Recording - April 2014 - 30

Along the way, certain words or images may concurrently begin emerging from seemingly nowhere,
giving further shape and focus to your otherwise rudimentary utterances. Vowels are significant: As you
sing along, you can try moving from "Ooooh" to
"Aaaay" or "Eeee", for example. Listening to the
sonorous quality of these and other vowel shapes can
further suggest lyrical snippets or additional melodic
ideas... the point is to keep walking down that musical trail and see what else is there to be discovered.

Stopping time
If you're lucky, you may arrive at a
big "Eureka!" moment, or you may just
run out of steam... In either case, this is
the place to whip out that smart phone
and record what you do have so far.
Got lyrics? Write those down too! Just
a chord and a rhythm? Fine. Hit
Record. A bunch of stuff in your DAW?
Hit Save and render a rough mix. Like
a page with a folded corner, your
process can be frozen in place until
your next opportunity to return to it.
Neil Young, only one among many
artists who feel that way, has long
embraced the notion that most of his
songs be not only born from but completed in this initial flurry of activity. It
obviously doesn't always happen that
way, but his stated intent is that within
that early burst of inspiration lies something very special that's also quite fragile.
You can find a great interview online,
wherein Young discusses this concept in
MasterWriter not only provides a regular Thesaurus, but also has several
the writing of his song "Like A Hurricane".
useful song-oriented dictionaries like Parts Of Speech.
Singer-songwriter Peter Himmelman
It's easy to organize and build up lyric ideas.
once said that as soon as a song idea
Get it in writing
began to take shape, his goal was to then finish the
song before his wife came home, so he could show it
Now comes the crafting of the song, a stricter yet still passionate
to her. In the book Written In My Soul (a collection of
process. At this point I fire up my word processor-I use Microsoft Word.
interviews with many great songwriters, which I very
Aside from the spell checker, I use its Thesaurus. The internet is full of thehighly recommend: www.amazon.com/Written-Mysaurus websites and dictionaries of synonyms-pick one and type in
Soul-Conversations-Songwriters/dp/0809246503)
'ubiquitous'. Word will throw the following alternatives back at you:
Himmelman's father-in-law Bob Dylan says, "All you
"ever-present", "everywhere" and "omnipresent". It may seem a paltry
know is that it's a mood piece, and you try to hold onto
selection, but I'll bet it's a lot easier to rhyme with "everywhere"....
the mood and finish. Or not even finish, but just get it
These sorts of synonymic options are the writer's key accomplice. They
to a place where you can let it go."
can help us to think "outside the box", by offering unexpected twists in our
Modern technology affords us the unprecedented abiliflow. One fantastic program that helps this process along in a very "musity to pick up right where we left off, to effectively bookmark
cian-oriented" way is MasterWriter (masterwriter.com), which offers a
these works in progress, to subsequently develop them into
huge selection of writing and reference tools with songs in mind. Check it
something even better, stronger and more lasting.
out if you find working in Word to be a creativity-killer...
30

RECORDING April 2014

http://www.amazon.com/Written-My-Soul-Conversations-Songwriters/dp/0809246503 http://www.amazon.com/Written-My-Soul-Conversations-Songwriters/dp/0809246503 http://www.masterwriter.com

Recording - April 2014

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