Thanks for those songwriters who participated in the last Forge. Here are a couple rather practical tips for writing a sad song.
#26 Arpeggios are sad. Joshua Weresch's song "the South Wins the War" was a very effective song . It had a beautiful arpeggetiated piano part. There's especially moving in hearing chords broken into individual notes -- a delicate vulnerability. I would definately recommend finger-picking for guitar players, if you are attempting to border sad subject matter.
#27 Melodrama, hyperbole and humour are not sad. I was told my own song "Someday" was too funny to be sad. Sad songs seem to require an appearance of sincerity and the sensitivity of understatement. Melodrama can be effective in eliciting tears at the movie theatres, but songs are very short form of writing, and so it is very difficult to engage the listener in such a dramatic build in such short amount of time.
I would still recommend writing overblown melodramatic songs -- like those Tom Waits, Rufus Wainwright or The Dears -- as I love to listen to them; but perhaps I should not consider these songs "sad".
Here are lyrics to my song, in case anyone would like to see by example or comment.
Someday (by Thomas Wilson)
On a Monday I first met you, in Love's innocence I stumbled
Over many hilly meadows, I rambled and I tumbled
I was chasing after your East-bound train
I almost caught up you, it was as close as I ever came
On a Tuesday we made a date, but my car broke down
And I got caught in the snow and the rai, fifteen miles out of town
I would've called up if cellphones had existed,
But the payphones were frozen and your number wasn't listed
But Someday
I'll declare my love (2x)
Someday
I'll declare my love
to --
On a Wednesday I was stuck like lightning in the eyes
God help me write a poem for you, God help me or I die
You laughed a might laugh, my dick shrunk in my pants
To quit while I was ahead, I took you to the dance
On a Thursday I bought you flowers, the kind you didn't like
And then I made you dinner, you didn't eat a bite
When you threw my toothbrush in the toilet out of spite
I was thinking just then, that it wouldn't be the night
Chorus
On a Friday I said I loved you a thousand times or more
But all my words just fell like dry gravel to the floor
You said you loved me too as a ricochet does bounce
A cease-fire was declared, for whatever that amounts
On a Saturday it felt like the last day of my life
I recognize you as someone who looked almost like my wife
You held my hand, cut my food with a plastic knife
I was trying to tell you something, but words didn't come out right
Chorus
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2 comments:
How did the night go? I'm sorry I missed it, I don't even know what I was doing that night, I must have clean forgot.
Congrat's Tom on the HMA nomination!
Randell,
The night, at least during the time for which I was able to stay, went fairly well, I think. Joyce's songs were quite lovely and I'm sorry that I missed both Thomas's and Lea's songs.
I, too, echo congratulations to Thomas and the Wilson Family Forgery on their Hamilton Music Awards' nomination. Whether they win or not really doesn't matter; it's the song that has plumbed to some level of beauty, truth, and -- ultimately -- love that matters. Poet and Trappist monastic Thomas Merton said it better than I ever could: "The greatest journey of our life is the inward journey." That's precisely the place from where good songs come and that's where Thomas's songs are born.
Thomas,
I don't really enjoy Edgar Allan Poe's writing anymore, but his insight into what makes a good story rings true for the song, precisely because of a song's brevity (Thomas's epic adventures notwithstanding). You have to strive for a single effect, Poe writes (whatever that means). Melodrama certainly has its place, but I suppose I find it too pushy for my liking.
Thomas, your song's certainly funny. It was a busy week for the protagonist, from the looks of it! There is an element of sadness to it: he didn't really get the girl; however, it's overwhelmed by the humourous words. It is too funny to be sad: they're right. On the other hand, I suppose "South Wins War" is too sad to be funny. Would you rather have comedy or tragedy?
I was quite taken by the title of this post and, because of my love of words, thought I'd consult the venerable Oxford English Dictionary to compare the words "pithy" and "pitiful." "Pithy" is an adjective formed from the noun "pith" and a suffix. The word "pith" is "[Cognate with (with diminutive suffix) Middle Low German peddik, peddek, (rare) piddek medulla, bone marrow, spinal cord, inner part of a horn or quill, also (fig.) essence, core, of unknown origin." The word "pitiful," however, is an adjective and adverb formed from the word "pity" and a suffix. "Pity" is formed from "[< Anglo-Norman pité, pittee, peté, peti, Anglo-Norman and Old French pitet, pitee, pitié (Middle French pité, pitié, French pitié) compassion (c1100), piety (15th cent.; rare) < classical Latin pietas." In short, pity is piety and compassion.
In our modern sense of the word, we regard as pitiful something or someone useless or a failure, such as a pitiful attempt at humour or art or whatever else. What we're saying, though, at least in the word's original meaning, is that the attempt awakens compassion and mercy in us, virtues to be directed from us to the work and worker. I don't think this means we vilify the work in question, but that we realize that we, too, are capable of such things and treat them (and, thus, ourselves) with a great measure of care and kindness.
Do the two tips noted here qualify as pithy or pitiful? I don't know: if they delineate what is good art, then yes, they are; if they awaken a sense of compassion and mercy for the subject of the song (and, in turn, for others), they are. Arpeggi (I had to look that one up in the Oxford Dictionary of Music 'cause I don't know a lick of Italian) can be sad, but I think it's worth more because it draws on Thomas's perfect phrase -- "a delicate vulnerability" -- to draw the words and music closer together to a single theme. I wonder if it is the broken notes of the arpeggio that evoke a sense of brokenness in the hearer; perhaps there is a longing for a whole chord, a sense of rest, instead of the instability of separate notes. (I'm shooting from the hip here, quite obviously.) Perhaps it is this longing that makes the arpeggio sad. Because that feeling of sadness has been evoked by the use of the arpeggio, it may awaken a sense of sadness and, perhaps, compassion for the subject of the song. So, in short, Tip # 26 accomplishes both ends, as far as I'm concerned.
Tip # 27 is a more difficult one to tackle. Can humour be sad? Thomas's opinion is that such a thing cannot be and I'm in agreement with him. Humour can overstate the case too much, I think, and my personal bias here is that it can distract from the real issue at the heart of the matter, the sadness and loss that we experience in small and great ways. Humourous songs can be written, of course, and many wonderfully funny songs have been written (by John Prine, for example, or even, to a lesser extent, some by Gordon Lightfoot), but we cannot turn to them, as far as I'm concerned, for any deep look at the heart of one who hurts. Frankly, it is inappropriate to expect only happy songs of our lives today: it simply does not reflect true, human experience. We should be with others in their pain as well as their joy (some are better at one than the other, but we must strive for a whole human expression and range of emotions). Songs, then, must express the whole range of joy and sorrow. At the core of a sad song, some hope must abide, even if it is the hope that someone's sadness has been acknowledged, even ironically; I'm thinking of Pedro the Lion's song, "Priests and Paramedics," a sad song by any account but joyful in the sense that someone's feeling of being utterly crushed by hopelessness has been acknowledged. It's enough, I think, to know that someone's heard you in your broken voice of pain and cared enough to bring that pain to others; it creates, as fellow songwriter Jon Brooks wrote to me once, "commonality between strangers." Humour can do that as well, of course, but it's hard to awaken compassion and mercy for someone's happiness. How do you suffer with someone who is in the throes of joy and ecstasy? I don't think one can.
So, before my fingers fall off, I'll close here. If you've made it this far, I'm sorry for taking up your time. Enjoy the autumn season.
Regards,
Joshua
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