This one is my attempt at addressing the urgent shortage of songs about trains and feeling sad. As in previous posts, the lyrics and music are by me. I then uploaded my own piano/guitar version to Suno, which generated the cover version. (This involved numerous failed attempts, in which it insisted on rearranging the song in bizarre ways, but I eventually got to a pretty faithful version that I think has a nice, train-like shuffle to it.) Again, none of the voices or instruments in this recording are real.

Lyrics

The station clock is showing
a quarter to one.
Soon you’ll be going.
Soon you’ll be gone.
I wait with you.
Quarter to blue.

People are waiting
in the waiting rooms.
The future is waiting.
Loneliness looms.
I’m sitting with you.
Ten to blue.

(Nine to blue.)
And all I want to say
(Eight to blue.)
is won’t you stay?
(Seven to blue.)
But I know it’s clear
(Six to blue.)
there’s nothing I can do
to keep you here.

Announcer announcing
the train is on time.
I see it approaching,
coming down the line.
I watch with you.
Five to blue.

(Four to blue.)
(Three to blue.)
(Two to blue.)
(One to blue.)

The whistle is blowing,
ready to depart.
Conductor is closing
the door on my heart.
I look at you.
The clock strikes blue.

I look at you.
The clock strikes blue.

Downloadable audio

Full collection over on YouTube or Instagram.

Another song for a Sunday morning, and for anyone who can tolerate the weirdness of listening to AI-performed music, albeit human-written.

This one came from my own recording with guitar, piano and (for once) a rough bass line, which the AI stuck to pretty faithfully while generating the cover version. I like how it goes a bit Bruce Hornsby in the instrumental part.

Once again, the title is an idiom that the song unpacks and takes more literally than usual.

Lyrics

Caught in two minds,
both of them on you.
Caught in two kinds
of mind for you.

One that thinks I want you.
One that’s shrinking from you
One that dreams about you.
One that seems to doubt you.

Caught in two minds,
both of them on you.

Caught in two minds.
Don’t know what to do.
Caught in two kinds
of mind for you.

One that sees the future.
One that sees the danger.
One whose head was turned.
One who has been burned.

Caught in two minds,
one of either kind.
Which of you minds
is my real mind?

One that dreams about you.
One that seems to doubt you.
One that thinks I want you.
One that's shrinking from you.

Caught in two minds.
Caught in two minds.
Caught in two minds.
Caught in two minds.

Downloadable audio

Full collection over on YouTube or Instagram.

As you’ll hopefully have gathered from previous posts, this Songwritings adventure has recently evolved. Previously, it was Nick writing songs, the very real Kate van der Borgh bringing them to life, and both of us having written conversations about it all. More recently, Kate has been fully committed to novel writing and Nick has been tinkering with the eerie technology of AI.

The outcome was Thirteen Paper Moons – an album of songs written by Nick and brought to (a kind of) life by AI. As explained in previous posts, this isn’t a predictable or controllable process. It involves uploading a recording of the song to Suno, and rolling the dice with some creative prompting. You can’t tweak or edit the result – if it’s not right, you roll the dice again and it often comes back totally different.

Here’s another product of that process – downloadable audio, lyrics and notes below. I’ll continue posting a few on idle Sundays, and maybe they’ll add up to that difficult second album.

Audio

Lyrics

I plough a lonely furrow
across the stony ground.
I sow my seeds of sorrow
as evening comes around.
When the river freezes
and the hour comes to sleep,
I’ll fall and call on Jesus
and pray my soul to keep.

This winter I’ll be buried
inside the stony soil.
My soul will soon be carried
far from tears and toil.
When the river’s flowing
and winter turns to spring,
a field of flowers growing
for you, my love, I’ll bring.

When the river’s flowing
and winter turns to spring,
a field of flowers growing
for you, my love, I’ll bring.

Notes

Again, this started with a title that plays off a common idiom. I find it interesting to take a familiar phrase and follow it to see where it goes. I also had in mind first-person song titles like ‘I dreamed I saw St Augustine’ and ‘I pity the poor immigrant’ by Bob Dylan, which I always think have a particular feel to them.

In this case, it goes in a melancholy direction that I like to think is about the urge to create art that outlives the artist. I suspect it was also influenced by having read Ulverton recently – on Kate’s recommendation, so she’s still involved.

Full collection over on YouTube or Instagram.

For the uninitiated, this is a collection of Tin Pan Alley-style songs where I write the words and music, record myself playing them, then upload the recordings to a website called Suno and generate ‘cover versions’ by AI. The resulting music consists entirely of singers and musicians who do not exist, but it’s my way of bringing to life songs that would otherwise barely exist either.

Before launching into Side 2, a word about AI music in general.

I’m keenly aware of how strange and soulless it is to have songs performed by disembodied algorithms, trained on a body of work that almost certainly involves unpaid artists and copyright infringements. For that reason, I know many people will be against AI music on principle.

For my part, my ethical lodestar is that human creativity is a good thing. Copyright law is a vital way of protecting it, but there are cases where it can limit creativity. In important ways, especially with amateur art that barely registers a blip on the radar, I think the concept of ‘fair use’ is a fair one. If I’ve written original songs and can use this technology to bring them to life, while not directly appropriating anyone’s voice, playing, words or composition, then it feels strange not to use a tool like that – while being honest about its provenance and not pretending it’s the same as the real thing.

There’s also the aesthetic question of whether it simply lacks life and spark. In most cases, that feels true, although it’s also true of some human music. But in some cases, I find it uncanny how sensitively a song can be delivered by this dumb robot.

