The Agony and Ecstasy of Songwriting
Friday, August 23rd, 2024: Arts, Music & Dance.
Afro-Goth Fusion
This Dispatch is going to be a deep dive into the creative process. I know most of you are music lovers and hope you find it interesting – raw and unfiltered from the horse’s mouth instead of highly processed in movies like Once or the upcoming A Complete Unknown.
The last time I wrote new songs was over a decade ago – and those were just experiments, nothing memorable. After that, I became concerned about the hundreds of hours of archival recordings I’d accumulated with bands and friends, and began editing and releasing some of those. Meanwhile I was writing my epic novel and starting on a big painting. It wasn’t until early 2020 that I got the itch to write new songs. Maybe reviewing those archival tapes had reminded me of the era in which I matured as a musician – the post-punk years of 1978-1980 – because it finally hit me that although that’s what got me started, I’d only written a few true post-punk songs, instead plunging straight into primarily instrumental experimentation with my band, Terra Incognita.
I felt that the purest form of that original post-punk sound had been achieved by New Order immediately after Ian Curtis’s suicide, in their 1981 recordings of “Ceremony” and “Dreams Never End”. But rather than developing it further, they abandoned it in favor of club dance music.
I had always assumed that my mature guitar style was an adaptation of Appalachian bluegrass flatpicking to the call-and-response guitar riffs in Nigerian juju bands. But looking back, I realized that the classic post-punk sound – marching-band drums, clean guitar and bass tones fattened with the chorus effect, melodic bass, and droning or purely rhythmic guitar riffs – was not only one of my main inspirations. It freed every alt-rock and indie-rock band after that from the blues-rock cliches of the Sixties, and that classic post-punk sound is now renewed by every new generation of rock bands.
I wanted to acknowledge and honor that pillar of my legacy, and in early 2020 I recorded some instrumental tracks to my favorite post-punk beats and did some vocal improv over them. Then the pandemic took over, my house caught fire, and the next two years were spent trying to recover. During that hiatus, I discovered that the goth subculture, inspired by Joy Division and The Cure, had faithfully rescued that early sound and perpetuated it worldwide in a series of obscure bands that continue to this day.
Through pain, illness, trauma, and the stressful work of helping my family, I kept getting ideas and making notes about the new songs I wanted to write. In my heart, I really just wanted to write classic post-punk songs, but I’d spent decades studying and experimenting with African genres – especially my favorite, Nigerian Yoruba apala music. And as I reviewed and analyzed my work since 1980, I realized that my forté as a songwriter and composer is to invent new sounds by fusing distant, unrelated traditions – like I did with Nigerian juju and Appalachian in the Eighties, and apala and Native American in the Nineties.
I actually learned that kind of trans-oceanic fusion from the Africans. From the Fifties to the Seventies, record companies had dumped their overstock in Africa, and African musicians began adapting American country and funk instrumental styles to their tribal traditions. If Nigerians could use country-western pedal steel and the funk wah-wah pedal in juju, why couldn’t I fuse apala with post-punk or goth?
From the Heart
Occupied with family duties, I literally didn’t have time for music until I was forced to make time in April of this year, setting Katie’s songs to music for her ceremony. That, and the ceremonial handover of African drums from a colleague, a few months later, have provided the impetus for my new songwriting effort.
Turning Katie’s lyrics into songs proved to be easy, and I began wondering if the pain and trauma would end up making me a better songwriter and singer – that’s the old cliche. Singing lyrics that poor lost Katie had addressed directly to me definitely got my heart into my voice. Here’s the latest, a true story from the beginning of our relationship:
After finishing a series of Katie’s songs, I sat down and organized my notes, which included dozens of potential themes or ideas for songs. But of all those songwriting notes I’d accumulated since 2020, the most urgent was to “write from your heart”. In the past, the work of inventing new genres had allowed my brain to dominate. I’d written songs about things that inspired me in nature and prehistory, but by the time I finished the songs I’d ironed most of my feelings out of them.
More recently, when I wrote lyrics and tried singing them over instrumental tracks, they always came out as either too cerebral or as plaintive, mystical garbage, which is a rut I used to get in when smoking pot.
Making it even harder, in addition to evoking strong feelings in my songs, I was still determined to work outside existing genres, making everything up as I go along, combining instruments, rhythms, melodies, and harmonies from exotic and obscure traditions, while showing my love of nature and indigenous cultures and embodying the questions I’ve pursued and the lessons I’ve learned from an adventurous life. I always need a challenge.
Clear Creek Canyon Girl
Fortunately, there was one subject that was still fresh in my heart – an encounter with the past in Indian country, in which I fell in love with someone who was about as inaccessible as you could get. I decided to start with that.
I started out by writing the story of my impossible love in the form of rhythmic lines, but when I tried various ways of setting those lines to music – with African drums, drum kit sounds, a bass line, or guitar chords – by the end of the day I was back in the same old boring rut.
So I studied my music library for inspirations – beats or structures I could adapt. I don’t normally use other people’s music for inspiration, but this was a special case. Maybe I could use other peoples’ songs as disruptors to prevent me from falling into past ruts.
