I went to see a performance of the Nutcracker on Dec 24th, and this has got me thinking about the style that I write in. MADLO was the first album where I was really consciously trying to fit lyrics into the phrases of the song, so something like da DAH, dah DAH, dah dadada dah dah dah, just slowly whittling it into words: “I crawl, I crawl, an animal to ya…” When I was younger, this would have either been a total gibberish phrase, or I would have abandoned the melody for a lyric written just as text. With MADLO I wanted a certain incantatory quality to it, where I didn’t have to give up a certain melody for something that scanned logically, but the words still pointing towards a meaning, not just being placeholder or roundabout expressions. So this was a major challenge of the record, filling in these lines word by word, waiting for the right word that sharpened the meaning without derailing the melodic line of thought.
But now as I get more into writing for a new album, I’m realizing that to the extent that I have any sort of natural style, a large part of that is having lyrical phrases that don’t fit into the melodic momentum, that jut out oddly into the room. This is why when I was finishing the MADLO songs, I felt they were in some sense folk songs, because a folk song needs to adhere to that tight rhythm and meter, so it can be retained and passed along from one singer to another easily. It’s much easier to remember a repeating melody than it is to remember a string of words - not only easier to remember but to participate in, to have the song be a group activity. The farther it deviates from these standard, simple rhythms, the more it turns into a sort of solo display, away from folk dances and towards a practiced, virtuoso display of emotion, like the dancers in a ballet or singers in an opera. Instead of equal participation we get observation, reflection, meditation; instead of the thrill of the dance we get a richer and more nuanced taste of a particular emotion.
I’m excited now to use what I learned in writing MADLO - having clear melodic lines as anchor points, perceiving those lines clearly and developing the song from them - and start to stray from that towards my natural tendency to complicate and obscure simple shapes into something more gnarled. What I am always most opposed to is straying into territory that feels random, arbitrary, lacking any connective tissue that makes it feel like art. What is laid out in the track should always feel like the tip of the iceberg, not a scattering of flakes melting in a glass. The structure of a song should feel ordained by ghosts, not produced by the composer’s whims but bowing to unseen, ancient guideposts. If we could not see the trees but we could see the wind, then the wind would tell the story of the trees. That’s what a song should be, a wind that lets you see those invisible branches of life; so a writer has to sense what those trees are like, and they have to understand how wind works. The former is done by living, meditating, experiencing, developing your connection with the unseen; the latter is done by study, by pulling apart songs like a mechanic pulls apart cars. The last few years I feel I have really learned a lot, learning how to put a song together so it does what I want it to do rather than fighting against it, like a pilot fighting against a poorly-constructed airplane. Now I perhaps know at least the basics of flying, and I can have some clarity when I’m circling around these big subjects, hoping to return with a little piece of it in song form.
