Monday 19 October 2009

A Song A Day: #2

First, some thoughts, on the second day of this fool's errand.

- Rhymezone.com is my best friend. Even though it's American, so it doesn't think water rhymes with quarter.

- Songwriting can be a bit like that riddle about the axe. You change the verse, and then you change the chorus, so is it still the same song? With today's, there were a few instances of this: I'd want to use the word 'black' at the end of a line, so the next line would end 'I want you back' - a sentiment plucked out of the air, for the sake of the rhyme - and then I'd go back and change the first line to end with 'track'. And hey presto, for no very good reason, the song's about wanting someone back.

- Though this whole exercise is partly about lowering my standards for myself, I've still (happily) got some in-built sense of quality control. Today's song is almost very cheesy, but hopefully, my constant desire to undercut the sentimentality will have saved it from total schmaltz.

- Both today's song and yesterdays have seriously challenged my piano-playing abilities. If/when I do them live I need to either do some practice or bring in a real pianist.

So. Today's effort is called 'Trains and Sunsets'. I find that I'm often at my most introspective on train journeys, and when I happen to be on a train at sundown I'm even worse. I remember a moment from my pre-university travels when I was on a train from Munich to Prague, standing by the window, wind in my hair, listening to 'Dust In The Wind' by Todd Rundgren as the sky turned pink. I had been a bit down at the time and I just had the most epic emotional wallow. This song isn't about that train journey, but it's about that feeling.

I like songs about trains, too. Seriously, I've got a whole playlist on my iPod. I've long wanted to write one, and since the rhythm I'd been playing around with on the piano sounded vaguely train-like, this seemed a good moment. The first bit of the lyric to come was a lighter-waving chorus:
I barely think of you but every now and then
Trains and sunsets set me off again
I took a moment to congratulate myself for the accidental wordplay of 'sunsets set me off'. Then I had to pad out the sentiment into a couple of verses. I wanted to have a specific train journey in mind as I wrote, and toyed with a few ideas before settling on the standard train from Victoria I take to get home from central London. Consequently I refer to it as the 7.21 (there actually is a train at that time), there's a reference to the Thames in there, and when I mention chimneys I was thinking of Battersea Power Station.

That aside, it's not a very specific lyric. As I said, there are lots of attempts to save myself from cliché by drawing attention to the cliché (which is a cliché in itself), so there's a bit about a "clichéd colour scheme", a "chocolate box display", a "manipulative lighting plot". But then that became, I suppose, the central idea of the song: that certain moments (like a sunset on a train) conspire to manipulate us into feelings that we wouldn't usually have; that the epiphanies you get at such moments are produced, as it were, under duress.

Anyway, after two verses I thought I'd have trouble stretching the idea any further. So for the third verse you get some good oldfashioned "da da da"-ing. Which, in the context of a band, would be solo time. And I think that just about constitutes a whole song...

No comments:

Post a Comment