ASHES AND FLAME
It won’t be long
before I belong
to you again
If the fight to possess each other
Ends
I’m not a bird in a locked cage
warbling to be free
You’re not an old woman
Clutching rusty keys
You’re not the wounded
I’m not the spear
I’m not a monster
You’re not the fear
No one’s a victim
We’re one and the same
Both sand and water
Ashes and flame
-MT
Watching you walk naked
from the bathroom to the bed
Water droplets clinging…worshipping your head
Smoke ribbons rising from a mutual cigarette
Your crooked forearm…cradling my neck
Jerry playing ‘Birdsong’, in the key of E
That afternoon, your filthy room
was Paradise
to me
-MT
If you haven’t had a chance to watch ‘Trash’, Tyler Glenn’s new solo single debut, take a minute and watch/listen….I’ll wait….
Okay, you’re back…first impressions? Frustration, betrayal, defiance, this is one angry song. I have not been able to stop thinking about it. First, a little background info. Tyler is the lead singer for the Neon Trees and he was raised in a faithful Mormon family, and he also happens to be gay. He served a mission for the church, (two years for young men, paid by their family) to further spread the gospel. There are better articles that explain all the intricacies of this video. I just wanted to applaud Tyler Glenn for writing such a personal song about his struggle with the religion of his birth.
I was born a Latter-Day Saint, or what is commonly called, Mormon. And after years of struggle, I left the Mormon church. It was the most painful discovery of my life to realize that it was all a lie and I had been banging my head on a brick wall that wasn’t even there. To give you some perspective, think of Jim Carrey in ‘The Truman Show’.
‘What the ____????’
You may laugh, but that is honestly what it is like. If you have any doubts at all and express them freely, EVERYONE, everyone you know, tells you you are wrong. All the people you trust, the people closest to you; your parents, youth leaders, grandparents, your bishop. It’s like searching for fruit in a vegetable factory (a ‘fruitless search’, get it?). I can’t even imagine how much worse it must be for the LDS young men and women who find themselves searching for their sexual identity and being told that there is no place in heaven, or Sunday School, for them.
As a teenager, very confused and defiant, I had a conversation in a car once that lasted for hours. I implored, ‘How can the Hindus and the Muslims and the Catholics and the Methodists all believe different things and the Mormons are the only ones who are right?’ The woman I was speaking with, who happened to be a professor at BYU, wouldn’t let me leave the car until I saw things her way, the Mormon way. This happened over and over and over again as I continued to search for answers. But when you are surrounded completely, taught from birth that the world is in a gray fog of confusion and that the LDS church has the only true gospel, you are in a hamster wheel and you don’t even know it.
There were many ‘aha!’ moments along the way, but a major pivot point for me was during a voice lesson in college. My teacher casually remarked I was ‘too smart to be a Mormon’. I was insulted at the time, but her statement helped me explore what was already unraveling. I didn’t ever get to thank her for saying that. She died before I got the chance.
More than a decade later, I officially resigned from the Mormon church. And I still have waves of anger that hit outta nowhere. All the years wasted on religious questions, the sexism that forged my decision to start a family and forego a career, the continued bigotry toward the LGBT community…
Tyler Glenn has his own journey of discovery to go through. He may or may not come to the conclusions I did about the Mormon church. But he had the guts to document the most painful chapter so far in this song. Trash, the thing you get rid of because you have no place for it. That is really…well that just says it all doesn’t it? I wish I could thank him in person for releasing this song. He didn’t filtering anything.
Okay, here they are, in no particular order, Lyric No-no’s. And I’ve added image reinforcers for the visual learners out there.
Don’t use big, complicated words. I struggle with this because I actually like big, complicated words. Words like succinct, contrition, ambivalence. They say exactly what I’m trying to convey. But ‘convey’ and ‘succinct’ are not words most people use in conversation and they don’t sing well. Imagine it in a song. (Cue soft strings and a whiny trumpet…’if I could convey my love, succinctly, you would finally understand, If I could separate myself distinctly, from the women who don’t love you as I can, bo-dee-bo-dee-boooo’). Yuck. It sounds awful in my head.
There are some notable exceptions. ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ But that’s a novelty song really. How about Faith Hill’s first big hit ‘This Kiss’? Check out the chorus:
‘It’s the way you love me
It’s a feeling like this
It’s centrifugal motion
It’s perpetual bliss
It’s that pivotal moment
It’s, ah, impossible
This kiss, this kiss (unstoppable)
This kiss, this kiss’
Notice the words are used to repeat a rhythm. They have a function in the song separate from just their definition. That’s how she got away with it. There are ways to bend the rules.
