of the beat, I figured even if it was heavy-handed it helped to bring the setting of the song to life.
Not fine, not fine, OK or coming back
Sister missed another brother heart attack
Dealing is hard when the deck is stacked
Holding his chart, feeling so wracked
How can she ever be happy enough
She got to dodge all of this stuff
How can she carry his name around
And let little things get her down
I was pretty much out of description at this point so I just kept going with moralizing, imagining things survivors might think. You tend to feel lucky when you learn about terrible circumstances other people are born into; you feel sympathy, but also gratitude that you were spared the same predicament. The problem is when you're grieving it doesn't seem like you can feel enough of either. You think about all the times you've been annoyed, or petty, and realize how minuscule those problems really were, and you realize your priority should just be getting the most you can out of every minute, every hour.
But every moment is not a gift
That's not a long-term way to live
She gave her brother's name to her first-born son
Told him just to try and have fun
When she needed anaesthesia or took a plane to meet him
It was plain that she was numb and afraid
Pain that fades with the years is still rattling ears
With echo echoes of her brother saying
Except that feeling of gratitude, that re-evaluation of priorities, never lasts. Eventually you slip back into normal life, your day to day concerns, your plans. It's possible to change your attitude about things to a certain extent, but a different kind of reality always reasserts itself as danger fades.
My mom gave me my uncle's name, Scott, as my middle name. Maybe partly so she would never worry about forgetting him. If so, it turned out to be a good plan, though I doubt she ever expected I'd write a song about him.
I wrote the words in one sitting, probably 3 or 4 hours. More than three quarters of what I wrote survived to the recorded version, with the last stanza receiving a major rework about a week later. Several other lines were changed slightly before recording as I considered other wordings.
I think the type of writing I was doing changed as this song progressed, as the changing focus of my analysis demonstrates. I started out with a lot of description, borrowing pretty heavily from things I'd heard done, turns of phrase I remembered. But by the end of the second verse I wasn't aware of borrowing anything, and I was interweaving description with moralizing, and carrying metaphors through almost unconsciously.
I was pretty pleased with how the words turned out for this song, which is probably why I didn't mind that it's one of the simplest arrangement on the album. Maybe I'll pick another example and look at arranging next.
That started to change when I started singing, because humming the whole time was pretty boring. Lyric booklets helped, and if the CD didn't come with one I'd sometimes make one myself. I learned hundreds and hundreds of covers and got a pretty good understanding of some different ways people write songs, not to mention a warehouse-sized lyric memory. Trying to write my own songs just pushed me further into the world of words, to the point that now if I don't have anything else on my mind I'll just be repeating interesting lines to myself, figuring out how they do what they do.
All this to say: I take words seriously. I put a lot of work into mine, and I hope it shows. I use the posts on this blog to set down what I'm thinking about as I make music, so I can see how my ideas progress and my concerns change over time. I'm going to look at one of the songs from Little Gwaii called "Do You Know CPR?" and see what the heck I was thinking about when I wrote the lyrics.
---
I started working on the song with just the title, which is from a story my mom told me once. Her little brother (my uncle) was born with a congenital heart defect that meant that his life expectancy wasn't good. The last time she visited him in the hospital before he died was after he'd had a succession of heart attacks, but they'd managed to stabilize him. She thought he must have known that something was going to happen to him because at one point a propos of nothing he asked her if she knew CPR. Here's the song:
His eyes shift over from the window to the chair
Holding off death with a get back stare
He says "Sis, it's all right,
I won't go gentle into that good night"
Well no that's not what he said
No one quotes Dylan Thomas in a hospital bed
Especially not a kid of 17
Circles under his eyes, encircled by machines
This first part is supposed to launch you directly into the song world by going as visual as possible and giving the kind of cinematic direction of camera and dialogue that Elvis Costello uses in the second verse to "Watching the Detectives" (Cut the baby taking off her clothes/Close-up of the sign that says 'we never close'). I'm imagining the scene from fragmentary details, and my writing reflects this, starting with a pair of darting eyes and building my world outwards.
Spoken word is a new style for me, so on this record I sometimes felt more comfortable alluding to specific lyrics I liked from the genre. The first line approximates a line from Soul Coughing's "Moon Sammy" (And automatically your mind moves from the stairwell to the chair), and the third is straight from Serengeti's "Teenager" (I said 'sis it's all right'/'You know you gotta watch your mouth when your parents are in sight')
And then, instead of using another song, the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas. I like this because it undercuts my credibility as narrator, something I was feeling acutely as I was writing the song. What do I know about death? Nothing, really, and you can tell since English lit is my reference point. I don't know what it's like, what people say, and I don't want to pretend I do. But I want to try and imagine, and if I get it wrong I'll try again, this time with concrete facts (17) and a visual bit of wordplay (circles/encircled).
Born with a hole in his heart
Sometimes he needs more just for it to start
Lately it's been stopping a lot
Like stopping a watch, like stopping a clock
When you fall down 36 times,
Rising up 35 is a pretty good record
A pretty good record but the stakes are too high
A pretty good record and he's still gonna die
The first two lines borrow an image from "Blue Eleanor" by the Old Canes (I've got a hole in my heart/And it needs more for it to start/Feeling alive, feeling alive). "Like stopping a watch" I got from Donnie Brasco, the scene where Lefty's son is in the hospital and he tells Donnie "His heart stopped. Like a watch. That's what the doctor said, just like a watch. They had to wind it back up. Who knows, maybe next time...they can't."
