Writing songs is a strange thing. With twelve notes, it's amazing we can continue to come up with novel melodies. And where do they come from? I don't think any composer can really answer that. Many of the songs I am proudest of having written really just dropped out of the ether, often almost fully formed. I wrote the lyrics to "Heart of the Lion" in the middle of the night. I woke up and wrote down the entire song. Weird. Of course, I did some re-writing and editing after that, but the basic idea was fully formed in a process I am incapable of really describing, because it is a process the mechanism of which I do not know or understand.
I once had a dream (and I don't remember many dreams) that Baaba Seth was opening for Fela Kuti, but his band didn't show up so we needed to be his back-up. In the dream he taught me a guitar and bass part. When we were performing the song on stage, Fela was singing this line over and over - "Political Party" - and though he sang other stuff as well, when I woke up I could remember that chorus, and the guitar and bass lines. I immediately told the band, and we started playing "Political Party." How bizarre.
Most of my songs have some small piece of inexplicable inspiration which is then hammered out with craft and effort into a full composition. And I am certain that this is less of an "inborn" ability than it is a process accessible by most human beings. When we first compose a melody (at least for most of us, I think), we imitate the music we love. Our earliest efforts are often contrived, derivative. As with any craft, as we do it over and over, we develop our skill and eventually an extra spark comes into our creation. Instead of imitating another composer, we are learning to express our inner lives through our craft. Just like a woodworker - at first, she constructs cabinetry that is rudimentary. She does it over and over, and eventually she is producing functional, well made cabinets. At some point, the cabinets go beyond functionality and become beautiful. Craft becomes art.
Well, that's how I think it is for most people. But then, there's the few - the people I have a real love-hate relationship with! - the composers who just seem to launch right out of the gate with true art. Paul Simon's craft has improved over the decades, to be sure, but he was writing gorgeous songs right from the beginning. T.S. Eliot wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock when he was nineteen years old! My son is twenty, but he is composing music that I only wish I could have written when I was his age. It's a gift I envy, but all I can do is continue to work on my own craft, and hopefully someday achieve that extra spark of art.
I once had a dream (and I don't remember many dreams) that Baaba Seth was opening for Fela Kuti, but his band didn't show up so we needed to be his back-up. In the dream he taught me a guitar and bass part. When we were performing the song on stage, Fela was singing this line over and over - "Political Party" - and though he sang other stuff as well, when I woke up I could remember that chorus, and the guitar and bass lines. I immediately told the band, and we started playing "Political Party." How bizarre.
Most of my songs have some small piece of inexplicable inspiration which is then hammered out with craft and effort into a full composition. And I am certain that this is less of an "inborn" ability than it is a process accessible by most human beings. When we first compose a melody (at least for most of us, I think), we imitate the music we love. Our earliest efforts are often contrived, derivative. As with any craft, as we do it over and over, we develop our skill and eventually an extra spark comes into our creation. Instead of imitating another composer, we are learning to express our inner lives through our craft. Just like a woodworker - at first, she constructs cabinetry that is rudimentary. She does it over and over, and eventually she is producing functional, well made cabinets. At some point, the cabinets go beyond functionality and become beautiful. Craft becomes art.
Well, that's how I think it is for most people. But then, there's the few - the people I have a real love-hate relationship with! - the composers who just seem to launch right out of the gate with true art. Paul Simon's craft has improved over the decades, to be sure, but he was writing gorgeous songs right from the beginning. T.S. Eliot wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock when he was nineteen years old! My son is twenty, but he is composing music that I only wish I could have written when I was his age. It's a gift I envy, but all I can do is continue to work on my own craft, and hopefully someday achieve that extra spark of art.
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