Songwriting

Having poetry week just ended I figured it would be reasonable to reflect on the last thing that we did with Max: creating our own piece of art. Overall all the songs and poems that were performed by the members of the combined class were great. I was surprised to so much talent with the singers. Gwendolyn’s poem about lemons was good, and Jeff’s breakfast song was interesting. But I do not really want to focus on the work that others did, but rather the journey of writing a song in a group. Matthew, Thomas, and myself were a a group and decided to write a song.

Originally we had planned to write a set of lyrics for Max’s melody, but I figured that it would be more interesting to write a song instead. Matthew who is pretty snazzy with a keyboard said that we would be able to create a melody and harmony for which we could create lyrics. Matthew had a genius idea during the creation of the song. He wrote a saxophone part as a substitute for the vocals while he wrote it, so all we would have to do is create the words. When we can together to write the song we were all awe struck on what to do. We had never done anything like it in our lives. We had to create a collection of words that made at least a little bit of sense. And to make it even harder we had to made the words fit into a pattern of sound. We tried everything and could not think of anything to do for the longest time. We basically just stared at the screen of Matthew’s computer for a good twenty minutes or so. Thomas had been talking up a storm about “WHAT ARE THOSE!,” during all this time. Then when we played the melody I just said some random words. It turned out that those words made sense to Thomas and Matthew, and they thought that these words would make sense. I cannot remember what I exactly said, but it had some deep meaning. But these words meant too much. A group of sixteen year old guys are not going to sing about anything that really is meaningful. So instead of singing some heartfelt song we chose to scrap it.

It was at this point when Matthew suggested a few words for the opening lyrics. “Hello there, Buddy” he said. This grew into a guy talking to a girl and complimenting her on pretty she was. But this only covered lyrics for the first third of the song. Then unanimously we had a great idea: what if our song was a conversation between a guy and a girl that he likes. We could come up with anything of substance for the girl to say for a while. Then Max walked in to check on our progress and we told him that we had gotten a little bit written. As he walked away Thomas once again said “WHAT ARE THOSE!” And then we figured out the finally key to writing the song. The theme of the song would be as follows: A guy talking to the girl he likes and the girl trying to roast him on his shoes. After this point it was smooth sailing. The rest of the song was finished with ease.

When we came back to the black box, Max asked us if we were ready to perform. We declined, but said that if Max and Mr. Yee wanted to sing our song together they could. When they agreed to do it, our group was laughing on the inside. Sadly this never happened because the other performances took too long. It would have been fun to see Mr. Yee sing with Max, but you cannot change the past.

Overall the project was enlightening on the process of songwriting. When we were forced to write a song, it was more us just trying to find an idea off of which to ground our song. Also having multiple songwriters agreeing on something was not easy. It appears to me that if the process is forced the resulting product will not be as good as when natural songwriting takes place. But regardless of how good the song was it was a good time writing it. And in the end it taught me to respect the songwriters of the world.