So I expand on that idea of multiple heart attacks by reversing a lyric from The Streets' "Going Through Hell" (Fall down five times, rise up six). And I never lose an opportunity to work in a lyric that can be taken out of context as a commentary on my craft, like "a pretty good record [LP] but he's still gonna die". The band Metric does this on most of their radio singles; you can read them literally or you can interpret certain lines as describing their place and concerns in the music industry.
Is that fair? What's fair?
This is real life
And no doctor here would dare
To put him under the knife, so
Back to the room without poetry
Big sister at the edge of the bed
His eyes flicker upwards hopefully
Then you know he whispers he says
The thing about the type of heart defect my uncle had was it would be completely fixable at birth today, with better surgical procedures. But at the time, there was nothing they could do for him.
Chorus:
Do you know CPR?
I can feel it in my heart
Do you know CPR?
Could it really be that hard
I like it when choruses are somewhat open in the interpretation of their lines. Here "I can feel it in my heart" is meant to work as my uncle speaking about his feeling of premonition and also me empathizing. "Could it really be that hard" is my uncle saying CPR can't be that tricky, and also me incredulous at how hard a decision it would be to not continue to resuscitate him when there was no hope of improvement.
I generally time my completed first verse and chorus to give myself an approximate idea of how many verses I'll need for the song's runtime to hit 3-4 minutes, and try to plan content accordingly. In this case my first verse was quite long and a double chorus felt natural, so I knew two verses would be enough.
As virtuous men pass mildly away
And whisper to their souls to go
Scared young kids who just wanna live
Can whisper to their sisters "no"
'Cause this is not John Donne, don't be the one
Who watches as his breath expires
And if doctors and parents all agree there is
No hope then call them liars
I like symmetry from verse to verse, sometimes I've used the same rhyming syllables from verse to verse. In this case for the second verse I just pulled out my #2 English lit poem on death, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne.
I got the idea of doctors and parents as a reason-based unit (as opposed to other kids who have real sympathy) from a line in Ted Leo's "Me and Mia" (Not doctors nor your mom and dad but/Me and Mia, Ann and Ana/Know how hard you try).
Rage cause he got nothing like a fair shot
But still has the will to fight
He's not noble or cowardly, just minutely/hourly
Dreaming he'll live the night
E.C.G. blinks in the dark
Beeping to the beating of a heart
E.C.G. whines on a line
Supine in a box of pine
Another thing going on in this song are the ethical questions that the death of someone close can raise. "Why him? Why not me?" I'm trying to argue here that we shouldn't moralize about things beyond our control. It's not more noble to accept the inevitable than to fight it; things happen, or don't happen, and we can only grieve.
I modified a rhyme from "Lock the Locks" by the Streets (No more alarm that barks in the dark/With the beeping like darts to the heart) for the ECG stanza. I also incorporated a sample of one of those machines as part of the beat, I figured even if it was heavy-handed it helped to bring the setting of the song to life.
Not fine, not fine, OK or coming back
Sister missed another brother heart attack
Dealing is hard when the deck is stacked
Holding his chart, feeling so wracked
How can she ever be happy enough
She got to dodge all of this stuff
How can she carry his name around
And let little things get her down
I was pretty much out of description at this point so I just kept going with moralizing, imagining things survivors might think. You tend to feel lucky when you learn about terrible circumstances other people are born into; you feel sympathy, but also gratitude that you were spared the same predicament. The problem is when you're grieving it doesn't seem like you can feel enough of either. You think about all the times you've been annoyed, or petty, and realize how minuscule those problems really were, and you realize your priority should just be getting the most you can out of every minute, every hour.
But every moment is not a gift
That's not a long-term way to live
She gave her brother's name to her first-born son
Told him just to try and have fun
When she needed anaesthesia or took a plane to meet him
It was plain that she was numb and afraid
Pain that fades with the years is still rattling ears
With echo echoes of her brother saying
Except that feeling of gratitude, that re-evaluation of priorities, never lasts. Eventually you slip back into normal life, your day to day concerns, your plans. It's possible to change your attitude about things to a certain extent, but a different kind of reality always reasserts itself as danger fades.
So you can't carry those feelings around with you forever, but you can pass on the priorities, the outlook that having lost gave you. In the few times I've ever seen my mom feel like she's in danger (before flying or surgery), she tells me to remember if anything happens to her that I should always do whatever makes me happy and try to have fun every day. Which I assume are the same strategies that have helped her get through losing people close to her.
My mom gave me my uncle's name, Scott, as my middle name. Maybe partly so she would never worry about forgetting him. If so, it turned out to be a good plan, though I doubt she ever expected I'd write a song about him.
---
I wrote the words in one sitting, probably 3 or 4 hours. More than three quarters of what I wrote survived to the recorded version, with the last stanza receiving a major rework about a week later. Several other lines were changed slightly before recording as I considered other wordings.
I think the type of writing I was doing changed as this song progressed, as the changing focus of my analysis demonstrates. I started out with a lot of description, borrowing pretty heavily from things I'd heard done, turns of phrase I remembered. But by the end of the second verse I wasn't aware of borrowing anything, and I was interweaving description with moralizing, and carrying metaphors through almost unconsciously.
I was pretty pleased with how the words turned out for this song, which is probably why I didn't mind that it's one of the simplest arrangement on the album. Maybe I'll pick another example and look at arranging next.
No comments:
Post a Comment