How to Write One Song

by Jeff Tweedy

Let’s start with a few basic ingredients and see if we can make something exciting happen. An example to start . . . Come up with ten verbs that are associated with, say, a physician, and write them down on a page. Then write down ten nouns that are within your field of vision. Examine Thump Prescribe Listen Write Scan Touch Wait Charge Heal Cushion Guitar Wall Turntable Sunlight Window Carpet Drum Microphone Lightbulb Now take a pencil and draw lines to connect nouns and verbs that don’t normally work together. I like to use this exercise not so much to generate a set of lyrics but to remind myself of how much fun I can have with words when I’m not concerning myself with meaning or judging my poetic abilities.

While we’re here, I might as well show you how I’d try to make the exercise into something more songlike. I can relax all the rules we just followed for now, and hopefully something that makes more sense will emerge. For this poem/lyric I can use whatever I want from the first-draft poem, but I’m not obligated to use every word from the original list. I’m not going to even hold myself to the nouns being nouns and the verbs being verbs. the drum is waiting by the windowsill where the sunlight writes its will on the rug my guitar is healed by the amp plug charging the wall and that’s not all I’m always in love There. That’s still a bit awkward, but it’s definitely enough to jump-start my brain in a way where language and words have my full attention again. Which is the right mind-set to be in when you’re creating lyrics, or at least fragments of lyrics.

I used the Wilco song “I’m Always in Love.” Go ahead and sing that whole verse to yourself if you’re familiar with that song. Now, I don’t think it’s an improvement, necessarily, but it gives you an idea of how it feels when you combine any of this type of thinking about words with a melodic idea to trace over.

Open up a book anywhere, any page, and keep humming the melody to yourself as you scan. Don’t really try to comprehend what you’re reading; just let your mind skim over the surface of the words on the page and focus your attention on the melody. If you can get in the right frame of mind, words will jump out and attach themselves to the melody. Highlight (literally, with a highlighter, if you can) those words, and keep moving until you’ve collected a cache of words that potentially sound right in the context of your melody. Again, this might take some trial and error before it becomes helpful.

Sometimes it’s easier once you have an anchor word that snaps it all into place. For example, you’re scanning the page, and all of a sudden the word “catastrophe” matches itself to the cadence and movement of the notes you’re humming—that’s a beautiful word, by the way, one that has a lot of melodic movement in it. It has an internal rhyme—ca-ta-stro-phe. That’s like a musical moment in itself. It’s easy to find some single-syllable words to connect it together: “Wouldn’t you call it a catastrophe?”

catastrophe

want to see

Humming and scanning along until you’ve stockpiled more lyrical prompts or ideas than you’ll ever need for your typical three- or four-verse song. I think it’s important to stress that you should actually overdo it in terms of coming up with lyrics and words you like whenever you have the energy and time.

Writing more than you need is almost never going to make a song worse. Sometimes every good line doesn’t make it into the song you’re working on. But that doesn’t mean you have to throw those lines away.

I’ve been doing this for so long that most of my books have highlights all through them. People come over and pick up some book laying around and think, “He must have found this very interesting. I wonder what prompted him to study the Gnostic Gospels.” Nope. Just liked the words.

There are no accidents. Or at least there are no accidents that can’t be embraced and claimed as what you meant to say all along. I honestly believe that making the decision to open yourself up to what might be within your work that isn’t completely intentional is a brave act of acceptance and every bit as revealing and artful as any art that claims to be a fully realized vision.

Of course, it’s strange how adding words to paint a clearer, more specific image often muddies the image you’re trying to expose. The problem is when they are used to spice up a vague verb or noun instead of replacing that with precise language. There are so many great words. Find them! “I was extremely frightened by the very large man behind the counter” versus “I was petrified by the colossus working the register.” OK? You get it. Just making sure.

So, back to adjectives and nouns (or adverbs and verbs if you prefer). Here’s a list of ten adjectives related to outer space set against ten nouns that just popped into my head. Circular Distant Ancient Haloed Cold Vast Bright Frozen Silent Infinite Ladder Kiss Daughter Hand Pool Summer Lawn Friend Blaze Window there is a distant hand on a frozen ladder climbing through a bright window a vast pool waiting beside a silent lawn where a daughter haloed lives a circular summer one cold kiss from an infinite friend away from an ancient blaze Again, it’s not a perfect poem, but it took me only about fifteen minutes to complete, and I really do enjoy some of the imagery that emerged.

Whenever I do one of these exercises, I’m reminded how much beauty we have at our fingertips and how creating doesn’t always mean that you have to cast yourself as the creator. In these cases I feel more like I’m participating in an activity that reveals my creative nature, that uncovers the hidden desire for there to be more meaning—the powerful longing I have for things to exist that I wasn’t aware of. Or even the beauty that I witnessed being born.

To me both poem fragments are pretty singable, but loosening the rules added a layer of meaning.