Writing "It's Very Dark"
Dec. 22nd, 2023 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperThis is going to be a very long post on how I wrote "It's Very Dark".
This is an essay on songwriting with a guitar, which uses my new song, “It’s Very Dark”, as the example, because – in this case – I actually wrote the song to demonstrate this particular songwriting process.
This particular story starts at the last Chambanacon, where Jen was giving a panel on her songwriting process (which made me happy, because I was one of the folks who had suggested it). At some point during the panel, I opened my mouth and said “Tunes are free.” And Lauren turned around and looked at me like I had said something completely unbelievable. Some subsequent conversations revealed that Lauren comes out of a poetry background, while I don’t, and that seems to explain the difference in approach.
I have a guitar here and the guitar has a million tunes in it. I just need to discover them.
About a week ago I set out to put my music where my mouth had been and I picked up the guitar with the intent of writing a song. I had no idea what the song was going to be about, but I felt it would be good if it didn’t sound a lot like anything else that I’d written lately. My fingers went to Amaj7 on the guitar and I looked at them and said, “Nice try.” There’s been a lot of major-7ths lately. Let’s try something else.
Time for a brief digression into the minimal amount of music theory that I know. Guitar is an instrument that (without a capo) likes to play in certain keys and will make your life horribly miserable in others. Keys that have flats in the key signature are your enemy, while keys with sharps generally work out pretty well. So good guitar keys are C (0 sharps), G (1 sharp), D (2 sharps), A (3 sharps), and E (4 sharps). That’s five choices of starting chords, which isn’t bad at all.
But I wanted to write something that sounded different and a minor key was looking good. The array of useful minor keys on the guitar is much shorter, being mainly Am (the relative minor for C) and Em (the relative minor for G). The relative minor keys for D, A, and E all involve a lot of potential for bar chords, all of which are harder to play than open forms. And I have never been fond of bar chords. So open chords it is, and if you want to play in F#m, pick up a capo and play in Em capo 2. (Or Bm = Am capo 2.)
A minor is a great key and Am is what I have occasionally referred to as the “chord of death”. This is unfair to Am. I recently used Am in a love song, “Counting Up”. Death is optional, not a factory-standard feature with Am.
The three-chord wonder chord progression in Am is Am - Dm - E7. It’s ok, but it’s not exciting. I would like to do something different.
I have used Am - G - F - E7 a lot. In fact, I used it (more or less) in “Counting Up”. Let’s not be using that again right now.
How about Am to Em? This is not exciting me. Maybe Am to Em7, which is the quick and easy substitute for G in the chord progression above. That’s better.
It’s still not what I’m looking for. Let’s move a finger and get E7sus4. Hmm. That’s got prospects. In fact, let’s play the two finger version of E7sus4, which is not quite Em, with one finger on the fifth string B note and one on the third string A note.
That’s a grim little two chord riff. Am / E7sus4. What’s next? How about that G from the earlier progression? Yes, that works, but it’s nicer if I play the four-fingered G with the added D, so we’ll use that. And I can go from G to F, but that’s getting too close to my Am / G / F / E7 progression that I’m trying to avoid, so I need something like an F chord without being F. Dm7 is way too happy for this. And Dm is the relative minor for F, but it’s not right either. How about Dm6? That works!
Let’s pause for a brief musical vocabulary lesson. It is handy if you know how to play a lot of chords and what to call them. It’s not strictly necessary, but it’s like knowing more words when you’re writing lyrics. It just gives you more tools to work with.
So you pick up vocabulary by playing other songs that you like the sound of. I picked up a lot of musical vocabulary from America, which explains all of those major 7th chords that I use.
But you can also just move a finger in a chord that you know. If you like the sound, it is a chord. If you don’t like the sound, it may still be a chord, but it is not the chord you are looking for today. If you don’t know what it’s called, there are reverse chord finders on the Internet where you can click to place your fingers on a fretboard and it will give you a bunch of possible names for your chord. One of them may be the right name for the key that you’re playing in.
Anyway, Dm6. Cute little chord, only need two fingers to play it. Fits right into this chord progression which has still not resolved. Back to Am then. Resolved? Only sort of, because I can hear that we’re not at the right length yet. Let’s go to E7sus4, back to Am, and now this particular chord progression is resolved.
