I wrote a set of lyrics, or a poem, or something, and I wanted to see if I could translate it into an actual song, at which point, of course, I forgot everything I’d ever known about music or writing. I went to Google to ask how to write a song and found page after page that boiled down to: set up the story in verse one, state the basic emotion of the song in the chorus, advance the story in verse two, and good luck. But shockingly, I still felt clueless about how to proceed. In general, when I write I just write, and the rhythm comes from the words themselves and from how often I need to stop and breathe. In order to write a song, though, I needed a more deliberate structure and I was still at a loss.
So then I collected a YouTube list of songs that seemed well-structured (to me) and started listening to them to see if I could figure out how they worked. I listened to a lot of Mumford and Sons songs, like Awake My Soul and I Will Wait, and My Church and The Bones by Maren Morris, and Falling and Sweet Creature from Harry Styles, and songs from Regina Spektor and Van Morrison and Sarah Mclachlan and James Taylor and Nat King Cole. And what I noticed, after listening to dozens of songs and reminding myself to listen for rhyme and meter each time, wasn’t rhyme and meter. Instead, it was how I felt. Even when a song didn’t bother to finish telling its story, as long as there was one moment where I felt something or saw something or maybe even smelled something, the song felt successful.
I also noticed that I really wanted to rewrite other people’s songs. I’d be singing along, feeling like this is my song, until a word or two would ring false and break the spell. For example, Kelly Clarkson’s song Mine is beautiful and heartbreaking and almost perfect, until she gets to the line “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,” which feels like a foreign substance dropped in from popular culture rather than part of an organic whole. (I blame my rabbi for this tendency of mine to want to edit. He “adapts” poems and essays from established writers to fit his purposes throughout the year, and especially on the high holidays, when we need as much help from English as possible to try to understand the endless Hebrew liturgy. I mean, I was always like this, but now I have, like, God’s permission.)
Anyway, with all of that in mind, I was even more uncertain about how to proceed. I was especially flummoxed by the need to rhyme, because it reminded me of having to buy a thesaurus in graduate school and being told there was always a “right” word for each purpose. But one of the things I learned from my long listening experiment was that rhyme schemes can help create a sense of anticipation, or inevitability, in a song, taking something that otherwise feels humdrum and making it almost magic. So, bravely, I looked through my existing lyrics and made a list of words I thought I could find rhymes for, and then I asked Google for rhymes (no more stupid thesaurus for me!)) and wrote down every possible word that resonated for me. At this point I was lost in a sea of words and even more overwhelmed than before, but I reminded myself that there’s always a way forward and I started freewriting every image I could think of for each word on my list.
If this is starting to sound like a ridiculous amount of work, especially with no guarantee that it would lead anywhere productive, I agree. But I can’t think of any other way forward. The gulf between “I want to write a song” and “I know how to write a song” feels so vast, it’s like trying to fly over an ocean without a plane, or a life preserver. And I’m still somewhere over the Atlantic at the moment, desperately flapping my wings. Wish me luck!
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 