Category: Songwriting

Grace · Me · Songwriting

There’s A Circle Of Grace

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Walter Brueggemann talks about the way that the Christian life can be summed up in two words – Gift and Task.

This post is definitely gift. I’ve been trying to write this song for a couple of weeks. I had the phrase ‘circle of grace’ that popped up in something I read, and I already had the words ‘where the lost can be found, and the bound can be freed.’

It took some time to realise what the song needed to be – two halves with something linking between the two. It seems that songs have a life of their own, and part of the craft of songwriting is to help bring that song to life. Was it Michaelangelo who described the work of a sculptor as bringing out the figure that is already there in the stone. Just removing the stone that is not part of the figure …

Anyway, here it is. Lyrics below and rough recording on BandCamp. Circle of Grace

Where the lost can be found

And the bound can be freed
There’s a far away place
That’s calling to me

Where the hungry are fed
And the dead can be raisedq
There’s a far away place
That’s calling to me

It’s not status
or money or looks
or keeping the rules
Empty handed
we come to this kingdom of fools

It’s not knowledge
or image
or power that’s the key
There’s a circle of grace
that’s setting us free

Where the broken are healed
and the least will be lifted on high
There’s a circle of grace
That’s where you’ll find me

Where the last will be first
and the thirsty be filled
There’s a circle of grace
That’s where you’ll find me.

Jonathan Evans. Copyright 2021.

Grace and peace to you.

music · Songwriting

The Melody Of The Expression

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On my run this morning I was listening to a conversation between T-Bone Burnett and Rick Rubin. T-Bone is a musician and record producer, and Rick Rubin has an impressive CV as a producer.
They were talking about the way that lyrics have their own inherent rhythm – and sometimes for example, a lyric will have a particular feel to it that suggests it should be repeated. A hook line. It might be that the lyric is the heart of the song, and needs to be repeated. Or it might be that it just has a feel about it that is chant-like.

T-Bone then said “it’s the melody of the expression.” There’s something about words that suggest the pace of a song, or whether the melody should be bright or melancholy. Think of Jimmy Webb’s song ‘Up, up and away.’ The melody does exactly that – it goes up … and then seems to float when he gets to the line ‘… in my beautiful balloon.’

So on the way back from my run I thought I would try it. I looked up at the trees on my street and sang :
I see you up in the trees. (the melody going up on the word ‘up’)
So I carried on: I see you up in the clouds
Then, why not have: I see you everywhere I go
So it’s logical to sing: Your face is always on my mind
and then: The traces you have left behind

All in about 20 seconds. I wonder if this will result in a song. In my mind, the last line couldn’t have been anything else, and it’s strange how that line then determines where the song is going.
It’ll have to be about a) Someone who has died (Not again please! I’ve wrtitten too many of those)
or b) A lost love.

I think it will be lost love. I need to write a happy song one day. Oh Well.

Back to T-Bone. He made the observation that (in America, that is), the canned music that you hear in supermarkets and shopping centres tends to be from the 60’s. The 60’s was a time of great change and at the same time great optimism. So many of the songs reflect that mood, and it was a time when the music industry was young.

It seems that there is a tendency for movements and organisations to feel fresh at the beginning, but over time become jaded and bound by the pressures of success.

So – tasks ahead
1) Continue the song from above …
2) Write a happy song.
3) Write a song about songwriting with the line ‘The melody of the expression’

Ron Sexsmith has a song about songwriting. here it is: This Song

I brought a song into this world
Just a melody with words
It trembles here before my eyes
How can this song survive

I brought it to the tower of gold
In my coat of many holes
I came unarmed, they’ve got knives
How can this song survive

Oh now, I can’t help wondering how it is
How someone like you exists
When all around you bullets fly
You don’t seem to notice them go by
How can this song survive

Oh now, I see the game I’m up against
No wonder I feel so afraid
For every song you ever heard
How many more have died at birth
Oh how, how can this song survive

I brought a song into this world
Just a melody with words
It trembles here before my eyes
How can this song survive
I came unarmed
They’ve all got knives
How can this song survive
Until we finally say goodbye
How, how can this song survive
I wonder how, I wonder why

Songwriters: SEXSMITH, RON
Publisher: Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Me · music · Songwriting

In Memory Of A Friend

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A few weeks ago, my son-in-law sent me a link to a podcast interviewing songwriters – the one he had recommended was the ‘Broken Record’ podcast episode with Jack White and Brendan Benson of the Raconteurs. It was good to hear songwriters talking about the art of writing songs and not just telling stories about life on the road etc.