To understand how simple can be better, listen to Motown hits…‘Ain’t no woman like the one I got’, ‘Someday we’ll be together’,‘If I were your woman’,‘Just my imagination’…the titles are great and simple and direct. That’s why they work.
Don’t start rhyming…yet. Writers love to rhyme. They love showing how clever they can be. They love showing off. This is more a critique of the writing process than anything. I have written with people who immediately want to start rhyming, before we even know what the song is about. And then the song runs off into a thousand different directions and we are all feeling very vague and trying to rack our brains to find a new rhyme for ‘love’ or ‘you’? Ugh.
Come up with a great title, concept or a killer first line. Worry about the rhymes, the second line, after the song has a real direction and viewpoint.
Figure out who you are singing to, figure out who the singer is, figure out where they are and why they have to break into song to get their emotion across. Good writers who sing and are instrumentalists accomplish this while they are goofing on their guitar, keyboard…they channel it vocally. Lyricists without musical chops are at a disadvantage, unless they can hum and type at the same time.
Eventually the rhyme will propel the music and the song, hopefully. But if you start too soon, it’s like crawling into a little cardboard box and pulling the flaps down. Now you’re crammed in tight and in the dark and you can’t find a way out. This is what some people (who only write when they are ‘inspired’) call ‘writers block’. It’s not a block. It’s a hollow box, with tiny little walls and you created it by rhyming too soon.
Don’t fill in all the blanks. Let the listener engage their imagination by not spelling out every single detail. One of my favorite songs of all time is ‘Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty. Here’s verse one and two:
‘She’s a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She’s a good girl, crazy ’bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too
It’s a long day livin’ in Reseda
There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard
And I’m a bad boy, ’cause I don’t even miss her
I’m a bad boy for breakin’ her heart’
So, we know who she is, we know she’s a good girl. We know she’s patriotic, religious, romantic, loyal, possibly from the South, or a farm. We know he broke her heart. I would argue if he’d kept going and explained exactly WHY or HOW he broke her heart, the song might be ruined. Maybe he cheated on her, left the small town for the big city, maybe she was pregnant and he abandoned her because he didn’t want to settle down. Who cares. Instead, he says:
‘I’m free, free fallin’
And the following verse never really goes back to her, and it totally works, because the song isn’t titled, ‘I’m So Sorry I Left You Darlin’, it’s ‘Free Fallin’ because there’s some sort of elation in doing the wrong thing that’s right for you.
If you haven’t commented on my blog posts and you’re just trolling around, how dare you. Say something shocking and controversial below now. I mean it.
‘You are a naughty naughty lyricist Carol, that was a vewy, vewy bad line…’
I know. This picture is ridiculous, and sexist and dated, but now I have your attention don’t I? And to think that a few decades ago an ad like this helped people sell things like mens dress shirts. Yikes! And now I’m using it to promote this blog…
I thought I would share some observations about bad lyric writing. It’s easy to spot and yet as songwriters sometimes we fall into the quicksand without realizing it. I’ve noticed some things that make lyrics universally bad, so here goes:
1. Your lyrics are not specific enough, they do not engage the senses. The best way to represent this is to show how well it works when you do engage the senses of the listener. Take this passage by Eminem:
‘His palms are sweaty
knees weak, arms are heavy
there’s vomit on his sweater already, Mom’s spaghetti’
Here’s another one by the late, great Merle Haggard:
‘The blood red sun beat down and baked the red clay ground
Dust kicked up around his John Deere wheels
No trace of rain in sight, again he’ll lose the fight
And have to watch his crops die in the fields’
Show, don’t tell. Every writing mentor I’ve had has repeated this mantra.
2. You are using cliches and overused phrases. Avoid talking about the rain, hearts (hers or yours), her smile, angels, heaven, etc. Now here’s the kicker, there are tons of songs out there that are dripping with this stuff. But do you really want to contribute to that noise? I found this lyric in a popular pop song:
‘Just a smile and the rain is gone
Can hardly believe it (yeah)
There’s an angel standing next to me
Reaching for my heart’
Okay, the above lyric is passable, but it ain’t GREAT, right?
If you are going to write a cliche, flip it around somehow. Turn it inside out and give it a new meaning. Examine it up close or reverse it. A great example of this is the Toni Braxton hit and Diane Warren penned ‘Unbreak my Heart’:
‘Un-break my heart
Say you’ll love me again
Undo this hurt you caused
When you walked out the door
And walked out of my life
Un-cry these tears
I cried so many nights
Un-break my heart
My heart’
3. Your lyric has no emotional core. I’m going to argue that this is the most important one so far. You can say all kinds of crap that you think is poetic as hell, but if there isn’t a sliver of emotional truth, the song will not have an impact on the listener.
