#songwriting

[jnrduttonswritingjournal]

Don Henley's writing isn't just entertaining. Every piece is like a meditation, a deep dive into the psyche and the soul. Maybe that's why he hits me so deeply on a personal level as well.

Even if he'd never been part of the Eagles, I'd still adore him as a songwriter.

[ari2freakyyy]

Pull it out, twist it, chop it

Feel it in Serato before I put in my pocket

This ain't rocket science, but it's fiction

Hyperreal addiction

I got future vision

I got everything in my mind’s eye

And it's quite nice

[stillineroda]

🎥 Why are artists skipping the bridge? (and why i want it back!)

👹LEAVE AMERICA👹

Listening to Niall Horan's new album sent me down a rabbit hole. So let's talk about song bridges and how IMO artists like Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, and Louis Tomlinson remind us that the bridge might still be the best part of a song🙊🎶

[parisstreet]

How To Write A Song Called 'J Street, 2am'

The newest Paris Street EP, Midtown Blue, is out now. As I've occasionally done with Paris Street releases, I'm going to spend this week rambling a bit about each song on the EP. This is the last one! Enjoy!

The song: J Street, 2am

Any alternate song titles? This song was originally called ‘Rebecca’.

Who the hell’s Rebecca? Easy there, tiger.

One morning, I woke up with this song idea in my head. Hoping to not forget the idea, I started mumbling words into my phone in order to remember the vocal melody (i.e. a ‘gibberish track’, as explained 2 days ago). One of those words ended up being ‘Rebecca’.

The night before, I went to the restaurant by my place (same one from ‘A Good Band At Torch Club’) and chatted with a bartender I had never met before. By the end of the night, we had become friends and – as is customary – exchanged names. Her name was Rebecca.

The name was fresh enough on my mind that it popped out while recording the gibberish track (this exact scenario also occurred several years prior when I met a gal named Jessica one night, then came up with a song idea the next morning that turned into ‘Jessica, Please’). I liked how the name sounded when I sang it. I also liked the challenge of finding rhymes for ‘Rebecca’, so I kept the name, even though the song has nothing to do with her.

When was it written? January of 2024. You can read my post from last week to see why it lingered for 2 years.

Where was it recorded? The original scrapped demo was recorded in January of 2024. From the start, it was intended to be a very sparse song, with an arrangement originally intended for an acoustic guitar with some light touches of electric.

When it came time to finally record a version for the EP, I was in a small town in New Jersey, about 3000 miles away from my guitars. I started recording something to serve as a placeholder until I got back to Sacramento. What I ended up with – an arrangement for vibraphone, ondes Martenot, a smidge of piano, and a ton of silence – fit the mood that I was looking for so well that I never bothered adding the guitars once I got back home.

Are there any Sacramento-area references that I should know about?  J Street runs eastward from Old Sacramento though downtown, Midtown, East Sacramento, and across the American River before it turns into Fair Oaks Boulevard. In this song, we are focusing on the part of J Street that’s in East Sacramento, running between 33rd and 39th Street.

What’s it about? Somehow, in almost 9 years of living in Sacramento, I have dated 3 different women who live close enough to me that I can walk over to their place. In all those relationships, the walk has involved taking J Street, from 33rd Street to 39th, before going up a block and continuing the walk on H Street (for alphabet sticklers, know that I Street only shows up sporadically in East Sac, hence it’s absence in that block between H and J).

This song is a dramatization of that walk, one which takes place late at night, and which involves a main character who appears (more on this in a sec) to have just gotten off work and is extremely tired, but all he wants to do is spend some time – even just a brief moment – with the woman he loves before exhaustion takes over and he falls asleep.

That’s one way of reading it. The nice one. Skip the next part if you want.

Anything else to say about this song? California residents might notice the ‘2am’ in the song title and be reminded that closing time for bars in California is 2am. So the main character might just be drunk and horny. The woman he loves might not want nor be expecting a drunken visit in the middle of the night.

That’s the other way of reading it. I assure you, though, that my intention all along was the first way.

Is there any songwriting wisdom that might be gleaned from this song? It’s fun to add a subtle touch to a song – even one that almost everyone will overlook – that might twist the song’s meaning.

But I swear this isn’t the case here. It’s a love song, nice and pretty and sincere. And it’s the last song on the EP, a very quiet ending after 4 songs that were considerably more upbeat (musically, at least – the words contain their fair share of bummers, as is my wont).

And it’s likely the last post on here for a bit, until the next batch of songs turns into something worth releasing. Thanks for following along.

Midtown Blue can be found on Bandcamp, Spotify, and all other streamers of note.

[greenastral]

An old track from the SoundCloud by me!

[sparkbirdmusic]

I wrote many many pages of lyric ideas for Atlantisia, then completely changed direction and landed on this. (I still might use those other ideas for another song, so I'm not including them here.)

[acecreamsandwich]

I hate trying to find writing prompts for ideas for songwriting. I genuinely feel like I am so bad at it. Even when I think I have a promising idea I only get maybe a few lines down and then quit. Why am I like this😪