So, since then I’ve looked to see who else I might listen to, and just yesterday finished the episode with Joe Henry. You may not have heard of him, but he’s produced a 15 solo albums over the last 30 years, and also been involved in projects with such people as Solomon Burke, Bonny Raitt, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello and many more. I first heard Joe Henry back in the early 90’s when someone recommended the album ‘Kindness of the World.’

It’s so good to hear someone talking about songwriting and to recognise some of the ways I work in what they are saying.

I’ve been working on a song for a few weeks, and just finished it, I think. It may need some tweaks, but essentially it’s there.
It was triggered off by a line in a book by Will Cohu – The Wolf Pit. The book is a memoir of his growing up in a sheep farming community in North Yorskhire. The line that caught my eye was this ‘The black dog had backed him in a corner.’
The black dog in question was depression, and the person was Will’s uncle Robert. It’s a deperately sad story of how someone tried to fight this disease, and the way his friends and family tried to help him.

I wrote the song, and just as I was beginning to feel that it was finished, it all came back to me.
When I was in the last few years of school, I had a friend called Tim. We didn’t go to the same school – In those days of selective education where I grew up, I was at the High School and Tim was at one of the Secondary Modern Schools. This was back in the late 60’s early 70’s.

The High School for Boys was one of the choices of school if you had passed the 11 plus exam. The education there was more academic, and I remember having to drop subjects like music, art, and woodwork when I was 13 in favour of Latin, History, French and German.

Anyway, I got to know Tim when he turned up at our church youth group, and we started to get to know each other outside the Sunday evening gatherings. He introduced me to his younger sister, Penny, and his parents. His Father was a gifted pianist, and Tim was likewise gifted. He had a similar ability to his father in playing the piano – whtout music and completely untrained. In addition he had an instintive feel for electronics. At the age of around 16, he had built a telephone exchange in the garden shed. In those days it was all mechanical relays, triggered by electrical impulses. He built it such that there was a telephone in every room of the house, all controlled by the complicated arrangement in the shed.

At that time, young people like Tim usually ended up in the Secondary Modern School, because he wasn’t academic in the traditional sense. Yet he was, in many ways, far more gifted than I was. I think someone like Tim would be spotted today as ‘gifted and talented,’ and would have access to a wider range of opportunities.

Back to the telephone exchange in the shed – the thing was, he had designed all of this in his head. At the same time, I was beginning to get some rudimentary grasp of electricity in A level Physics, and was familiar with simple calculations, which I would do on paper. What Tim had done was way more complex and it seemed that he could just think about an electrical circuit and know instinctively what values he should assign the resistors and capacitors in each circuit. I guess he was some sort of savant.

At the same time, Tim was an incurable romantic. He was madly in love with a girl, and she became the subject of our conversations, me as the listener as he poured out his feelings for the girl, and his uncertainties about whether this love was going to be returned.
I suppose this went on for a couple of years. He got to know the object of his love and took her out, and gave her gifts, but there was always this feeling in my mind that he was building this romance up into something that it wasn’t.

The time came when I went away to University to study engineering. It was at the beginning of one of holidays that I found out. I had got home at the end of term and my parents told me that he had died. They hadn’t wanted to tell me until I got home. I missed the funeral. I don’t think I went round to see his parents or his sister. I wasn’t mature enough to think of that. Tim had driven his car up to a nearby beauty spot on the South Downs (a place he had often taken his girlfriend) and taken an overdose.

I can’t remember much about how it affected me, but it must have done. Although it was a bit of a one way friendship, with me being a more or less permanent shoulder to cry on, he was a good friend.

Here’s the song lyrics, and a link to the song

Black Dog

A good friend of mine
was great to have around
but lately we had found
he had another side

The little pills
supposed to make him better
just became a fetter
He couldn’t let ‘em go

He was a lovable man and he tried
We let him know that we were always on his side

The old black dog
had backed him in a corner
buzzing like a hornet
wouldn’t let him go

He tried to fight it
Be normal like his friends
Not having to pretend
But it’s a long way back

He was a desperate man and we tried
but in the end there was nowhere to hide

He locked his car
sat smoking in the shade
he had overstayed
now it’s time to go

The old black dog
that had backed him in a corner
buzzing like a hornet
wouldn’t let him go

Jonathan Evans April 2021.

music · Songwriting

Thoughts On Constructing A Building

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Well, not a building actually, more a song. I was listening to apodcast the other day that features songwriters being interviewed. So far I have listened to Dan Penn and more recently Jimmy Webb. They were both fascinating in their different ways.