Am - E7sus4 - G/D - Dm6 - Am - E7sus4 - Am
I have a riff and this riff contains a melody – possibly more than one melody, but it’s going to provide me with a melody that goes along with these chords.
This is the point where I make my Pete Townshend joke. Ever listen to the beginning of the Who song, “Getting In Tune”? It starts out “I'm singing this note 'cause it fits in well with the chords I'm playing.”
I heard that and starting laughing. Because that is the trick.
You’ve got a chord progression that sounds good. You may not yet know what the rhythm is, you may not know whether you’ll be strumming this or finger picking it, or what the tempo is, but you can try all of those things and see what starts to sound right with the notes that fit in well with the chords you’re playing.
Because tunes are free.
What I have now is the beginning of a melody. I do not yet know what the song is about, but the chord progression is dark, so it is likely that something bad is happening.
I am going to play this for a while. I am going to play it over several days and keep throwing words at it and see if any of them would like to stick. I would also like some more melody, because this chord progression is clearly not the whole song, so I need some more chords to give me some more melody.
There are now a lot of tricks that you can pull out of the songwriting cabinet and see how they sound. For example, there’s restarting your chord progression halfway through and playing it again to construct a different phrase. For this chord progression, that would be:
G/D - Dm6 - Am - E7sus4
You can also pick up halfway and reverse course, possibly changing up a chord, so:
G/D - Em7 - Am
At one point, I found:
G/D - B7 - E7
I liked that change a lot. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the change I was looking for, so I put it back up on the shelf in case it came in handy later. After all, there are choruses and bridges lurking out there somewhere.
I finally decided that the additional piece of melody I needed belonged to this chord progression:
G/D - Am - G/D - E7
It feels like I’ve got the parts together. I just need to know what this song is about. It’s clearly dark. I wrote a song called “Dark” once. Of course, I wrote it a long time ago. Maybe I can write a different song about dark now.
It is time to let the song do what it wants to do. And it wants to be dark.
Let’s try the obvious then. It’s very dark.
The song is still in flux now, but it is going to try to gain form as it acquires words. And I am going to stop fighting it and let it be the little horror story that it wants to be.
I sing at the original chord progression until I have the first three lines of the song. The rhyme scheme here is going to be aggressive with two short lines ending with the A word, and a longer line that ends with the B word.
I find lyrics to be hard. I have been waiting for lyrics for this song for about a week now, but now that some lyrics have arrived, they give the song form, so if the first three lines have that shape and rhyme scheme, then let’s repeat it and write three more lines. The RhymeZone site is my friend, because I want some rhymes for blinded so I can get the B word rhyme at the end of the second triple. RhymeZone coughs up “minded” (among others) and that will do the job.
So far, so good. The problem is that I still don’t really know who my protagonist is, although it is clear to me that he is not in a happy situation.
Time to mull this over. And it takes some time.
Ok, so he’s alone in the dark. Why is he there? Well, he went out hunting at night. Alone. That shouldn’t be a problem, right? There are a lot of things that you can hunt for on a moonlit night.
And it’s dark. But this dark is not right. Dark is the absence of light. This dark is not the absence of something, but rather a presence. Something bad is out there. He doesn’t know what, but it’s a predator. If he had a flashlight with him, the light would penetrate the dark, but this dark cannot be penetrated by light. There is nothing that he can perceive past his own fingertips.
At this point, I am not sure how much of this is going to make it into the song. But I am understanding exactly how bad this is. And now it’s time to pull in that alternate melody line and use it for exposition, because the hunter is now hunted.
That’s not where the verse needs to end though. So let’s pick up the original chord progression and melody line and use it for the final triplet, except the beat is going to move from the end of each phrase to the beginning. That little trick will mess me up a couple of times before the song is done, but it’s better that way, so I will just keep patching things until I get it right.
I have a verse! This is an important milestone in writing a song, because once you have one verse, you have set the pattern for the other verses and your life becomes simpler, because you are now constrained by the pattern that you’ve created.
Oh. I have a verse that is twelve lines long. That’s a lot of verse. And I would like to have a chorus. I am convinced that I would like to have a chorus.
It had better not be twelve lines long.
