Songwriting Without Boundaries (47 page)
Read Songwriting Without Boundaries Online
Authors: Pat Pattison
Both Bleu and Susan take you right there with some lovely sense-bound writing. Look at the metaphors, “a thousand wind fingers,” “the bloom of the parachute,” and the simile “clouds like towers.”
Your turn.
5 minutes: Rocking Chair on the Front Porch at Sunset
BLEU
Grandma’s fingers stringing beans
Cicada soothing me to sleep
Fireflies blinking, honeysuckle breeze
Simple, southern, harmonies
Two crescents of wood, on older wood
This porch knows the way great-grandma stood
So I rock, slow and slower still
And hum the Lonesome Whippoorwill
Little peepers lace the pond
Sun is setting orange on blonde
Pour a wine and settle in
Toast the cool and silent wind
A rocking chair for company
He drifts inside a memory
I like the beans/sleep assonance rhyme—it doesn’t lock down; rather, it relaxes the structure. Look at the rhyme breeze/harmonies, using the secondary stress
harmo
nies.
Be careful rhyming secondary stress with primary stress: If you place the secondary stress on a stronger musical beat than the primary stress, you’ll distort the natural shape of the word. The same would be true for compa
ny
/memo
ry
. For more on this, check out my “Writing Lyrics to Music” online course at Berklee College of Music, available through http://patpattison.com/patsonlinecourses.
Your turn.
DAY #7
COMMON METER
For more on common meter, look at chapters fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen in
Writing Better Lyrics,
and chapter three in
The Essential Guide to Lyric Form and Structure.
The best way to create sections larger than couplets is to vary line length. Start with this tetrameter line:
DUM da da DUM da DUM da da DUM
Give her a chance to sing by herself
Next, add a shorter, three-stress line (trimeter), keeping the same triple feel:
DUM da da DUM da DUM da da DUM
DUM da da DUM da DUM
Give her a chance to sing by herself
Give her the room to shine
You tap your foot four times in line 1, but only three times in line 2. Your body feels the imbalance—there are some matching rhythms between line 1 and line 2, but the differing lengths of the lines causes instability, throwing the section off balance. Since you are off balance, you must continue to move forward.
Match the third line with the first line, and rhyme with it. You’ll create strong expectations for a fourth line:
DUM da da DUM da DUM da da DUM
DUM da da DUM da DUM
DUM da da DUM da DUM da da DUM
Give her a chance to sing by herself
Give her the room to shine
Watch as she smiles and everyone melts
Now the pressure builds. The structure is still unstable, with its odd number of lines. Because lines 1 and 3 match, you expect something quite specific:
A fourth line to balance with an even number of lines
A line that matches the length and rhythm of line two (the odd-duck line)
Specifically, you want to hear
DUM da da DUM da DUM
giving you this section:
DUM da da DUM da DUM da da DUM
DUM da da DUM da DUM
DUM da da DUM da DUM da da DUM
DUM da da DUM da DUM
Give her a chance to sing by herself
Give her the room to shine
Watch as she smiles and everyone melts
Hearing a voice divine
You feel the resolution. It is called
common meter.
You will find it everywhere, because it, like the tetrameter couplet, fits perfectly into an eight-bar sequence.
Today you’ll use common meter. You have your choice in common meter of rhyming alternate lines, abab …
Give her a chance to sing by herself
Give her the room to shine
Watch as she smiles and everyone melts
Hearing a voice divine
or rhyming lines two and four, xaxa …
Give her a chance to sing all alone
Give her the room to shine
Watch as she smiles and everyone melts
Hearing a voice divine
For the next two days, simply rhyme the trimeter lines. After that, you’ll rhyme alternate lines.
Keep your writing sense-bound, and keep your eyes open for metaphor. As usual, set a timer and respond to the following prompts for exactly the time allotted. Use the whole time, whether you complete your final four-line section or not. Use common meter, rhyming only the trimeter lines (xaxa).
Sight Sound Taste Touch Smell Body Motion
10 minutes: Whistling
Wrinkled and puckered she purses her lips
Angry and close to tears
Everyone else can whistle a tune
But she hasn’t whistled in years
Airy and flimsy and flattered with spit
Forcing the air she tries
Till somebody mentions that field grass
Held with her thumbs is fine
Plucking a blade young and green
Cupping her fingers around
She strokes the air with effortless skill
Releasing a covetous sound
Puckered and folded like a circular fan
Breath pulls in like a thread
The hollow resounds a mini wind song
Air and shape wed
Lips give birth to thin high-pitched notes
The tip of the tongue taps
Dividing the melody coming up from the throat
Mimic the bird’s rap
Both rely primarily on triple meter, and work the four-stress/three-stress of common meter very well. Note that the adjacent strong stresses in Jess’s “shape wed,” “tongue taps,” and “bird’s rap” force either a musical rest or longer notes when set to music.
Your turn.
5 minutes: Falling in Love
Give me a song to remember the night
Let the candle burn low
And soon I will tell you a love that is lost
That’s how these stories go
Give me the scent of magnolia trees
And sweet tea on the lawn
And soon that glass will be smellin’ like bourbon
That’s how fast love is gone
Give me a beauty with hazelnut eyes
And I’ll tell you of promises
Like the moon smells of lilacs and fresh-cut grass
And broken dreams and wishes
