Let it All Flow

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Kapitano's 3 rules for not getting bogged down in songwriting:

1) Don't write about things that matter to you.

If you do, you'll wind up spending days painfully trying to make the words mean exactly what you want, while still scanning and rhyming. Or else you'll sacrifice scan and rhyme for sense - and the result will be a tedious lecture and a lousy song.

2) Don't worry if it doesn't mean quite what you intended, or indeed anything at all.

Look a "Whiter Shade of Pale". Look at the back catalog of Duran Duran. Look at just about everything written by Vince Clarke for any of his bands. These songs mean absolutely bugger all - or to put it another way, they're evocative, intriguing, oblique, suggestive, and productively ambiguous.

3) If you can't find a good rhyme or rhythm, find another word or sentence to rhyme or, er, ryth.

I somehow doubt that "ryth" is a word, but it should be. We need a word meaning "to have a particular rhythmic pattern".

Music is about form. The fact that lyrics have content is an awkward concession to the notion that songs can and should communicate in the same way that sentences do.

It's the kind of notion that's self-evident, until you think about it for five seconds and realise you can't explain why it's self-evident. On the grounds that it isn't.

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I've got two songs written - one with a backing track done - and a lot of notes for others that might go somewhere if I can manage to follow my own rules.

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