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This Is Some Frustrating Shit

July 7, 2008 12:47 AM

very rarely sit down with the intention of writing a song. Instead, I'll pick up the guitar and noodle around until I come up with something that I like. If I'm in a sad mood, I'll mess around with minor chords and minor pentatonic scales. If I'm in an angry mood, I'll mess around with distorted power chords and try to come up with some interesting riffs or fills or whatever. Then I'll generally see where that little snippet wants to progress. Then, depending on my mood and the mood I think the music seems to evoke, I'll generally hum along a melody or come up with some very stupid, rudimentary words, just as a placeholder. Then the whole thing generally starts to come together from there.

The music is always the easiest part for me. At any given time, I've got about a billion different parts and chord progressions and whatever else sitting around waiting to get put into something. Most of these don't go anywhere not because I don't think they're good but because I have a really hard time coming up with lyrics to go with them that I wouldn't be embarrassed to sing in public--not that I do much singing in public, but you know what I mean.

Still, sometimes lyrics just sort of come to me. I like writing songs that have a bunch of words that basically express one idea or theme. I don't like writing songs that are narrative sorts of things. So a lot of the times whether I can write a decent song depends on whether I have an analogy or insight that I think is worth exploring.

So what's really frustrating is that I've been working with this riff for a few weeks now. I really like it, and I think it's got a lot of potential. But I can't come up with shit for words to go with it. And it's not even that I don't have anything to say, it's that I've got a garbled mess in my mind and I want to somehow convey all of it at the same time, but I haven't been able to come up with any sort of analogy for it all, and I can't pin down any one aspect of what I'm feeling to write about.

So I just play the music over and over again but I can't move past the dummy words I came up with to help work out a melody.

And that's some frustrating shit.


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