Reading practice 7
I used to have to feel pain in order to write songs. Normally, this inspiration took the form of wanting or losing a girl. My heartsickness would reach a state of such unwieldy gloom that words and melodies would coalesce and fall like raindrops to relieve the stress of carrying such a heavy cloud of misery. I think many of us mainly write songs for relief. It's unhealthy to keep swallowing unspoken words. Keep them on the tip of your tongue and they'll fester like bacteria. Stash them all in a song and you suddenly have an emotional storage unit, which un-clutters your inner world.
The first "songs" we ever write are just exaggerated expressions of our stream of consciousness. We create theme songs while jostling with action figures, concoct mocking serenades to annoy our siblings, or narrate our inner lives to a random tune. We have all been yelled at by a frustrated audience of our friends, acquaintances, and family members to cease our incessant noise making. While many learn to keep their songs to themselves as they master the rules of polite etiquette1, songwriters apparently never learn. Instead, we begin to turn our songs into something people will be happy to hear.
Music somehow makes people feel unashamed about being completely expressive. In speech, someone melodramatically complaining about all the injustices of his world would probably be chastised for lacking self-control. However, in song, a proclamation of suffering is received as an almost heroic attempt to overcome adversity. Songs boldly broadcast a description of someone's inner world. Why do people want to tune into someone else's emotional episodes?
There's a balance of two opposing forces that we enjoy in music. One force soothes, the other agitates2. As music plays, the actual frequencies of the individual notes are constantly lining up in different mathematical relations to each other. When they are proportional to each other, we hear chords, harmony, and unison. Songs normally end on this sort of relationship because it conveys closure, completion, resolution. Other combinations create a sense of tension, discomfort, and anticipation. Successful songs win over listeners just as successful stories do. They normally introduce a protagonist and take the listener along to experience some of his/her setbacks and triumphs. Even instrumental pieces often introduce a central melody and then explore its travels through different passages of the song's structure.
Young children often enjoy hearing soothing lullabies as a way to be distracted from anxiety or coaxed into a peaceful slumber. They take great pleasure in singing agitating songs, such as the "nenny nenny boo boo" melody that can be customized into any taunt. Similarly, adults have classical, smooth jazz, and easy listening styles of music when they want to be relaxed or distracted, and they have the more provocative extremes of punk, rap, and metal when they want to use music to express irreverence or rebellion.
We become much more selective in our musical tastes as we age. As children, we passively accept and learn to love our parents' music just like we do their cooking. It's not that a parent necessarily cooks "better" than other parents, but through sheer familiarity a child will greatly prefer her parents' cooking to that of others. Similarly, the cultural backdrop of a child's upbringing calibrates her listening tastes to a given set of rhythms, instruments, harmonic scales, and song structures.
As adolescents, though, we begin to choose our own songs just as we would choose our friends. We identify with artists based on their dress, their politics, their mood, their popularity. We look to find personal meaning in lyrics and to latch onto songs that seem to broadcast our private thoughts5. Despite not being the author of our favorite songs, we wear our songs like trinkets of personal expression, telltale accessories that describe to others important parts of our psychology. When we develop a kinship with a song, we feel waves of euphoria as it plays, the feeling of our inner world radiating out.
As songwriters, we must aspire to this private release in every song we write. However, sometimes we fear that if we express ourselves too specifically, we will deny listeners the opportunity to mold our song into something they can claim as their own. We often replace specific details with general symbols, preserving for ourselves the original meaning of a lyric while infusing it with enough flexibility that someone else can derive a different significance.
The one thing we must be sure of as performers is that a song means something to us4. Through observation of other artists, we learn to mimic expressions of joy and anguish. It becomes easy for us to write and perform songs without any genuine attachment to their emotional content. Nevertheless, just as audiences can distinguish between good and bad acting, so too will audience members feel a difference between a contrived and an authentic performance.9
