In my songwriting it has been very rare for me to write music without lyrics to go along with it, even way back before I had any inkling that I’d one day end up singing (trust me when I say if you told the 18 year old me I’d be singing in a band 20 years later he’d still be laughing now… and have his fingers in his ears in preparation).
I’ve written lyrics in a couple of ways. Once I copied the syllabic rhythm of a Smashing Pumpkins song and replaced the words with random words of my own (I don’t know why - it was during a Year 11 Chemistry exam and it seemed a better use of my time).
Another time I was convinced that story writing was the go, except in truth I hadn’t lived enough life to be telling stories just yet.
The lyrics for Ozone, a song on One Proud Monkey’s first EP, were written driving to and from work in Wellington, NSW, with the song’s music playing on repeat while I sang gibberish (initially, though you may think similar of the end product)
But somewhere along the line I stumbled across the writing of Pat Pattison, a lyric writer and coach, and I started exploring this idea of sense-bound writing and I was hooked.
Sights, smells, sounds and more infiltrated my lyrics, the songs became metaphor heavy and I started to realise the depth you can explore when writing songs.
In The Morning (another One Proud Monkey song) actually started as a simple writing exercise from one of Pat’s books and turned into (perhaps, maybe) my favourite of my own writing.
On my last solo EP “Bones” I tried really hard to conjure imagery with the lyrics and connect to feelings that everyone has, hopefully I went someway to succeeding but there’s always something else to learn and explore. And create. And that’s why we keep going, looking for that next song.
Thanks for listening,
Clint
Oh! I promised you an example of an exercise last week didn’t I? Here’s a nice simple one to try - give yourself 5 minutes, I want you to think of “The Sky” - write down what you hear, see, smell and feel… I’d love to see what you come up with!