I started with PJ Harvey’s “The Wheel”. I spent another day using that as a touchstone – and I do love the song – but it turned out to be totally the wrong feel for my story.
So on the third day I turned to New Order’s “Love Vigilantes”. I like the song, and I love the power and simplicity of New Order’s rhythm tracks, but mainly I had the idea that the story resonated with mine in some nonintuitive way. To make things easier on myself, I settled on drum kit sounds as a placeholder, hoping to work the African drums in later. The “Love Vigilantes” approach worked, but you’d be hard-pressed to recognize the inspiration in the final result!
Each time I started over, I deleted six or eight hours of previous hard work, which takes motivation and discipline. On all three days, I was in pain and taking meds, and the meds pushed the pain into the background enough for me to work. I had to get my heart and mind to work together somehow – fiendishly tricky.
I finished it on that third day, and the result literally had me in tears. Maybe it wasn’t just the tragic love story – maybe those years of pain and trauma had something to do with it. In any event, the joy I feel after an accomplishment like this is better than anything else in life.
And the song was long – almost six minutes! Afterward, I happened to hear Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on the radio. A six-minute tragic folk ballad, it reached the top of the pop music charts in 1976. Can you imagine something like that competing with Taylor Swift today?
I can’t share my new song with you until it’s ready for legal distribution – weeks of further work – but here’s a snippet of “Clear Creek Canyon Girl”:
Stranger to the World
After that success, I was really stoked, but it still wasn’t Afro-Goth. I didn’t know what it was, it seemed a one-off like many of my compositions. So for the next song I went for broke and took New Order’s “Dreams Never End” as my inspiration – a track that’s sacred to me. The subject would be my childhood pastor, who set me on a life path as a seeker. I wanted to honor him while showing how hard a path it is.
I started writing lines based on the phrasing of “Dreams Never End”, but as I might’ve expected, I soon lost control of the subject. What was it about? My long-lost pastor, or my entire life story? How could I narrow it down and turn it into something that might engage an unfamiliar listener?
I recorded a rhythm track roughly inspired by DNE, using software drum kit sounds, and tried singing some of the lines I’d written over it, finding a key that seemed to work with my voice, and a chord progression I could alternate repeatedly. But the lines I’d written were woefully incomplete, so I spent the next two weeks trying to outline the song and focus the theme, in between doing rehab exercises and struggling with the side effects – insomnia, hot flashes, splitting headaches – from a shot of prednisone a doctor had given me for pain. This, after finishing the first song in three days! This is my kind of art, moments of ecstasy separated by days of agony.
But after seven or eight drafts I finally got something that was enigmatic but heartfelt, triggering tears again by the time I reached the end. I’d recorded an acoustic guitar track to sing over, and now I added bass and electric guitar, still trying for that post-punk sound.
But now, it had so many echoes of the New Order song, I realized I had to make big changes to avoid a copyright issue. I slowed the tempo way down, and that actually allowed me to put more feeling into my vocals. Then I realized the tempo was similar to one of my favorite apala songs, so I recorded syncopated talking drum tracks using big and little drums. In the past I’ve used banjo to take the place of lamellophone (mbira, thumb piano) in apala, so I tried a banjo track. But that made it sound way too folky, so I tried the same part on bass, and the song really began to work.
I muted the original drum kit tracks – the song seemed to be working with just talking drums, electric bass, and electric guitar. But now that I was closing in on it, I discovered I didn’t really have an ending – I just had a series of verses, all with the same phrasing. The last set of lines could be used as an ending, but I wanted them to have a different chord progression and melody, something climactic. I remembered a brief passage in a song that’s been playing on an LA radio station I listen to daily, a song by an obscure indie-pop band from the early Nineties. An achingly beautiful melody with a seven-chord progression that occurs once in the middle of the song.
I fit that to the existing key of my song and recorded a track with the guitar chords at the end. Singing over them in that melody took my voice a little too high for comfort, and totally changed the character of the song, but I decided to keep it for now. Now, the song seemed too powerful for just the talking drums, so I tried adding the kit drum sounds back in, and voila! Afro-Goth!
After listening to it from the beginning, I realized the main melody was just too close to New Order’s. I mean, the beat was now completely different, none of the instrumental parts were similar, but I’d succeeded in singing too much like Peter Hook. So I experimented to see if I could “apalafy” the vocal melody, using melismatic singing. That actually worked, in that I ended up loosening and putting soul into what had previously been a bleak, metronomic performance.
But the ending still bothered me, and my heart sank when I listened to the full song on my big speakers, and the new ending melody suddenly reminded me of a famous, sappy old pop song, probably by Barry Manilow.
What could I possibly do after investing this much time and work? The answer turned out to be simple. I ignored the high-pitched melody from the indie-pop song and sang my final lines in a lower register over the same chord progression, to a melody I just made up. At first I sounded a little like Elvis doing a gospel standard, but that inspired me to put even more soul into it. It ended up subtly evoking early rhythm & blues.
That inspired me to go back and let my lyrics take the phrasing and melody even farther from the New Order song, so that no one would recognize a connection now.
Here’s a snippet of “Stranger to the World”. Can you hear the talking drums?
Nice Rasta Max