One of the stories Dan Penn tells goes back to when he was around 16, and out with a group of friends. Someone would ask a question like – Do you like fried chicken, and his friend would answer ‘Is a blue bird blue ?’
(It’s like ‘Is the Pope a catholic ?’). As the evening went on, this became a running joke, and somewhere in his brain, Dan stored up that line, and it emerged in one of his first lyrics, which became a hit for Conway Twitty in 1960.

Well, me and my girl went out the other night,
Down lovers lane we were walkin
She said, Honey child, do you love me?
Right away I started talkin.

Is a bluebird blue?
Has a cat got a tail?
Hmm, is a blue bird blue?
Well honey, I love you.

So to Jimmy Webb. In 1998 or so, Jimmy Webb wrote a book – Tunesmith – about the art of songwriting, which of course, as an amateur songwriter I had to have. I’ve just started reading it, and it’s reassuring to see that some of the things I have been doing instinctively are part of the songwriters craft.
I want to quote a section from the book where he likens writing a song to building a structure of some sort – a house, a barn, a block of flats or whatever.

Firstly you have to have an idea of what it is you’re building. In other words, to start with, you need to know what the song is about. You need the big idea. And, in the same way that a building uses a variety of materials, you song will use a variety of words.

Here’s the quote: ‘In the dictionary, he finds oaken words, words of stone and paper, plywood words and words like steel beams, words of ironwood and ash, rich resonant words of mahogany and cherry, rococo words that swirl like burled walnut, simple pungent pine words, heavy words of dark ebony, ephemeral, silly words of balsa, everlasting words of marble and granite, and translucent words like coloured glass, along with blunt, pragmatic words, made of lead and cement.’

Jimmy Webb talks about the importance of having a good dictionary and thesaurus to hand – which almost felt to me like cheating, but actually isn’t. Although his book is called Tunesmith, a songwriter must also be a wordsmith, which means having a love for words themselves, for the way they sound, for the innate rhythm that a word has, for rhyme and texture, for the way one word can sit comfortably next to another, or not, depending on how you need to use it. For a sense of whether a word is soft or hard, and the skill to make a hard word do something soft, or a soft word do something hard.

So I’ve just finished a novel called ‘Nothing but grass’ by Will Cohu. I think I’ve got an idea sparked off by the book, and some words and phrases … but, heeding Jimmy Webb’s advice, I’m not going to think aloud any more about the process … it feels like this is essentially a very private enterprise until the work is finished – that is, if it ever is.

Songwriting

A Journey To White Mountain

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The White Mountain is the name given to the Taurus mountains two hours drive inland from the village of Patara on the Turquoise coast of southern Turkey. We met Muzzafer Otlu in September 2018, and again when we returned in 2019. Muzzafer is the same age as me, born in 1953, and he recalls his early childhood, when his family were still living a nomadic life. They would leave their permanent home in Patara during the summer, and travel to the countryside around Elmlali where the climate in the mountains was cooler and more hospitable. The journey of about 100 km took three days – with camels and donkeys, and sheep and goats heading to the pastures for summer grazing. We visited the valley where they spent the summers. An idyllic place a few km from a small village called Islamar. (it would have had a greek name then). The song tries to capture something of that journey and that nomadic life.

The journey is long, the way is hard
From our house on the coast to a tent neath the stars
Together we dream as the White Mountain calls

The time has now come, the hot air is so still
From the rays of the sun, to the cool of the hills
Together we go as the White Mountain calls

Step by step, hour by hour
Day by day, until we reach our home

The smell of the pine, the clear water streams
From fields that are brown to pastures of green
Together we go as the White Mountain calls

The tents are pitched, the food is blest
We watch as the sun dies in the west
Together we dance as the White Mountain calls

Step by step, hour by hour
Day by day, until we reach our home

The fires are lit, the dogs keep watch
All through the night taking care of the flocks
Together we sit as the White Mountain calls

Step by step, hour by hour
Day by day, until we reach our home

The people we love, the place we belong
Shadows remembered, the Singer of Songs
Surrounding our steps, as we journey on
Together we leave, as the White Mountain calls
Together we leave, as the White Mountain calls

White Mountain: words & music: Jonathan Evans

Activism · faith · Greenbelt Festival, · music · Political · Song for Today · Songwriting · World Affairs

A Song – Work In Progress

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I don’t think I’ve posted one of my own songs before, but here goes. If you’ve been following me, you’ll know that I am trying to understand the situation in the Middle East, especially as it applies to the relationship between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza.

