M usic Notes Songcraft: Savoring Life by the Slice If you’re reading this article, chances are you have an interest in music. Maybe you like Bach or Beck, George Gershwin or George Thorogood, John Lennon or John Legend or even John Tesh? (Don’t laugh. I didn’t see you playing the piano at Red Rocks.) When a song comes on that you love, you might say things out loud, like “Here we go!” or “Are you kidding me?” Whatever your tastes, it’s difficult to be indifferent to music. Songs are the closest things we have to time machines; they’re able to take us back to a moment so clearly that we can often picture the scene down to the last detail. Everyone enjoys a good song, and a few of us are crazy enough to try to write one. I am still a happy amateur, but my hours leaning over the piano and guitar have led me to think about the craft in a deeper way. Endless articles, books, and seminars dissect the art of songwriting: how to do it, pitfalls to avoid, the best songwriters of you-name-the-era and their methods. To most people, writing a song seems about as realistic as going to Saturn. But if you’ve ever tried it, it’s likely you’ve found yourself waking up in the middle of the night with words that must be put to music if you are ever to fall back to sleep. Being a songwriter can both thrill you and torture you on the same day. My college writing professor described a story as a slice of life. I liked the sound of that. A slice is just enough— we can savor it, but we don’t expect it to sustain us. It’s a piece of something bigger, something that’s easy to share with others. While it takes time and skill to create, you’re not thinking about that when you take the first bite—you’re thinking about how good it is. Some songs are stories put to music: Country, blues, and folk music were all born out of storytelling. Others are stories that couldn’t exist apart from
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Levi Gangi their music. The magic of an excellent song is how the music captures your attention before you’ve even heard the lyrics. Then it surrounds and lifts the lyrics into an emotional possession that feels as if it belongs to only you. There’s a truth in it that you recognize. How do you feel at the first riffs of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion”? I feel like driving fast. The symphonic intro to Etta James’ timeless rendition of “At Last”? I
want to fall in love. Norah Jones’ upbeat “Come Away With Me” can lull you to sleep, while Johnny Cash’s gloomy “Ring of Fire” gets your foot tapping. When I first began to write songs, I knew it was going to be a rough road with lots of trial and error. I had ideas, but should I begin with lyrics or melody? Think of any timeless song: Reading the lyrics immediately triggers the melody in your head, and hearing the melody immediately brings the lyrics to mind. If I read you the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner,” your mind would quickly transform my monotone into the melody you’ve heard for years. A good song is not a sum of its parts. In my first songwriting ventures, I wrote the music first and then added the lyrics. I came up with some good melodies but never felt able to say what I really wanted to express. Instead I ended up fitting words into a preformed musical grid rather than allowing the melody to emerge out of the experience I ended up singing about. I was unwilling
to sacrifice certain musical gimmicks to make room for an authentic lyric. The result was music that was out of step with my emotional life. Now lyrics come to me with a melody attached. It’s not magic. It’s like anything else—when you put the work in, eventually it starts to give back to you. Usually it starts with a single line: “As you turn toward the light / you watch the shadows get longer ’til they’re reaching out of sight.” That one came to me while on a hike in Virginia one day, and I sang it all the way back to the car. I wanted to be hopeful amidst the daily tragedy I was going through, but I wanted to speak of both. The image of light and shadow said just what I wanted to say, and I immediately knew how to sing it. With one true line to begin with, something you feel you can sing with abandon, the rest of the song is just waiting to be found. You may not ever write a song, but you know what rings true for you. Some songs hand you an image you recognize from your own experience. They dance around truth, offering it to you from different perspectives, casting light on it from unique angles. They have highs and lows, depth and conflict, just as we do. They enter your heart and help you feel something that doesn’t need to be explained or analyzed. They reveal a movement and a rhythm that match the shape of your life, or maybe just this one moment in time. Next time you hear a song you love, imagine the songwriter serving you a slice of something exquisite— sweet or tangy, spicy or rich—prepared just for you. Then savor it. It will be just enough. Levi Gangi (pictured above) is a seminary student, musician, and US Army Reservist in Rochester, N.Y. His band, The Lonely Ones, recently released an album called Desire & the Aftermath. Find him at ReverbNation.com/ LeviGangi.