Nothing Too Soon

I wanted each song of the Meyers-Briggs LP to not only be written about people of that type, but also to feature aspects of music that each personality type appreciated. But most of the type descriptions I could find online dealt only briefly with music, usually as a career option. But I discovered forums where people who self-identified as a given type went to discuss all sorts of things with like-minded people, and there were always a few threads about music. I also found out that reddit had a sub dedicated to every Meyers-Briggs type, where followers discussed in much the same way.

Not a lot of literature covers the relationship between Meyers-Briggs type and music taste, because it's hard to immediately discern one at all. On the forums, when someone started a “What's your favourite music?” thread, the responses always seemed all over the map, artist/genre wise. Which makes sense, considering that most people discover music through friends and family; even those who find completely new things online hare understanding those things through the lens of music they've been exposed to up to that point. Not to mention the huge bulk of music out there, where even if it's possible that people of a certain type could agree on specific artists, it's unlikely they've all heard them.

Where things got more interesting is when they also included a justification of why a given song or artist was their favourite. Once I found enough responses from a specific type, I could see which reasons came up the most often. Some broad patterns emerged: extroverts were more likely to enjoy uptempo, cheerful music; songs that made people want to dance and socialize. Lyrically, sensing types seemed to prefer songs with storylines whereas intuitives liked associative, list-style songs.

The value that types place on lyrics is complex. Certain types often seemed to cite foreign or instrumental music as favourites; ones where the voice is perceived as another instrument or is entirely absent. For every type, there was someone who found lyrics important, but types like INTJ or ENTP seemed more comfortable than other types without words present. For other types, like ESTJ, words needed to be included, but a strong, recognizable voice was often more important to them than the lyrical content.

What kind of lyrics people quoted as favourites also varied by type. INTP, for example, enjoyed songs where an esoteric idea or emotion was expressed accurately; they liked songs that did something they hadn't heard done before. ESFJs, on the other hand, tended to enjoy songs that expressed a universal emotion or situation especially beautifully. When ENFPs found a bit of lyrics they especially liked, they often reported listening to that song constantly for a certain time, almost like a personal mantra.

And so, armed, with this patchwork of knowledge, I set it aside entirely to write the music. I worked much the same way as I did on Little Gwaii, setting up a roomful of instruments fed into a looper, and then building a groove one instrument at a time until I had something I could envision writing lyrics over, at which point I'd save it and start on a new one. This is a process that I have to be in the mood for: a confident enough headspace to explore whatever idea I had fully, without being critical. Sometimes I just worked from an idea I'd had, other times I'd grab an instrument and see what came to mind. I was able to do around 4-5 of these a day before I'd decide to work on something else.

When I had thirty or so of these demos, I figured I'd be able to pull 16 good ones out. I tried showing the loops to people at this point, and they helped me let go of some ideas I liked but that were too weird to wrap an ear around. More than anything else, the positive reaction to them psyched me up to work with them further. I made up a master list of characteristics I'd identified in each type's musical taste, and started mapping the loops I had onto Meyers-Briggs types. At this point, I had only vague ideas about lyrics and song structures, so I went by the mood and qualities of the instrumentals, asking questions like how fast, how happy, how complicated, how original. Sometimes I had more arbitrary reasons, like when a track's style reminded me of a person or artist I wanted to draw from for a given personality's songs. I didn't do a lot of swapping around once I'd assigned tracks to types, and the only misgivings I had were with the last couple of ones I had to pick, where the instrumentals I was most sure about were already taken.

I think it was at this point that I decided the songs on MB-LP should be comparatively short. My thinking was, first of all, that I wanted to write songs I could actually perform live with a looper, and that setting up the loops would add at least 30 seconds to the runtime of any given song. Second, that 16 tracks was a lot of songs, and at the rate that I sing, a lot of words, so keeping them short meant that I could keep the amount of writing I would have to do manageable, without resorting to too much repetition. And third, that some of my favourite songs were around the two minute mark anyway – “Web in Front” by Archers of Loaf, “In the City” by the Jam, or John Peel's favourite “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones – so it was definitely enough time to leave a strong impression. As I started to write lyrics, I kept this in mind, timing out sections as I wrote them and aiming for the 2:30 mark, with varying success.