Songs are often character studies. Don’t Stand So Close To Me by The Police and The Visitors by ABBA are fine examples of how a pop song can play out like a mini movie. Songs like these have drama, tension and backstory, and a solo singer who can play the part and deliver the lines. Navigating between the necessary limitations and widescreen possibilities of the pop song format, great stories can be told. And then comes the making of stories. Those are often equally fantastic.
Artists tell amazing and sometimes ridiculous stories about the origins of some of their much loved songs. If Artificial Intelligence becomes an important tool to create songs, will it one day draw from the collective digital consciousness to tell its stories? Imagine that! Tales of AI’s great adventures in recycling … er, songwriting.
When Simple Minds began working on Don’t You Forget About Me, singer Jim Kerr was initially unimpressed by the song. He found it ‘generic.’ The intro was added. He sang some la la la la’s over the part at the end where it breaks down, and planned to write some lyrics for that later. He spent the whole night writing ‘something existentialist.’ The next day, the others heard him sing it, and went: ‘Nah, the la la la’s the one! You can’t really beat that.’ And Jim Kerr thought: ‘It’s never gonna work.’
Brompton Oratory marked a shift in Nick Cave’s songwriting. His style had been first person narrative, but then, not long after recording the album Murder Ballads, he went to a more personal, confessional approach. Initially, he found it overly self-absorbed and inward-looking. Brompton Oratory was composed on a Casio keyboard (which has been called early AI by some), bought at Portobello Market. Cave felt the song needed one more verse to complete it in all ‘its religiosity, its carnality, its self-abasing, elephant-sized anguish.’ Nothing came, and he forgot about it. Months later, wandering aimlessly around a cold and windy Notting Hill, he stopped outside Kensington Temple, the Pentecostal Church in Ladbroke Grove, and stood listening to the joyous, communal singing coming from inside. And the final verse seemed to drop out of the sky, fully formed.
Much later, in The Red Hand Files, issue #294, Nick Cave wrote that when this happened, he was made merry, even saved, and gave Saint Cecilia, martyr and Patron Saint of Songwriters, an imaginary kiss.
So, essentially, in between all the inspiration, wild symbolism, happy mistakes, and the kind of prose that writes itself, it’s just bloody hard work. Better get to it.
Or, if you can’t hack it, go for some artful dodging …