Where do songs come from?

Where do your songs come from? Where does your inspiration come from? What’s the story behind that song?

These can be both fascinating and frustrating questions for songwriters. I think writers who find these types of questions fascinating (most) are into self-reflection and often learn as much about themselves as the questioners do. I think about these question a lot and ask them of myself, but I’m a college instructor by trade, kind of analytical by nature, and I’ve been thinking about blogging about songwriting for years.

I think those that get frustrated by such questions have either been asked them too much (now there’s a problem I’d like to have), want their songs to stand on their own merit, or have just been taken off guard.

The answers to these questions are often very personal, maybe even painful, but not always. Sometimes it’s hard to answer them, because we just can’t pinpoint where the moment of inspiration came from, or because it really seemed to come from somewhere outside ourselves. Obviously this is a topic that we can revisit and expand upon in the future. If you are interested on how songs come to be and like The Guess Who, BTO or Randy’s solo career, I highly recommend Randy Bachman’s Every Song Tells A Story.

I’m going to try my best not to hold back in this blog, but it won’t always be easy, and I won’t always succeed. Not to worry for this first song though.

(Here’s a link to the original song post for those who missed it : For My Guitar (Singin’ Wood))

The origins of For My Guitar (Singin’ Wood)

I bought a new guitar this spring, an acoustic guitar, a little beauty with a spruce top and rosewood sides and back. I didn’t go out to buy this particular model. I went out to buy an acoustic/electric and did find one that I was very satisfied with, but sometimes you just fall in love, Inexplicably, almost by chance.

So that happened.

But, so did this. I started watching Guitar Picks, with Kim Mitchell on AuxTV (also on HiFi). There is often a segment featuring a manufacturer or luthier making guitars, and there is almost always a discussion on selecting the woods. One episode even visited Canadian manufacturer Godin, maker of my new Simon & Patrick guitar.

Those two ingredients likely began the unconscious rumination process. I loved playing this new guitar and couldn’t bear to leave it behind when we went for a visit to Toronto for the weekend. I even played a couple of my other tunes for my mother-in-law on my new guitar— groundbreaking for someone who rarely has the nerve to play in front of anyone.

Low and behold, I wake up Sunday morning in Toronto with most of a chorus rattling round in my head and I have to get it down. Usually I’ve got my trusty moleskin with me for writing lyrics down and I quite likely had it with me that time, but it’s rare that the melody and lyrics come at the same time for me and not as easy to capture melody in the moleskin. So I got up quickly and rushed down to the half-bath off the foyer and recorded a voice memo to my iPod.

As rough as that is, It’s pretty amazing that it was born all together (note the improvised lines at the end). That doesn’t usually happen, but there it was. It’s important that you remain open to this sort of inspiration, learn to recognize it, and grab that idea while it’s fresh, by any means at your disposal—napkin, business card, calling your own voicemail—whatever you can do to recall it later.

I spent two weeks nearly every summer of my childhood on the Canadian Shield at my uncle’s cottage. I’ve lived on the prairie in Brandon, Manitoba. I’ve driven through and camped in the Canadian Rockies. I’ve been to Vancouver, the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island, though I haven’t been to the east coast since age four or so (this needs to be rectified). It isn’t too hard to imagine that my brain, probably while I was sleeping, exaggerated this little trip to Toronto with my brand new guitar onto a much more grandiose canvas. We will return to this idea of exaggeration/extrapolation as a songwriting technique when discussing other songs in future posts. I often use it consciously in my songwriting.
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So I returned to Kitchener with what essentially became the chorus.

I take my guitar and play the prairie,
I take my guitar and play the shield,
I take my guitar and play the mountain,
I take my guitar and play each wave against each shore,
That’s what this singin’ wood is for.

I think it is important that the performer is playing the prairie, the shield, the mountain, rather than playing on them. It helps reinforce that these places have intrinsic stories to be told and it creates a connection with the story of the tree that is developed through the verses.

The idea of the guitar being born of wood came from all those episodes of Guitar Picks for sure. The three verses are just three acts from a tree’s life on its way to becoming a guitar, with the bridge providing the dramatic turning point towards its death or sacrifice.

1. A tree grows strong
2. A tree stands tall
3. A tree’s brought down

I liked the idea of the tree collecting stories that it can’t tell until it gets its voice—listening through the wind to one and all.

One concern I have is that I don’t want anyone to think that I’m glorifying tree harvesting, especially with some very real concerns of late about where some guitar wood has come from in the past.

But a song is not a research article or a balanced news story. It has to be focused on one idea. For My Guitar (Singin’ Wood) is me contemplating and idealizing the life that a tree (or trees) gave up for my guitar and the care that a luthier (or several) took in crafting it.

So that is where we’ll leave the first songwriting process post and the story of For My Guitar (Singin’ Wood),  but I am happy to answer any questions you might have through the comments.

(For an excellent song with a completely different theme, check out Bob Bossin’s Sulphur Passage, which became an anthem in opposition of clear-cutting old growth forests on the west coast.)