But the chorus is simple. I grab the alternate chord progression from the third triplet, massage it a bit for different rhythm and melody, and get a two line chorus. That’s a good length.
Will there be a bridge? Maybe. We will cross that bridge when we come to it.
I was writing this song whenever I could steal time from work and sleep. I forget whether it was “get back to work” or “come to bed”, but I needed to put the song down after the first verse. That’s ok. Things were fixed in form now, so the rest of this should be easier.
When I return to the song, it is time to check it over before proceeding to write the second verse. The verse is in first person. The chorus is in second person.
My protagonist has been afflicted with a Greek chorus.
His life is miserable enough. He is going to die before this is over, and he has a stinking Greek chorus in his head to remind him just how stupid he is for having gotten into this situation.
You’ve got one of those too, don’t you? I do.
Second verse now. Should I repeat the first three words of the previous verse? Sure, let’s do that, then change up the end of the line. First triplet done, except I start working on the second triplet and realize that the last line of the first triplet needs to belong to the second triplet, so let’s mark things up with some arrows and move that around. That makes singing this as I’m working it out more fun.
Oh, yes. I am singing my way through this as I write each of the verses, because the rhythm of the guitar is keeping my meter honest. The first verse creates the shape, now all of the subsequent verses need to follow (unless we break it deliberately for good reason, but that won’t be happening here).
You know, he went out hunting. He should have his faithful dog with him...
Oh. Dog gone. Nothing good has happened to the dog.
It’s about this point that I start to wonder if this is a country song, because losing the dog is a staple there. But I digress...
At this point, I mess up the rhythm at the end of the second verse. (This will be my favorite set of meter errors in the song, as I’ll do it again at the end of the third verse.) I will fix this later, as it turns out to be a matter of changing “can’t” to “cannot”, but it is late and time to go to bed, so the song is going to have to wait a bit longer to be finished.
Next day, and the end of the song is in sight. This is the spot where a bridge should go if this song is going to have a bridge. And I have a nice piece of alternate chord progression (remember that bit with the B7 chord from earlier?), but I realize that this song does not want a bridge. What it wants is an instrumental break right here with Amy McNally playing on the fiddle and providing an absolutely lovely bit of accompaniment.
So this song will not have a bridge.
Let’s proceed to the third – and I presume as I’m starting it – final verse.
We’ve started the previous two verses with “It’s very dark” and there’s no reason to change our minds about it now, so let’s roll into the third verse. It’s bargaining time for the protagonist, but there is no deity who is going to get him out of this. I am now going to get myself into trouble by ending a line with “forgotten”, but RhymeZone will bail me out with “cotton”.
I also start out the fourth line here with “There’s no form”, but realize that I want “form” for later, so let’s swap that out for “shape” and keep going.
There are ideas that you get for things that you want to slide into the song at some early point. When you are in the last verse, they are either going to arrive or not. In this case, it was that earlier thought about “dark is the absence of light”. I can make that fit right here.
I am so intent upon making it fit here that I somehow convert what should be three lines into two, which completely breaks the pattern for the verse, and not in a way that I’d intended to. The second (should be third) line here is ok, so I pull out the broken first line and replace it with a pair of lines to restore the triplet. About now, I am thinking about as fondly of the “wise men” as my protagonist is. You guys think you’re smart? You should come and deal with this and let me escape.
At this point, it is time to go to bed, but I am so close to done. I now proceed to farble the rhythm on the last triplet (again!) and scrawl a final line that rhymes, but which I am not quite happy with. But it is a complete song. There are only three more words left to write and I know what they are.
“It’s very dark.”
The next day, I look at the mess at the end of the last verse, fix the meter again, and replace the original last line with one that I like a whole lot better. Editing is easier than writing.
And I play through, make sure that everything is now the way I want it, and the song is done.
So what’s the summary here?
Well, we started out with me saying “Tunes are free” and I still believe that. There are a million tunes out there and I used a chord progression to write a tune for a song that didn’t even exist as a concept yet. And the tune created a mood, and the mood eventually got me to attach some words to the tune.
Those words got me to flesh out a bit of story. And the words then drove the tune and the tune drove the words, which – for me, at least – is the way that the process works best.
Your process may vary.
