To be honest, I don't actually care if other people like them. Obviously, I would rather like it if people did like them, or find them in some way helpful in their journey through life, but really, I do it because I have to.
The other day, I read something by Robert Fripp about "finding out where the music wants to go " and "getting ourselves out of the way". (To be honest, the more I read of RF's ideas on music, artistic creation etc., the more of these "Yup!" moments I seem to have.)
That got me thinking (oh dear!). Most of the "worst" songs that I have written are the ones where I have thought about it - where I have thought about writing something that is about a particular subject, in a particular key or style etc. Most of the "best" (note that these descriptions are personal perceptions relative to my own output, not relating to the general corpus of musical works!) have indeed been things where I have "got myself out of the way" and allowed the music to found me - a random sentence that has appeared in my head that somehow grows into a lyric, or a riff, a chord or even just a sound that grows into music.
I know that this is not an uncommon way of writing, but perhaps Mr Fripp's words have given me some sort of validation that what seems to work for me, while not hugely productive, is kinda OK.
(I am also reminded of some thing that I think Sir Terry Pratchett wrote about particles of inspiration sleeting down, neutrino-like and occasionally interacting with the artistic part of our brains... I am currently too lazy to research it further.)
An example of this is my recent songwriting effort, "Snowfall". It emerged from an attempt to arrange an existing song ("Acid Kisses") for potentially playing acoustically at open mic nights. I had been struggling to combine two guitar parts, one using a capo, into one. I eventually came up with a variation on Open G, with the low string left as E and not tuned to D. With a capo on the second fret (should you care!). I had left my main acoustic tuned this way, and, a few days later, picked it up and started aimlessly noodling. Something appeared.
Fortunately, I wasn't too lazy that day, so I fired up my recording software and recorded it for future use. Or perhaps, as often happens, forgotten and left cluttering my hard drive. Only this time, the music kept coming. I had the parts for a whole piece. Then came the crunch. I had to save it. That required a name. There are many files on my laptop called things like "A Riff" and "Bass Thing", but this time a word came - "Snowfall".
I closed the file, shut my laptop down, and thought no more about it.
Until I did.
That night, going to bed, my brain did that thing it often does, and started working just as I was trying to shut it down for the night... A line "The silence fell like snowfall" came, so I did what I usually do now (where once I would have scrawled it into one of a large collection of notebooks) and typed it into OneNote, along with many other random fragments of language.
This one, however, wasn't finished with me. More words came. And I had a complete lyric. And it seemed to be about the events surrounding my son, Christopher's birth and our first of many encounters with Edinburgh Sick Kids. This is something that has lurked in my brain for over 15 years, but has never emerged in coherent words really. Until now, it seems.
The next day, I realised that the words and music worked together and added a rough (very rough!) vocal. I shared it with my bandmates. Sammy Jo, singer extraordinaire, came back to me almost straight away and said that she wanted to record it as soon as possible. So we did. Sammy Jo did an absolutely amazing job of bringing my words to life, in a way that I really struggle to do myself. And now, it lurks on my Soundcloud account. Some people seem to like it.
All that matters to me is that I got out of the way, the music and words found me, and a song that I have needed to create for years found its way into the real.
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