Ben Folds is a singer-songwriter, who once fronted an alternative rock trio ironically named the Ben Folds Five. In 2019 he published a memoir titled A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A life of music and cheap lessons. I have just enjoyed reading that book, particularly his advice on songwriting and then editing in the chapter titled Follow the Brown that begins on page 254. Starting with the second paragraph, he says:
“….The most common question I’m asked about songwriting is whether the words or music come first. And that’s a reasonable question. Hell, I ask my songwriter friends the same thing. We all want to know what the spark was. What was the first syllable the writer uttered before the musical sentence was complete? What stuck to the page first? For me, it’s almost always music. I believe my subconscious clues me in to my feelings by expressing them abstractly through music – a few notes, a musical sentence, that I don’t yet understand. I will follow the music to the edge of my lyrical comfort zone, because I firmly believe the music is about something and that’s for me to decipher. Often, the music fools me into writing something I’d rather not have revealed lyrically.
The spark of a song can come at the oddest time. Maybe at a stoplight, a meeting, or in bed at 4 A.M. For me, there’s usually a subtle glow in the air just before the notes start to come. A sense that something is around the corner. Like the farm animals in a disaster movie right before an earthquake, who seem to know what’s coming before the humans do, It feels the way light often looks at ‘magic hour,’ before sunset, when suddenly it seems that anywhere you point the camera will make a good picture. That’s the kind of feeling that tells me to watch for some music. It’s coming soon.
If freestyling onstage teaches us that you can always turn on the faucet and that some kind of music will always flow, then songwriting in solitude confirms that the water can sometimes flow muddy brown. Non-potable melody. You have to let it run for a while, until it begins to run clear. Yes, it hurts to hear the brown ideas coming from the center of your soul, but you don’t have to show them to anybody. Don’t let brown get you down. Here’s a common bit of advice I’ve heard from every songwriter I’ve ever met: Just keep moving.
I personally do not believe there’s such a thing as writer’s block. It’s just that we don’t like everything that comes out. When our self-judgment takes over, it shames us into submission and we shut off the faucet. We say we have no ideas. No. We have ideas, but we aren’t willing to fess up to how bad they might be. But, really, who gives a damn? Own them. They suck, and they came from you. Fine. That’s not a crime, that’s normal. Take it easy on yourself. Remember that you can always write something, it’s just that sometimes it’s shitty. Let it be so! And then follow that brown until it runs clear.
A great musician and producer named Pat Leonard told me that it’s important to know when to send your inner editor away. His advice is another version of my faucet metaphor. Maybe it works better for you. When you’re creating, make a deal with your inner editor – that judgmental but necessary part of your psyche that keeps telling you what sucks. Tell this trigger-happy editor in your mind that you need them to step out of the room while you create. You need to be free to follow all ideas, bad and good. You need to create with impunity – alone. However! The other half of the deal is that the editor gets to come back the next day – with a chain saw. Your editor will get to go to town on what you’ve written. The editor may even throw the whole song in the trash. But not now. Now you must create.”
His advice also applies to speechwriting. On March 23, 2015 I blogged about how Writer’s block is like getting your car stuck in mud up to the axles.
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