Writing Songs

I have come away on my own to write songs. Surprisingly, I got stuck in straight away yesterday afternoon when I got here, which was exhausting and I slept like a log last night.

I did something similar two years ago, but was much more relaxed about everything and went for copious walks in the sunshine (it was January in Devon and freakishly beautiful).

This time around the songs are for a specific purpose, and break the usual mould of chord sounds and imagery: they are storytelling songs that reject metaphors. One of yesterday's efforts was utter rubbish, but in an odd way that was quite a good result; the rubbish has to go somewhere, and out on a page is better than inside your head messing everything up in secret. At least I recognise rubbish when I hear it!

Annoyingly, I managed to leave the book that lyrics belong in at home, and had to go to buy a cheap notebook. It's got rough paper (supposedly for drawing on), but it's quite satisfying to scribble upon, making a scraping, scratchy sound with a suitably irritable timbre.

One of the things you realise is that you can't just sit there and 'songwrite' for hours on end; you need thinking time, so you need to wander around outside and daydream. That's one of my favourite activities, and even though I've booked a fairly grim, cheap hotel to stay in, the sun is shining and the walking around bits are fun. I've drunk the tea of three people (it's a last minute room with lots of supplies) so will have to take a proper break soon.

I've seen some astonishingly weird things: a young embarrassed-looking man in a short-sleeved polo shirt, carrying a tiny white-painted metal cage with a bright yellow cockatiel inside it down the very busy high street (the cockatiel looked very happy and self-important); a busker unpacking an acoustic guitar from its case, strumming a few chords, then burping really loudly; a serious-looking woman with an absolutely enormous stuffed plush duck attached to her wheelie suitcase, very early this morning; and two abseiling engineers in orange hi-vis sliding themselves up the very thin wires of the bridge in the sunshine, looking like some strange musical score that moves up and down before the instrumentalists can catch up with it.

For once, writing a blog post doesn't feel like procrastination. There's a mist of song ideas swirling around inside my head, and I have to wait for it to settle. Ideas that 'belonged' to one song have landed on an entirely different one. I've also written a guitar part that is impossible to play with my current skills, but that's probably a good thing too, because it'll have to be rehearsed until it comes easy.

I wonder if I can intercept one of the cleaners, and ask for some more tea bags.