Over the years, I have written several songs which have received mild acclaim. I’d have to say that “Rudy,” which is based on Kenny Roger’s “Ruby” but is about a guy who gets a sex change, is my personal favorite, followed closely by the “Ballad of OJ Simpson.”
But I don’t really count these songs as original, since I used the melodies of other songs to create parodies. I can’t complain really , Weird Al Yankovic made an entire career out of doing this.
However, I’ve always wanted to write an all-original song, not only coming up with the lyrics, but the music, too.
I did this back when I was 12. I wrote my first song, and yes, I still have it. By today’s standards, “Animal Abundance” sounds a bit immature, but hey, I was just a kid. Not to punish you too much, but here is the chorus:
Oh, there’s termites in my coffee, turtles in my soup,
I walked up to the sugar bowl and it was filled with poop.
I walked up to the counter and saw a frog afloat,
He was cold and soaking wet and floating in a moat.
Yeah, I know. Not much to write home about. But it did at least have an original melody. I didn’t steal it from another song.
Fast forward to college. My friends Dave and Tim and I penned “Ode to Idi,” which I also still have. It was a 50’s influenced number about Ugandan madman Idi Amin, and had an original melody too. Underneath was the overarching lyric, “Oh, Idi Amin, you’re so keen, that Idi Amin.”
The talk-over went something like this:
Oh, Idi, you were so nice to let those Tanzanian tourists into Uganda, but I have a question. How can 10,000 tourists die in one auto accident? You sure must have big cars, Idi. You sure must have done well.
This is what happens when you have access to a radio station and way too much time on your hands. Tweeter and the Midranges never hit the big time. And there appears to be a reason for that.
I have had a few false starts on original songs since then. I started “You’ve Exceeded the Limit of My Credit Card Heart,” but melodically it was bankrupt. Part of the problem was that I would think one up, but by the time it came to sing it, I had forgotten it.
So, I had to continue to lift other melodies and stick with doing parodies instead of writing anything meaningful myself.
This, of course, is painful for a writer. You want to be original at all the levels, not just the words. Creating a song without original music is like painting the Mona Lisa with paint by numbers. Someone else provided the framework for the song, you just colored it all in.
I love good songwriting. All day long at work I have music playing and I marvel at how these writers could touch on such raw themes and harvest their emotions so genuinely. All my songs to date have had to have punchlines, they had to be funny. I had never gone to those other places before.
One day I was watching Shania Twain’s comeback show on the OWN network. Yes, I have been known to watch OWN. It was actually Gladys Knight’s advice on the show that suddenly made sense to me. She almost off-handedly said, “You know that you don’t write a song for others, but for you.”
It had never occurred to me that songwriters don’t pour their heart out to help heal others, they do it to heal themselves. Good writers visit those dark places of longing, regret, hurt and unfulfilled dreams so that they can move forward in their own life. They only become hits because their own feelings touch something in us. We get what they are saying because we’ve felt it ourselves. Wow!
Yesterday, this epiphany met the technology. I’ve had Garage Band for years, which is basically an 8-track recording studio on my Mac. I have a Snowball microphone attached to the computer and in essence, my studio has twice the capabilities the Beatles had. Finally, I had a place to capture melodies as they came to me. But the real door opener was the version of Garage Band on my iPad, which includes a virtual guitar. You can play along with a melody and source the chording for it within minutes. I can’t tell you the doors that opened up for me once I discovered how to use these tools.
So last, I wrote the first song which had been bubbling around in my head. It’s about a ship that has too much wine in the hold and the only solution the captain can come up with is to drink all the wine. It’s really about me and my love of wine good and bad. It was cute and it virtually wrote itself. I then laid down the melody onto Garage Band so I wouldn’t forget it later.
But the second song came out of nowhere. I had been playing with something that was initially a reply to a friend who had asked me why I ever got married the last time. I said without thinking, “I don’t know what I was drinking at the time.”
As I played with this idea, the song wrote itself within 15 minutes. It was like channeling.
I particularly liked the first verse:
I thought I was happy, then you came along,
A promising lyric to the same old song.
I was taken in by that look in your eyes,
How would I know it was just a disguise.
Suddenly, all these feelings I had deep inside me had found a home. I know see why songs and writing songs is such a powerful thing. It certainly struck a chord with me, so much so that I wrote a song loosely based on me. OK, so it’s based a lot on me. It’s called “Hits You Like a Hurricane.”
The opening verse says it all:
He blows into your life one day, he steals your heart, your soul,
He prom-is-es he loves you so, he’ll never let you go.
Then one day he sails away, off to parts unknown,
He leaves you there, your heart laid bare, standing all alone.
Out on the Treasure Coast, filled with the lyrics of life and the melody of a contented soul,
– Robb