This is an essay on songwriting with a guitar, which uses my new song, “It’s Very Dark”, as the example, because – in this case – I actually wrote the song to demonstrate this particular songwriting process.
This particular story starts at the last Chambanacon, where Jen was giving a panel on her songwriting process (which made me happy, because I was one of the folks who had suggested it). At some point during the panel, I opened my mouth and said “Tunes are free.” And Lauren turned around and looked at me like I had said something completely unbelievable. Some subsequent conversations revealed that Lauren comes out of a poetry background, while I don’t, and that seems to explain the difference in approach.
I have a guitar here and the guitar has a million tunes in it. I just need to discover them.
About a week ago I set out to put my music where my mouth had been and I picked up the guitar with the intent of writing a song. I had no idea what the song was going to be about, but I felt it would be good if it didn’t sound a lot like anything else that I’d written lately. My fingers went to Amaj7 on the guitar and I looked at them and said, “Nice try.” There’s been a lot of major-7ths lately. Let’s try something else.
Time for a brief digression into the minimal amount of music theory that I know. Guitar is an instrument that (without a capo) likes to play in certain keys and will make your life horribly miserable in others. Keys that have flats in the key signature are your enemy, while keys with sharps generally work out pretty well. So good guitar keys are C (0 sharps), G (1 sharp), D (2 sharps), A (3 sharps), and E (4 sharps). That’s five choices of starting chords, which isn’t bad at all.
But I wanted to write something that sounded different and a minor key was looking good. The array of useful minor keys on the guitar is much shorter, being mainly Am (the relative minor for C) and Em (the relative minor for G). The relative minor keys for D, A, and E all involve a lot of potential for bar chords, all of which are harder to play than open forms. And I have never been fond of bar chords. So open chords it is, and if you want to play in F#m, pick up a capo and play in Em capo 2. (Or Bm = Am capo 2.)
A minor is a great key and Am is what I have occasionally referred to as the “chord of death”. This is unfair to Am. I recently used Am in a love song, “Counting Up”. Death is optional, not a factory-standard feature with Am.
The three-chord wonder chord progression in Am is Am - Dm - E7. It’s ok, but it’s not exciting. I would like to do something different.
I have used Am - G - F - E7 a lot. In fact, I used it (more or less) in “Counting Up”. Let’s not be using that again right now.
How about Am to Em? This is not exciting me. Maybe Am to Em7, which is the quick and easy substitute for G in the chord progression above. That’s better.
It’s still not what I’m looking for. Let’s move a finger and get E7sus4. Hmm. That’s got prospects. In fact, let’s play the two finger version of E7sus4, which is not quite Em, with one finger on the fifth string B note and one on the third string A note.
That’s a grim little two chord riff. Am / E7sus4. What’s next? How about that G from the earlier progression? Yes, that works, but it’s nicer if I play the four-fingered G with the added D, so we’ll use that. And I can go from G to F, but that’s getting too close to my Am / G / F / E7 progression that I’m trying to avoid, so I need something like an F chord without being F. Dm7 is way too happy for this. And Dm is the relative minor for F, but it’s not right either. How about Dm6? That works!
Let’s pause for a brief musical vocabulary lesson. It is handy if you know how to play a lot of chords and what to call them. It’s not strictly necessary, but it’s like knowing more words when you’re writing lyrics. It just gives you more tools to work with.
So you pick up vocabulary by playing other songs that you like the sound of. I picked up a lot of musical vocabulary from America, which explains all of those major 7th chords that I use.
But you can also just move a finger in a chord that you know. If you like the sound, it is a chord. If you don’t like the sound, it may still be a chord, but it is not the chord you are looking for today. If you don’t know what it’s called, there are reverse chord finders on the Internet where you can click to place your fingers on a fretboard and it will give you a bunch of possible names for your chord. One of them may be the right name for the key that you’re playing in.
Anyway, Dm6. Cute little chord, only need two fingers to play it. Fits right into this chord progression which has still not resolved. Back to Am then. Resolved? Only sort of, because I can hear that we’re not at the right length yet. Let’s go to E7sus4, back to Am, and now this particular chord progression is resolved.
Am - E7sus4 - G/D - Dm6 - Am - E7sus4 - Am
I have a riff and this riff contains a melody – possibly more than one melody, but it’s going to provide me with a melody that goes along with these chords.
