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Dave appears in the excellent documentary "The Gathering" by Vaquero Films and his songs are featured in the Horseman Gazette series by Eclectic Horseman. Anyway, the following is a post Dave wrote on his Facebook page. I was reading it at Supper and had to stop eating otherwise I would have likely choked to death.
How to Write Songs
I have on my desk here a letter sent by Mr. Roscoe Dimmler from Squirrel Foot, Idaho. It appears that Mr. Dimmler lives in a sheep camp up there in the flat part of the state. It’s difficult to make out just what he wants, as the letter looks as if it were scrawled with a sharp stick dipped in charcoal, but in the lines I can read he’s asking about how songs get written, and in particular how I go about writing mine.
He says:
“Dear Mister Stamler, cud you tell me how you rite yer songs. I have seed you many times and herd you, and I think if you can do it probly anybody can.”
The rest of the letter drifts off into a description of how many sheep he runs on his place, and some trouble he’s having with a pesky neighbor. After that it gets smeary and unreadable. As I, proudly, know nothing about sheep, and have never met his neighbor, I can’t help him with those issues, so I will limit myself to his question about songwriting—though I know nothing about that, either.
I wish I did know. I pretend that I do, but that’s just empty posturing, easily seen through. I’ve written and recorded a bunch of them, somewhere around a hundred, I would guess, but that doesn’t mean I know how to do it. There is a story that Irving Berlin, even in his nineties, would write a song every night before going to bed. Every night. A whole song. Every goddamn night. I imagine him there, sitting at his little desk with a pencil, lamplight shining off his old bald head, humming and scribbling, humming and scribbling.
Churning out these glittering lyrical jewels as easily as swatting a fly, and I kind of hate him for it. It seems wrong to hate the man who wrote “White Christmas,” something you might even go to hell for, but I can’t help myself. Irving wasn’t all that great as a musician, by the way. Allow me to point that out with only a smidgen of snarkiness. He played piano, but just barely. He could play in only one key—I think it was B-flat—and yet there he sat, every night, popping out a finished song before shuffling down the hall to brush his teeth. If he still had any. I’ve heard no stories about his teeth, but that’s not important. Even letting him have a weekend off every now and again, that’s still over three hundred songs a year, just in the evenings, let alone what he might accomplish during daylight hours. Such a massive output almost shames me. I’m lucky if I get ten or fifteen songs in a whole year, and some years it’s as few as five or six.
The nerve of the guy. I mean, really.
Diane Warren, who has written, I believe, a gazillion songs, most of them hits, and won Grammys and Tonys and Emmys and every other award ever dreamed up, says that she works at songwriting twelve hours a day, every day. She has a room she works in, like a little nest, and she claims it’s never been cleaned. That’s a bit scary, but not as scary as working for twelve hours, no matter what room you find yourself in. I can’t think of anything I’m capable of doing for that long. Once in a while I can run a weed eater for two or three hours, but then I have to quit and drink a Fresca. I’ve never met Ms. Warren, and while I’m sure she’s a very nice lady and I like some of her songs, twelve hours of anything is too much, I don’t care what it is. Twelve hours of trying to write a song will just make you nuts.
Writers like Irving and Diane have their tried and true methods, their routines. It’s called process. Writers talk about their process a lot. It’s what writers do, often instead of actually writing something, when they’re not being petty and resentful of other writer’s successes. They fixate on it, and worry about it, and obsess over it, and brag to their friends how faithful they are to the process, how well it works for them--and fret and fume when the process stops working for them, and must tinker with it and bang on it until the process starts working again. It consumes writers, much the way our medical conditions and digestion consume us when they don’t work properly. You have to trust the process, they say.
The word process indicates a series of actions, all pointed toward a specific goal. To even write a sentence like that makes me tired, and I want to find a dark room somewhere and lie down. I don’t seem to have a process. I have a goal, but no specific actions—not even one, let alone a series of them. What I do is sit around and hope a song arrives sooner or later, and you can’t call that a process because it’s too gradual. Almost glacial. At the end of the week I find I’ve written a total of two lines, neither of which seems to belong to the same song.
