Guitar Noise

A Thousand Words

I tend to write lyrics in spurts. Ideas will come at all odd times and I’ll write them down (yes, I carry a small note pad, just like A-J Charron suggests) but it takes time for me to be happy with a lyric. Maybe I’m just too critical; maybe I’m too pretentious.

One noticeable thing about writing in this fashion is that my song lyrics, depending on when they were written, tend to have a lot of recurrent themes. Something mentioned in one song is very likely to pop up for no obvious reason in another. This is neither good nor bad, I simply mention it in passing because at the time I was writing the lyrics for Lullaby I was (and still am) working on a number of songs centered around a trip I took to England a few years back. So some of the images leaked from other songs (and songs in progress) into this one.

I had two lines:

Hush little baby
Don’t you cry

And added:

Sleep sleep sleep

Harmless enough. I was going for as simple a style as possible. After all, I (or whoever I deemed to be my song’s “singer”) was supposedly singing to a baby. I have no children but I have lots of friends that do and I tried to imagine what I might sing to my child. The first thing I did, and don’t laugh, was to change “don’t you cry” to “close your eyes.” I didn’t (and don’t) think I would fare very well with a child that was crying.

From there, a logic of sorts took over the writing process. The second verse reflected a comment from another song that I was working on that eventually became Always. The “singer” (narrator, persona, whatever) of the song was looking at all the promises he’d made in his life, imagining them spread out across the sky like stars. We promise way too many things we can’t possible begin to make good on and I would certainly promise any child of mine the world. I substituted “tomorrows” for “promises” because I felt that the singer felt that tomorrow is often like a promise. It’s not likely to be anything like you think you’re getting:

Hush little baby
Close your eyes
Sleep sleep sleep

Stars like tomorrows
Fill up the sky
To light up your dreams

In the bridge, I again followed the logical lyric progression and tried to think of things that I would encourage a child (my child) to dream of at night. Angels, celestial bodies and flying, cliché as they might be, came to mind first.

You can sing with the angels
You can dance with the moon
You can fly across oceans so wide and deep

So hush little baby
Close your eyes
Sleep sleep sleep

“Flying across oceans” brought me back to my trip and since “deep” rhymes with “sleep” it seemed to flow right back to the first verse. When I looked at it later, though, I changed “wide” to “blue.” “Blue and deep” not only works with oceans, it also works with eyes which made me feel I’d made a much better connection to the repeated first verse. Now the whole thing had a lyrical flow, which had a special meaning for me and still could be understood and appreciated by people who didn’t know me at all.

So anyway, here’s the complete package:

Okay, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little foray into alternate tunings. We’ll be exploring a number of the other things that we’ve touched upon (arrangements and songwriting) in upcoming columns this summer. Please feel free (as always) to email me any questions, comments, concerns, requests and whatever else either directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com or via the Guitar Forums. And to all you who’ve written with suggestions of topics for future articles, please keep it up! A special thanks to A-J Charron for his tips and advice (and the Adrian Belew website address! If you’d like to read more about this great guitarist, one of the real unsung heroes of the guitar (and an all around nice guy), just go to http://www.murple.com/adrianbelew and look around. It’s worth the trip).

Until next week.