Always A Reason

The Dynamics Of Inaction

A song can take a long time in gestation. You can sit on a verse for months, and have nowhere for it to go. In theory it has anywhere and everywhere it can go, but there is something about the chords or phrase or sentiment or whatever bit of lyric in it that demands it goes somewhere important as opposed to just anywhere. So somewhere between the arbitrariness of decision-making and the imagined importance of making the right one lies the sea of paralysing option anxiety.

Then you might glom on to a chorus that might work with it, but then you can't find words for it. Or maybe you're looking for a bridge that changes the mood sufficiently or appropriately, and then you might be thinking about how the breakdown might go. This is all part of the mechanical bit of songwriting. It's not like painting or sculpting or making a film or designing posters, simply because music demands a certain level of intrinsic coherent structure.  It sure ain't like blogging here, I tell you. 

Let's say you have a C chord and you go to A minor, you're treading where just about every songwriter and composer has been down. Coming up with something new that fits across that is going to be very difficult. The history of music is filled with C followed by A minor. If you want to be original, the first thing you might want to do is avoid doing the same thing as a gajillion other songwriters; And even that might just be one single thing out of hundreds of these kind of things. It's no wonder rap came around and did away with melody and to some extent harmony. 

Ironically, the best thing to have happened to songwriting is Digital Audio Workstations. DAWs allow you to just park your ideas and forget about them. When you punch in information to a DAW and then forget about the original genesis or inspiration of that idea, it gives you the liberty to come at it from other angles at a later date. You need to derail yourself from the thing that locks you into the same old ideas. 

Yet most days it can be like anything else where you're staring at a blank canvas or page wondering what the hell you're going to go with the project at hand. I had a guy who taught me lots of things when I was a kid and he used to say there was little difference between the thoughtful pause and just resting. Whatever it is, the dynamic of waiting for things to fall into place is the very dynamic of inaction. 

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