Falter
Episode #174: Falter\xa0 \xa0(Song starts at 3.35)\nI had a conversation yesterday with Paul Dredge, my co songwriter, long time buddy and sounding board (always good to have one or a few of these that you can trust just to listen or offer sound measured advice).\nWe had a laugh together about how a lot of my first 50 or 100 songs were pretty much \u2018 baby I love you\u2019. Baby I\u2019ll miss you, or howling at the moon \u2026yep. Love songs. Nothing wrong with that. (Song# 637, Falter, featured on this episode. It\u2019s a love song).\nExcept maybe it\u2019s a good idea to try different subjects, perhaps imagining yourself further down the track, effectively creating a character, a new outlook, a new dialogue.\nSo the very act of the creative work can help us learn, get outside of ourselves and grow.\nThe flip side of that is writing about \u2018the now\u2019. It can be fall into the category of therapy/diary writing. As a performer, if your songs are not overly engaging an audience, perhaps this is something to look out for.\nI tend to start a song with a very basic sentence about something real I can see in the room or some thought that pops into my mind that feels truthful.\nGenerally this will then lead on to the bigger picture, as I step back and consider my position. At this point in time, the listener has had a dose of both views. The bigger view may cause the listener to engage and perhaps become emotionally attached to some concept, perhaps one of the personal confessions of the earlier sentences in the first verse.\nThis is a trick stand up comedians often use. When they first get on stage and open their mouth they\u2019ll often confess something deeply personal\u2026 it might be trauma, something embarrassing, etc. the audience is engaged. They feel something, they put themselves in that person's shoes and think wow,\xa0 that poor person. And wow, how brave are they to get up there and talk about it. Ok. I\u2019m ready to be entertained.\nThat is what a song can do, the entertainment on offer is a story - and a story is pretty much all, as I touched on last week. It needs to be going somewhere. And where it goes is from an island of now, (an island of certainty), then a question is posed, perhaps in the lyrics, or just in the lyricist\u2019s mind for the next \u2018island\u2019.\nFalter begins with observations: how the writer ( myself ) feels about a person, the relationship, how the days flow easily.. love.\nThen drawing attention to how unconditionally pure the love is that is being felt by the writer.\nThe step from there is the statement, perhaps the realisation: hmm, I think I\u2019d falter without you in my life.\nThe idea that two people have built a relationship like a structure and if 50% of that input and commitment were suddenly to be taken away, the structure would collapse.\nNote that it\u2019s not: \u2018Oh baby I\u2019d die without you\u2026 or I can\u2019t live without you\u2019.\nThis is the voice of an older writer. A few years have passed and a few songs have been written since those first 50 (when a few of these sort of songs may have been written.\nThe message here is: you\u2019re wonderful, I\u2019d miss you. Yes I\u2019d fall apart, but I\u2019d rebuild and carry on. It\u2019s not what I\u2019d choose.\nThe idea being is it\u2019s a song about love freely received and freely given, rather than a codependent struggle of wills. Something like that.\nThe music came at the same time as the words for this one. The melody of the first verse came to me on the breeze as I walked a long. I whistled it to memorise the intervals, the meter , the feeling, then noted it down as I picked the notes out on the piano.\nFrom there, the beginning, the feeling, it all came into being by asking a series of gentle questions about where the story was going, the music follows like a movie the song grows and a series of intuitive decisions are made -\xa0 some logical, others not so much.\nIt all builds to a tapestry, something cohesive, hopefully an honest piece of work that\u2019s a little different to anything that already exists.