THE BIRTH AN ALBUM: Part 1: The creation of a song

This year (2021) will be the 20th year that I have been making music. Well, in reality it's more like 17 years or so I've been making music because the other three years was the time it took me to learn. By learning I mean how to stretch my fingers, how to learn what a scale is, and how to form notes into chords. When I was first starting out I had a friend who played piano and she said that playing guitar was harder than playing piano. I begged to differ and thought back then that playing piano would be harder to learn. I still feel I was right, but maybe because I only really stuck to guitar!

Back in 2001 I asked Santa for a guitar to learn to play. Thankfully when I woke up Christmas morning a guitar was sitting under the tree! I would've never thought that it would take me to what I do now. I had no idea that I would stick with it and continue for the next 20 years. I had no idea that when I learned how to put two chords together to form a campfire song, that it would open my eyes to seeing what the "professionals" did is something I could do too. Now I could do what my radio heroes were doing. Making music!! As a bonus, they were making a living doing it. Some making more than others. Myself, the only thing I was doing was starting to put some of my own thoughts on paper and coming up with a chord structure to form what I considered back then, a song. A song that maybe one day would take me around Michigan, then around America, and maybe just maybe, a global tour!! I gave it a try and as nervous as can be started playing coffeehouses around my hometown. I played cover songs and threw in an original song every now and then. Once I started playing the first note, I was expecting the audience to start throwing tomatoes at me in dissatisfaction. The farmers market must have ran out that day because not a single tomato came my way.

Why was I so terrified to go up and play my songs in front of complete strangers and some family? It wasn't the stage fright that got me, it was the anxiousness of what others would think of my songs as I sang and played them. You see an original song is deeply personal to a songwriter. The process of making a song is a deeply intrinsic process. This is the process I go through when forming a song. I've read many behind the scenes stories of famous musicians out there and some do this same thing, while others follow other paths of creation. This is just how my songs originally begin.

1) I begin by just playing around on the guitar. Sometimes I'm finger picking, sometimes I'm just strumming.

2) Once I get a progression together it usually starts with the verse. Not always the first verse, but could be the second, or even the third. Songwriting is a journey and these are the forks in the roads.

3) After forming a progression I try to record it so I don't forget it. Sometimes after recording it I keep working more on it (such as coming up with a bridge or chorus progression) or sometimes I get so tired of playing it over and over again I start again at step one.

4) If I do keep at working on the original progression, I tend to play/listen to it over and over and try to do one of two things. The first is figure out a feeling that this song is making me feel. It's amazing how just a few notes can conjure up past memories or form an emotion. The second I try to do is come up with the first line that matches the melody the song. Once again, it's another fork in the road. I always think back to what Paul McCartney of the Beatles (like he needs any introduction!) once said. When he was writing his classic "Yesterday" the first words that he put to the melody was "scrambled eggs"! This isn't the most intimate part of songwriting because the artist is usually just throwing words out there to create some line of melody. Sometimes it's not even words, Dave Matthews (of the Dave Matthews Band) would start out in the studio just making different sounds with hopes to turn them into a word or phrase afterwards. There's no real meaning or intimacy to the song just yet.

5) Once you have a melody, then the real songwriting relationship begins. What do you want to say in this song. For example, one of the songs on my new album SEES THE LIGHT started with the line "I would give my all to you, just to help you through, climb the mountains from the valley below." After I formed this line I needed to figure out who the "I" was and who the "you" can be. Did I want it to be myself or in a third person narrative? Did I want it to be a human being I know or will this be a fictional story?? Now you can see why this stage is when the song becomes personal. It's personal either A. You're trying to say something from the inside that others may hear or B. you're creating a made up story and you begin to worry, will others like it, relate to it, or despise you for creating such a work of something. For this song, I decided to make it personal and telling what I wanted to say from my perspective (the scariest part of songwriting!).

Number five is certainly not the final step in the songwriting/album creation stage. It is only scratching the creative processes surface. I'll dive more into the process of creating a song (specifically the song FOR YOU as referenced above) and how one song fits into the album creation puzzle later.