This is the point where I make my Pete Townshend joke. Ever listen to the beginning of the Who song, “Getting In Tune”? It starts out “I'm singing this note 'cause it fits in well with the chords I'm playing.”
I heard that and starting laughing. Because that is the trick.
You’ve got a chord progression that sounds good. You may not yet know what the rhythm is, you may not know whether you’ll be strumming this or finger picking it, or what the tempo is, but you can try all of those things and see what starts to sound right with the notes that fit in well with the chords you’re playing.
Because tunes are free.
What I have now is the beginning of a melody. I do not yet know what the song is about, but the chord progression is dark, so it is likely that something bad is happening.
I am going to play this for a while. I am going to play it over several days and keep throwing words at it and see if any of them would like to stick. I would also like some more melody, because this chord progression is clearly not the whole song, so I need some more chords to give me some more melody.
There are now a lot of tricks that you can pull out of the songwriting cabinet and see how they sound. For example, there’s restarting your chord progression halfway through and playing it again to construct a different phrase. For this chord progression, that would be:
G/D - Dm6 - Am - E7sus4
You can also pick up halfway and reverse course, possibly changing up a chord, so:
G/D - Em7 - Am
At one point, I found:
G/D - B7 - E7
I liked that change a lot. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the change I was looking for, so I put it back up on the shelf in case it came in handy later. After all, there are choruses and bridges lurking out there somewhere.
I finally decided that the additional piece of melody I needed belonged to this chord progression:
G/D - Am - G/D - E7
It feels like I’ve got the parts together. I just need to know what this song is about. It’s clearly dark. I wrote a song called “Dark” once. Of course, I wrote it a long time ago. Maybe I can write a different song about dark now.
It is time to let the song do what it wants to do. And it wants to be dark.
Let’s try the obvious then. It’s very dark.
The song is still in flux now, but it is going to try to gain form as it acquires words. And I am going to stop fighting it and let it be the little horror story that it wants to be.
I sing at the original chord progression until I have the first three lines of the song. The rhyme scheme here is going to be aggressive with two short lines ending with the A word, and a longer line that ends with the B word.
I find lyrics to be hard. I have been waiting for lyrics for this song for about a week now, but now that some lyrics have arrived, they give the song form, so if the first three lines have that shape and rhyme scheme, then let’s repeat it and write three more lines. The RhymeZone site is my friend, because I want some rhymes for blinded so I can get the B word rhyme at the end of the second triple. RhymeZone coughs up “minded” (among others) and that will do the job.
So far, so good. The problem is that I still don’t really know who my protagonist is, although it is clear to me that he is not in a happy situation.
Time to mull this over. And it takes some time.
Ok, so he’s alone in the dark. Why is he there? Well, he went out hunting at night. Alone. That shouldn’t be a problem, right? There are a lot of things that you can hunt for on a moonlit night.
And it’s dark. But this dark is not right. Dark is the absence of light. This dark is not the absence of something, but rather a presence. Something bad is out there. He doesn’t know what, but it’s a predator. If he had a flashlight with him, the light would penetrate the dark, but this dark cannot be penetrated by light. There is nothing that he can perceive past his own fingertips.
At this point, I am not sure how much of this is going to make it into the song. But I am understanding exactly how bad this is. And now it’s time to pull in that alternate melody line and use it for exposition, because the hunter is now hunted.
That’s not where the verse needs to end though. So let’s pick up the original chord progression and melody line and use it for the final triplet, except the beat is going to move from the end of each phrase to the beginning. That little trick will mess me up a couple of times before the song is done, but it’s better that way, so I will just keep patching things until I get it right.
I have a verse! This is an important milestone in writing a song, because once you have one verse, you have set the pattern for the other verses and your life becomes simpler, because you are now constrained by the pattern that you’ve created.
Oh. I have a verse that is twelve lines long. That’s a lot of verse. And I would like to have a chorus. I am convinced that I would like to have a chorus.
It had better not be twelve lines long.
But the chorus is simple. I grab the alternate chord progression from the third triplet, massage it a bit for different rhythm and melody, and get a two line chorus. That’s a good length.
Will there be a bridge? Maybe. We will cross that bridge when we come to it.
