Writing songs can feel very strange sometimes. I know some people who sit down with pen, paper and guitar or piano, and just get to work. That’s not me. I start and finish songs that way, but I don’t actually write them there. I do the writing when I’m on the move.
This has upsides: I can work wherever I go, I’m always being creative and there’s inspiration all around. But it has a big downside: I often end up singing into my phone in public so I don’t forget my ideas. And the thing is, I can’t help myself. I need to get the ideas down.
One of my newest songs, When the truth comes, built up this way. For ages I had the basic melody in mind and the first line of a chorus “When the world turns…” But that just sounded like a sucky “watching the world go by, feeling insignificant and looking at how AMAZING the world is” song. Like Stereophonics’ Traffic but really shit.
As I sat on trains, wandered around the office walked home each night and lay in bed, the rest of the song came to me. Cue frantic scribbling on pads, on the notepad tool on my Android phone, singing into RecForge, and trying to process my ideas.
WTTC is a fairly short song with only two full verses, the chorus and a short vocal part in the middle eight. So there’s not a lot of time to tell a story. The chorus, for me, is like the climax of the story. In a murder ballad the chorus often describes the deed while the choruses explain why the deed was done. In this song, it’s what one person says to another, based on the thoughts they’re having in the verses.
The chorus starts:
“Before the hurt comes, take back all you promised
And when the truth comes, just tell me you don’t want this…”
There’s not a lot else to say here, actually unless the relationship is a little more complex than we first think. When I’ve been in relationships coming to an end, there’s usually a tension of not wanting it to end, wanting the truth, and knowing that really you want it to be over too.
So, I went from just adding detail to the first two lines (I’m so sad, I’m SO SAD!) to changing the meaning of them:
“Cause we’ll go in circles trying to figure out who’s changed
So why don’t you say what we both want anyway?”
Now who really wants to relationship to end – the narrator or the person they’re addressing?
So, I had a full chorus then and it set me off in two ways. I could make this conflict the subject from the start or, and more in keeping with my tastes, I introduced it as a sting in the tail.
The first verse is a sepia-tinged reflection on the good old days of a relationship. But the reference to “decaying like burning coal” at the end is a harbinger of something that’s not quite right. The chorus makes this more explicit, telling us that the relationship is ending except for someone saying “stop”.
Verse two brings out the ambiguity though:
“Don’t be deceived by the signs I’m giving
Cause I’m too busy hiding from the lie I’m living”
So on one hand the narrator wants it to be over, but they’re acting as if they don’t. The next two lines however show how the relationship has fallen apart. Where once they were comfortable just being together, now they can’t stand the sight of each other:
“Remember how we used to feed on the silence that hung
Now it’s just more time to sheathe the blades in our tongues.”
All these things weren’t there when I had the idea. But because I allowed time for the song to breathe in my mind, the ideas enriched the song incredibly.