All that being said, for those who insist on learning the craft, and sowing discord and tension into your family life, along with financial uncertainty and general depression, here are a few tips I’ve picked up over the years, tricks of the trade I’m happy to pass along:
Always begin your song with “Well. . .” as in, “Well, here I sit,” or, “Well, I ain’t never,” or, “Well, she was a large woman. . .” It’s effective if you can drag it out for several measures, and even more effective if you shout it—the louder the better. This is the equivalent of tapping your baton against the lectern, or clearing your throat, or throwing something, a way to capture your audience’s attention and let them know they’re about to have a song inflicted upon them. If you can’t get their attention they’ll never stop chatting and ordering drinks and smoking cigarettes, and you’ll have to abandon your dream of a life behind the footlights and go back to your dreary job in the toy factory.
Long, smooth vowels are preferred, as opposed to short, sputtery ones. Avoid consonants, if at all possible. Never use words with the letter K in them, or P. “Oooh,” is a fine choice for a vowel, the favorite of many songwriters, and the longer you stretch it out the finer it is. Some songs have nothing but “oooh” in them, though I don’t advise going down that road. It grows tedious and people stop listening, or get the feeling they’ve stumbled into a meditation class. “Oh” is also a good vowel, and can be used interchangeably with “well” to begin a song, as in, “Oh, my my,” and, “Oh, say can you see.” “Ah,” however, is not recommended, as it makes people think there is a doctor with a wooden stick looking at your tonsils.
Use the word “baby” every chance you get. Do not hesitate. Throw it in there willy-nilly, like seasoning in a meatloaf. It can’t be used too often—in fact, every hit song that ever rocketed up the charts contains the word “baby,” as in, “Baby, I miss you,” and, “Baby, come home,” and, “Baby, don’t take the television.” Combine it with one of the longer vowels and you now have the recipe for a million seller, and can start thinking about paving the driveway. “Oooh, baby,” and “Oh, baby,” are timeless lines that echo throughout history. Elizabethan minstrels and troubadours used them, Druids chanted them under the trees, Australian aborigines employed them in their ceremonies, and I believe they can even be found in the Talmud.
It’s a good idea to come up with a melody for your song people can hum, a catchy tune that gets into their heads and stays there for days and drives them crazy, like “The Flintstones,” or, “Gilligan’s Island.” The official songwriting term for such a melody is ear worm, and an ear worm is always a good thing to have. Make sure you get one. I don’t know how. If you can cobble together a rousing chorus that everyone wants to sing along with, that’s another big plus, as long as you avoid making it a singing-in-the-round chorus, such as “Frere Jacques,” or, “Row, Row Your Boat.” This would be a mistake. Round singing has been declared illegal in every nation of the world, except France. They still like it over there, but they also like to eat snails and horse meat.
I’ll bring this discussion to a close with a few frequently asked questions:
Q: What comes first, the words or the music?
A: Yes.
Q: I’ve written a song. What do I do now?
A: I have no idea. Be happy about it, I guess. Some people keep them in a drawer.
Q: What’s the proper way to pitch a song?
A: I’ve found the best way to pitch one is to make sure it’s wadded up into a very tight ball. That way it won’t come uncrumpled and lose velocity on the way to the trash can.
Q: Do you have a list of publishers looking for material?
A: I suppose there are publishers out there looking for new songs, but they certainly haven’t been looking for mine. Maybe you’ll have better luck.
Q: How do I get my songs to Garth Brooks or Snoop Dog?
A: I don’t have a clue.
Q: Should I get an agent?
A: This is not a “should” question. It’s a “can you?” question, and the answer is no. Agents are interested in making money, and as a species they gave up on songwriters early in the last century.
Q: How do I get a record contract?
A: The Columbia Record Company used to have a deal where you paid full price for the first album and got the second one for a penny. You might call them and see if they’re still offering that.
I hope all of this has been of some help. My plan is to stick it into an envelope and send it to Mr. Dimmler and his sheep up there in Idaho, and hope it satisfies them. If any of you have further questions, I suggest they be sent to the estate of Irving Berlin. Or, if you can find an address for Diane Warren, perhaps she can help you. Personally, I intend to get out of this songwriting racket and start playing clawhammer banjo instead. It’s more socially acceptable.
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