In the first part of our series we discussed the concepts of stillness, darkness, and cultivation. We talked about the importance of creating a unique space from which your musical ideas can be born, and to give them room to grow without the interference of the world and our own tendencies to begin ‘working’ before the idea has had time to bloom.
In this second part of our series, we’ll look at the process of birthing the idea into a coherent form, and beginning to tend the idea, to cultivate it, and begin to shape it.
My Daughter
Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.
William MacNeile Dixon
The idea started out as a lullaby. A single lyric, “I will love you tonight.” came to me with a melody some months ago as I was putting my daughter down to sleep. It was a particularly hard week at work, and my daughter wasn’t sleeping well. The horn of Africa was deep in the throes of a terrible famine, and I had been reading news stories about the work being done there. As I sat rocking my daughter to sleep, I felt so fortunate to have the life that I have and to be able to provide what I can to my family. I began to think to myself that I wished there was a way I could help those people beyond the small charitable donations I was making…It occurred to me that there, in that dark room, the best thing I could do was simply to love my daughter with all my heart.
So I began singing this lyric, thinking to myself that I would love my daughter as an offering to all the people in the world who were suffering, for all the people who were hungry or thirsty, or who might never know the kind of comfort that we were living. And so began the song…a few days later, I scribbled down the lyrics and some melodic notes, and left it at that until I had more time to come back to it.
So now you have an idea, you’ve captured its essence, and you’ve decided that you are going to begin sketching around it. Move now to your workspace, studio, or wherever you do your ‘productive’ creative work. This is where you’ll begin to take the seeds of your idea and work with it, nurture it, and begin to slowly shape it into the Song that is yet to come.
The important points to focus on in this step are:
- Don’t fiddle too much with sounds – capture the essence of the idea in chords, melody, rhythms – only tweak with timbre and sound selection if it is key to getting the core of your idea across
- Don’t edit during this stage – capture any and every sketch idea you have. Disk space is cheap and paper is cheap. Consider every sketch has some ‘gold in it’ and it is important to catch as much as you can.
- Follow the shape of the idea until you reach a logical end, then continue to sketch.
- Keep your work in this space confined to a relatively small set of tools and sounds. Within these limits your creativity can flourish without distraction.
I’ve come back to my writing space a few times, revised lyrics, revised chords and revised the melody. I’m now at a place where I feel like I have a good start on the tune, so I’m going to share a snippet of the lyrics and the tune with you.
When I sat down to capture this idea, I didn’t have my microphone in the studio with me, so I unfortunately had to use the built-in microphone on my laptop to handle recording duties. This introduced a lot of background noise into the recording, but for ‘capturing’ purposes, it worked just fine.
Remember – the important thing in this stage is that you’re still working with ideas, concepts, and that nothing is sacred and nothing is final. So here are the lyrics:
(VERSE 1)
i will love you tonight
for all the ways I can’t even love myself
I will love you tonight
for all the fears that keep me locked inside my shell
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And a quick mix of sampled piano and my vocal melody for the verse.
This is more or less the final stage of song-birth for me. You have an idea, you have ideas of how you want to communicate this idea – including perhaps a melody, some lyrics, a rhythm, etc. Now it is time to begin to shape and mold these ideas into something more concrete.