Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Two songwriters walk into a bar. One of them is Leonard Cohen. The other one is Bob Dylan.
Leonard says to Bob, “That song ‘I And I’, how long did that take you to write?”
“15 minutes,’ says Bob. “That song ‘Hallelujah’, how long did that take you to write?”
“About six months,” says Leonard, later confessing, “I lied. It took a year.”
The above is an apocryphal tale by this stage, but still a useful contrast in songwriting methodologies. Some artists go for spontaneity, some go for graft, some veer between the two. Some stick within traditional strictures, some use those strictures as scaffolding to be dismantled once the job’s done.
Speaking to Nat Hentoff in a legendary March 1966 Playboy interview, Dylan spoke about the influence of folk ballad forms in typically gnomic style:
“Folk music (is) based on myths and the Bible and plague and famine and all kinds of things like that which are nothing but mystery and you can see it in all the songs…All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels… and seven years of this and eight years of that and it’s all really something that nobody can touch....(The songs) are not going to die.”
Cohen, on the other hand, employs the discipline learned as a prize-winning poet in 1960s Montreal. It was rumoured that he wrote more than 70 verses for the aforementioned ‘Hallelujah’, compressing, editing, and boiling away the artifice until he found the song’s essence. El Cohen being what he is, grown songwriters grind their teeth with envy when they see the quality of the stuff he consigns to the dumpster. Consequently, couplets from songs like ‘The Future’ and ‘Everybody Knows’ are as tightly coiled as haikus and as potent as propaganda.
What both these artists learned from Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly and Hank Williams they bequeathed to Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Tom Waits and David Bowie, who in turn passed it on to Prince, Kate Bush, Nick Cave, Jack White and Polly Jean Harvey.
And, as PJ points out, God is in the details.
“Leonard Cohen uses tiny minutiae, specifics,” she told hotpress in 2004. “Instead of ‘the tree’ he’ll say ‘the old elm’ that he walked past or something. It becomes much more universal. I find I’m much more able to relate and be moved by something that is very specifically dealing with a tiny detail or a thing that happened.
“The only time I feel close to the songs is when I’m writing,” she continued, “and when they’re finished, they’ve gone already, they don’t feel connected to me any more. I like the idea that the songs are written for other people to go and buy and have and it’s theirs really to do what they want with it, it’s not mine and I’ve let go of it long before.”
Similarly, Tom Waits likens his swift and unceremonious working methods to making three legged chairs: soon as they can stand on their own, move onto the next one. Keith Richards reckons the best way to avoid writer’s block is to accept that you’re not so much the originator of the music as the transmitter, thus removing personal ego from the equation. Neil Young is equally dismissive of The Block. If the songs aren’t coming, he revels in the time off and goes fishing.
Sometimes technology helps. When Lou Reed acquired a word processor, the quantum leap in efficiency and swift lyric editing enabled him to produce a triptych of albums in rapid succession (New York, Songs For Drella with John Cale, Magic & Loss) that equalled, and arguably eclipsed, his epochal Velvets and Berlin periods. Then there’s good old-fashioned book-learning: Bruce Springsteen read a small library’s worth of American and Mexican history books and social studies as part of the research for The Ghost Of Tom Joad.
“The muse is most likely to visit when you’re sitting at your desk working,” CS Lewis once said. Like any craftsman or woman, most songwriters will tell you they can spend an entire week waiting around for a 10-minute burst of inspiration. Nick Cave, after years of dissolution and psychodrama, decided the best way to get anything done was rent an office a few minutes from his family home, show up there at 7.30 and keep at it until close of business, six days a week.
“The more I carry on with what I’m doing,” he told hotpress in 1998, “the more it seems that if I do the basic things that are required of me as an artist, and that’s really just to turn up at the piano, to turn up to the page, then the work comes, the ideas come. It’s my duty to try to remain open to them. I think it’s about remaining honest about you do, and if you can somehow hold onto some integrity, then you will be given the ideas.
“I know it all sounds a bit twee and a bit… whatever, but I do see ideas and inspiration as simply that, as a gift. I think it’s given freely as long as you treat it properly, as long as you’re not abusive to your imagination, or to inspiration, or to your muse, your God, however you want to put it.
“I know how I could dry up, and that would be if I started to exploit my own music, if I started to use music in order to make money, to become more popular. If that started to be the point behind my music, I know I wouldn’t be given songs for much longer, or if I did, they’d be bad.”
One of Nick’s heroes, Van Morrison, summed it in language that stressed the elevated and the mundane in equal measure:
“Turning lead into gold/On the road/Listening to the engine’s drone/And searching, searching for the philosopher’s stone.”