I was writing this song whenever I could steal time from work and sleep. I forget whether it was “get back to work” or “come to bed”, but I needed to put the song down after the first verse. That’s ok. Things were fixed in form now, so the rest of this should be easier.
When I return to the song, it is time to check it over before proceeding to write the second verse. The verse is in first person. The chorus is in second person.
My protagonist has been afflicted with a Greek chorus.
His life is miserable enough. He is going to die before this is over, and he has a stinking Greek chorus in his head to remind him just how stupid he is for having gotten into this situation.
You’ve got one of those too, don’t you? I do.
Second verse now. Should I repeat the first three words of the previous verse? Sure, let’s do that, then change up the end of the line. First triplet done, except I start working on the second triplet and realize that the last line of the first triplet needs to belong to the second triplet, so let’s mark things up with some arrows and move that around. That makes singing this as I’m working it out more fun.
Oh, yes. I am singing my way through this as I write each of the verses, because the rhythm of the guitar is keeping my meter honest. The first verse creates the shape, now all of the subsequent verses need to follow (unless we break it deliberately for good reason, but that won’t be happening here).
You know, he went out hunting. He should have his faithful dog with him...
Oh. Dog gone. Nothing good has happened to the dog.
It’s about this point that I start to wonder if this is a country song, because losing the dog is a staple there. But I digress...
At this point, I mess up the rhythm at the end of the second verse. (This will be my favorite set of meter errors in the song, as I’ll do it again at the end of the third verse.) I will fix this later, as it turns out to be a matter of changing “can’t” to “cannot”, but it is late and time to go to bed, so the song is going to have to wait a bit longer to be finished.
Next day, and the end of the song is in sight. This is the spot where a bridge should go if this song is going to have a bridge. And I have a nice piece of alternate chord progression (remember that bit with the B7 chord from earlier?), but I realize that this song does not want a bridge. What it wants is an instrumental break right here with Amy McNally playing on the fiddle and providing an absolutely lovely bit of accompaniment.
So this song will not have a bridge.
Let’s proceed to the third – and I presume as I’m starting it – final verse.
We’ve started the previous two verses with “It’s very dark” and there’s no reason to change our minds about it now, so let’s roll into the third verse. It’s bargaining time for the protagonist, but there is no deity who is going to get him out of this. I am now going to get myself into trouble by ending a line with “forgotten”, but RhymeZone will bail me out with “cotton”.
I also start out the fourth line here with “There’s no form”, but realize that I want “form” for later, so let’s swap that out for “shape” and keep going.
There are ideas that you get for things that you want to slide into the song at some early point. When you are in the last verse, they are either going to arrive or not. In this case, it was that earlier thought about “dark is the absence of light”. I can make that fit right here.
I am so intent upon making it fit here that I somehow convert what should be three lines into two, which completely breaks the pattern for the verse, and not in a way that I’d intended to. The second (should be third) line here is ok, so I pull out the broken first line and replace it with a pair of lines to restore the triplet. About now, I am thinking about as fondly of the “wise men” as my protagonist is. You guys think you’re smart? You should come and deal with this and let me escape.
At this point, it is time to go to bed, but I am so close to done. I now proceed to farble the rhythm on the last triplet (again!) and scrawl a final line that rhymes, but which I am not quite happy with. But it is a complete song. There are only three more words left to write and I know what they are.
“It’s very dark.”
The next day, I look at the mess at the end of the last verse, fix the meter again, and replace the original last line with one that I like a whole lot better. Editing is easier than writing.
And I play through, make sure that everything is now the way I want it, and the song is done.
So what’s the summary here?
Well, we started out with me saying “Tunes are free” and I still believe that. There are a million tunes out there and I used a chord progression to write a tune for a song that didn’t even exist as a concept yet. And the tune created a mood, and the mood eventually got me to attach some words to the tune.
Those words got me to flesh out a bit of story. And the words then drove the tune and the tune drove the words, which – for me, at least – is the way that the process works best.
Your process may vary.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-23 06:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-23 11:13 am (UTC)The first step is deciding whether it should be major, minor, or some other mode. As I shape the tune, I'm thinking about the chords it implies, and usually I try for at least one modulation to keep things interesting. This often results in songs which guitarists don't want to touch. :)