A bit on chords

Have been reading some books on songwriters and songwriting that friends have lent me. I have two about or by Dylan, one huge one full of interviews with musicians as diverse as Leonard Cohen and John Fogerty, and the book by Joe Boyd I mentioned in an earlier post. None really go into how chords can be a start for a tune.

Let me give an example of what I mean:

Take the open G-major chord on the guitar and modify it by changing the high E to a high D. Let it ring, and find a chord that plays well with it - like an A seventh or a modified open C - where the high C note becomes a high D (the fingers are held like a G major).

Bruce Cockburn has a song called “Last Night in the World” that uses those ringing chords. Maybe that is how he writes, since his lyrics are usually very cerebral. By that I mean that it seems that the music comes first, or is given the higher artistic priority and effort. His songs seem to be more musical than lyrical, although he claims in an interview that he writes the lyric first. One band not listed in the books I mention is Crash Vegas, and I think their lyrics are some of the best.

But back to the process for a second... Modifying chords, which in a sense are musical cliche's can open up avenues of composition, because the modification can be jarring, or just differrent. The new is a form of inspiration, and creating the new from the basis of the common chord is another way.

I have written songs by doing the lyric and then trying to match it to a riff or melody after the fact. Francis Cabrel, in a TV documentary said that he spends more time on the lyric, and then has a pool of guitar harmonies he tries to fit them to. I see that as a sensible approach, the mash up. Both the lyric and the music bend a little and you get a nice recipe. I envy Dylan and his apparent facility to put his wild lyrics to very simple chord patterns - consider “Isis” or "I and I”. It is probably his delivery that saves the music from dulling the lyric. It still doesn’t stop others from covering him. It is different somehow with Leonard Cohen, covers often sound better to me than his delivery. I think he polishes more, whereas Dylan is spontaneous and so totally confident, like an actor.

I like the spontaneity best, it is the seed, and sometimes it needs to be nurtured, at other times, just eaten.