SONGVILLE SAYS (Great Quote #16 - Nick Lowe)


"… I hadn’t been writing songs very long and, like everybody else who starts out doing anything creative, you start off plundering your heroes’ style and catalogue. When you’ve exhausted that, you move on to somebody else and do the same thing with them, and the day comes when you’re rewriting your latest hero’s works, and you put in a little bit of the first guy’s thing that you ripped off, a middle eight, or a bridge, and as it goes on you include more and more of these bits and pieces that you’ve ripped off, until, suddenly, you haven’t ripped them off at all. They’ve actually become your style. And then all you need is a good idea. And then you really are in business. I remember having this idea—“What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding”—and almost falling over in astonishment that I hadn’t heard this before, that it really was an original notion."
- Nick Lowe
(Thanks to Mike Turitzen's excellent The Songwriting Process Site for discovering this quote in Vanity Fair)



previous quote
next quote
Digg! StumbleUpon

Jonathan Coulton Demonstrates Super Cool Lyric Technique

One of Songville's fine neighbours, Spencer Capier, just sent me this video for "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton. The song is a quirky and charming piece of writing, and it happens to illustrate a secret lyrical weapon that's hard to explain but can really make a song flow.

In each verse of this song, certain lines end in words that rhyme with the previous line, but then flow on to another word. It gives the song a wink and a roll that it wouldn't otherwise have. Check it out and consider putting this particular tool (or some variation of it) in your lyrical toolkit.



Pay special attention to these lyrics:

Excerpts from The Future Now (Jonathan Coulton)

Verse 1:

Last week I left a note on Laura's desk
It said I love you signed anonymous friend
Turns out she's smarter than I thought she was
She knows I wrote it, now the whole class does too ...

Verse 2:
I'll end world hunger I'll make dolphins speak
Work through the daytime, spend my nights and weekends ...

Verse 3:
I'll see her standing by the monorail
She'll look the same except for bionic eyes
She lost the real ones in the robot wars
I'll say I'm sorry, she'll say it's not your fault
Or is it?

See what we mean? Do you have any other examples of this technique?
Digg! StumbleUpon