Racism and injustice make your blood boil? Lay it all out with expletives and venom like ‘Killing in the Name’ (Rage Against the Machine). Or write to someone that you miss, tell them all the things you wish they could hear (ahem, Adele). Or write about how much you believe peace is possible if we just ‘Imagine’ ( John Lennon). Tortured by loneliness? Describe what it’s like ‘Without Her’ (Harry Nilsson). You get the idea. I’ve heard many cleverly crafted, beautifully performed songs that I forgot all about five minutes later. Why? I didn’t have any emotional experience listening to it.
If this post helped you at all, please comment below and share! Also, I’d love to hear some of your favorite lyrics and and please explain why they speak to you. This is the first in a series of three posts about examining bad lyric writing. Next week, lyric no-no’s.
When I was in college, my final semester, totally broke, I worked very briefly at a sad bar in Boise, Idaho. So today I was goofing around writing what I thought was going to be a limerick about it and it ended up a lot longer…and the gender changed… THE SADDEST BAR IN BOISE Words […]
When I was in college, my final semester, totally broke, I worked very briefly at a sad bar in Boise, Idaho. So today I was goofing 
around writing what I thought was going to be a limerick about it and it ended up a lot longer…and the gender changed…
THE SADDEST BAR IN BOISE
Words and Music by Melissa Thatcher ©2016
THE SADDEST BAR IN BOISE
NO WINDOWS – JUST ONE DOOR
VIRGINIA SLIM AND CAMEL JOE
HURL DARTS AND SETTLE SCORES
THE ONLY LIGHT IS FROM THE BLINKIN’, DIAMOND DANCIN’ FLOOR
I USED TO STOP IN FOR A DRINK
I DON’T GO THERE ANYMORE
KENNY CROONING ‘GAMBLER’
DOLLY ‘9 TO 5’
AND WHEN I’D DRUNK TOO MUCH
THEY’D LET ME PLAY ‘I WILL SURVIVE’
EVERYBODY HAS A PLACE
THEY GO TO GET AWAY
BUT I WAS TURNING ‘HAPPY HOUR’
TO ‘HAPPY EVERYDAY’’
(BRIDGE)
A LITTLE KNOWN CELEBRITY
HUNG BEHIND THE BAR
THAT 8X10 WOULD GLARE AT ME
AND SAY ‘SON, LOOK WHERE YOU ARE?’
THE SADDEST BAR IN BOISE
NO INDOOR SMOKING BAN
THEY PUFF AND BLOW AND LAUGH AND COUGH
WITH SUICIDAL HANDS
TOO WEAK TO END THE PAIN THEMSELVES
THEY HOPE THE CANCER CAN
MY DREAMS BEGAN TO DIE THERE
AS A YOUNGER BROKEN MAN
KENNY CROONING ‘GAMBLER’
DOLLY ‘9 TO 5’
AND WHEN I’D DRUNK TOO MUCH
THEY’D LET ME PLAY ‘I WILL SURVIVE’
EVERYBODY HAS A PLACE
THEY GO TO GET AWAY
BUT I WAS TURNING ‘HAPPY HOUR’
TO ‘HAPPY EVERYDAY’’
This is the place where I write about songs. Melody, words to melody, harmony, structure, art, commerce, the whole messy situation of the music industry scrambling to find a way to make money, the death of the record label, underground house concerts and above board lyrics.
I wasn’t the 16-year old kid with a guitar in his basement working out tunes…songwriting came much later in life for me. My influences are many, artists like Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Cole Porter, the Beatles, Randy Newman, Jimmy Webb, Harry Nilsson, Kate Bush, Carole King, Laura Nyro and then flash forward to Eminem, Stephen Sondheim, Lana del Ray, Kasey Musgraves, Kanye, Earl Sweatshirt…and since I’m in Los Angeles, I get to meet up-and- coming artists all the time, there is a lot of talent out there.
songwriter’s internal monologue
As a singer-songwriter I have struggled to find my own style or you could say it is emerging…evolving, devolving. I’ll finish a song and my colleagues will say, ‘well, that’s cabaret’ and I’ll share the next song and suddenly it’s a great contender for ‘country’. But I guess for now, I’m comfortable with that.
Last night I got to see an amazing percussive acoustic guitar player, Forest Bailey, and it blew my mind. The technique alone, his commitment to it, was something you can really only appreciate live, (but you can hear him here) Watching Forest play gave me permission to just do my own thing and not worry about style/genre/blahblahblah…it’s music people. Play on.
Stay tuned for a blog post about bad lyrics and why you are writing them. Yes, you.
write and warble 