One of the defining moments in the last 100 years was what Palestinians call Nakba – the time in 1948 when Palestinian families were forced to leave their homes. One of the accounts of that event is told by Sami Awad, and tells how his grandfather, living in Jerusalem with his family, lost his life to a bullet. The truth of what happened that day is disputed, but whatever that truth is, his death was caused by the actions of Israel.

I wrote a song that tries to capture something of those events. It’s just a home version, with me doing all the singing and playing, and it’s very rough round the edges, but it’s a story that I needed to tell. The last 72 years have seen the bitter fruit of those days in 1948, with the loss of access to water, expulsion from the ancestral lands, frequent loss of the olive trees that are a symbol of Palestinian life and the perils of losing the heritage seeds that tell the story of day to day life in the foods that are eaten.

Amos Trust is a small human rights organisation – find out more about the situation here

My song is actually work in progress. I need to do some more work on it, but I wanted to put it out there. I am a songwriter, who like many others, dreams of others seeing the value of their work and making it their own. So if anyone out there wants to take the song and do something with it, let me know.

Here it is: Catastrophe

Grace and peace

Songwriting

Working Hard At Writing Songs

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One of the challenges for me is comong up with new songs. I was playing the guitar yesterday, and out of nowhere came one line of words and a melody for a verse. The line was ‘Swimming against the tide.’

Now I’ve a got a whole load of ideas – the main one being to do with finding the energy and hope to keep going with something when it seems the odds are aginst you.

So I’ve got these snippets …

I don’t understand why I always have to make it hard; Growing older now, should I try to make it easy on myself

I’m getting tired now – think I’ll just sit back and go with the flow

Going against the grain, I’ve got splinters in my hands; Swimming against the tide, I’m just making waves

I’ll come back when I’ve got more …. to be continued.

Songwriting

DADGAD Is Just Too Wonderful

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So what is DADGAD … it’s a guitar tuning that I’ve been working with almost to the exclusion of anything else for about a year. I’m trying to get better at the craft of songwriting, and my mantra is something to do with – the more songs you write, the more likely it is that you’ll eventually write a good one.

I found that with this tuning, I can come up with melodies that I would never have thought of with the regular EADGBE tuning.

So what about lyrics ? I have always thought that this my weak point, but a year ago I went to a songwriting workshop led by Boo Hewerdine, and facilitated by a great musician and community activist – George Moorey. With the teaching we had that day, I was inspired, and I’ve written about 8 songs over the last year. That may not sound lie much, but for me it’s amazing.

Most of my songs are story based, drawn from books, movies and people I’ve met. For example, one was about a fishing disaster in the early 20th century in Cornwall. I researched it from newspaper accounts, and used direct quotes to help with the song. I got really stuck a few months ago, actually right at the beginning of lockdown, and had no inspiration, but I had a starting line – ‘It’s been 39 days, since I saw the sun.’ (A reference to Noah’s Ark). Throughout January and February, it seemd like it had been raining every day, so that gave me the first line.

But that was all I had. I happened to have just started a thriller by Stephen Booth (which I never finished, by the way), and I just opened it at random and looked for interesting phrases. Somehow, I managed to put some of the phrases together into the song. I’m not entirely sure what it’s about, but it all seemed to work.

39 days

It’s been 39 days, since I saw the sun
grey clouds, the winds been blowin
the dogs are getting restless, they feel it in the air
You can’t see it yet, but you know it’s coming

Praying that the waters don’t get too high
fearing the worst as we see them rise
Looking outside and the sky is black
wondering if the sun will ever come back

I’m lying in the kitchen, face down on the floor
gravity’s got me, it’s pulling me down
I hear a voice laughing, smell the cigarette smoke
I can’t see it yet, but I know it’s coming

Praying that the waters don’t get too high …

She didn’t look up when he walked in the room
the old ‘duck and roll’ when he tried to kiss her
she said she was tired just couldn’t go on
He can’t see it yet, but he knows it’s coming

Praying that the waters don’t get too high …

It’s crouching at the door, this crown of thorns.
We can’t see it yet, but we know it’s coming

Praying that the waters don’t get too high …