All this plays into a question Kate and I have returned to in these conversations: to what extent does a song exist as a thing, separate from its performance? If some near-extinction event happened and, for some reason, the only versions of Beatles songs that survived were AI cover versions on a dusty hard drive, and some future civilisation unearthed them, would there not be untold artistic value in that discovery? Not as good as finding the real recordings, but still encoding much of what makes them of value – the lyrics, the melodies, the writing of them?

On some level, that’s how I conceptualise these recordings – putting my songs into some form other than crap recordings of myself singing, and with more life to it than simply releasing sheet music that no one would have much motivation to play, given that I’m neither Beck nor Beethoven. (I always liked that Beck concept of releasing an album purely of sheet music.) My hope is that people can see through the limits of AI performance and find some value in the songs themselves, as things.

Anyway. I had Stephin Merritt / Cole Porter in mind with this one – going for that genre of urbane, literary wit, combined with utter heartbreak. For once, there’s no bridge, just three verses. I feel it has a stately, chamber-music kind of vibe that didn’t need to be broken up, almost like the singer doesn’t have the energy to do so.

Along with ‘One of these days’, I feel this one is more of an ‘exercise’ that ends up closer to pastiche than the other tracks. The lyrics are undeniably pleased with themselves – all clever-clever rhyming (“this devotion, al / -beit notional” 🤓). But I think it’s offset by the naive happiness of the sentiment, and I like the way the melody skips along and builds.

I admire the way the AI delivers this one, strange as that is to write. In some other dimension, I like to think of this song sneaking onto Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning, and music critics being confused to find out it was written by some twat in northern England.

I’ll be my own hype man on this one – I think it’s good. Musically, I like short songs that don’t overstay their welcome, and I think the melody has a nice lilt, with a bridge that wanders off and circles back neatly. Lyrically, I hope it has that combination of conversational and crafted. For example, the first verse reads as a single sentence that you can imagine someone saying naturally in conversation, but the rhymes happen to fall in the right places. “Rose-tinted blues are the sentimental KIND that make you reminISCE on a time that you MISS that only exISts in your MIND.”

I’ve heard the 32-bar verse-verse-bridge-verse song described as the American sonnet. (At least, I think I’ve heard that – maybe I made it up.) But it’s a good comparison – both lend themselves to a train of thought unfolding naturally, incorporating a bridge/turn before reaching a resolution.

By the way, this is called ‘Rose-tinted blues’ but isn’t a blues song. Blues-tinged maybe, but not blues. I’m convinced this is OK – Bob Dylan does it.

Another song that takes a familiar idiom (going out of my mind) and returns it to its literal meaning. The whole song is someone journeying out their mind and experiencing love as a kind of psychedelic experience. It has one of those intros that you get in old-school songs. And it has a chorus!

This is a strange one – a children’s song in its innocent melody and verses, but a grown-up, world-weary song in the stoical spirit of the refrain. Partly singing to the listener, partly an internal monologue from someone just about clinging on. The AI renders the song faithfully as I recorded it, but the nature of the voice turns it into something more ethereal – it reminds me a little of Imogen Heap, who Kate first switched me onto.

And finally this one – written before any of the other songs, back in around 2011. Short and sweet, about the birth of a (my) child after a period of seeming like it wouldn’t happen. Again, the AI renders it faithfully, complete with a bassline that I roughly included in my recording. Maybe it’s just me and my sentimentality, but I find the performance of this song almost supernaturally good. The piano flourishes towards the end, the tone of the vocal, the general vibe – it’s all exactly what I had in mind, and I like it as a coda to this little collection.

To whomever I’m still talking to, thanks for being interested in all this.

Thirteen Paper Moons is available free on YouTube and nowhere else. Spotify, Soundcloud, Bandcamp and all the others have a policy of no AI-generated music. It’s a policy I understand in the grand scheme of things, even though it’s strange to be in a position of creating something that I feel is wholly me in its essence, but is considered taboo by publishing platforms. Maybe that makes me rock ’n’ roll and edgy, or just even more of a twat from northern England.

Again, this is a post from me (Nick) while fellow traveller (Kate) wanders wearily through Second Novel World.

In the last post, I released Thirteen Paper Moons – a collection of Tin Pan Alley-style songs where I write the words and music, record myself playing them, then upload the recordings to a website called Suno and generate ‘cover versions’ by AI. The resulting music consists entirely of singers and musicians who do not exist, but it’s my way of bringing to life songs that would otherwise barely exist either.

For anyone interested, here are a few notes on each of the tracks.

This was the first song Kate and I recorded together. We took a ‘make it weird’ approach and I loved the echoing harmonies in the last verse in particular. But a few lines in the lyrics bugged me (the end of the second verse mainly), and I’ve put that right in this AI version.

I remember writing the song based on the theory that many classic song titles involve what a rock-n-roll grammarian would call ‘temporal adverbials’. Things like ‘From this moment on’, ‘Time after time’, ‘Soon’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘As time goes by’. I decided ‘From time to time’ hadn’t been taken, so used that as a starting point. Later, Kate and I also did a song called ‘Sooner or later’.

Here’s another temporal adverbial 🤘

I’ve discovered adverbial phrases (temporal or otherwise) are useful to songwriters, because you can use them at both the start and end of a verse. Again, this one started with the title and wandered off from there.

Given that this whole thing is a cosplay Tin Pan Alley exercise on my part, I allowed myself to say ‘fall’ instead of ‘autumn’ near the end. This sets up the closing lines: “I’ve seen Paris bring / in the spring, / New England in the fall. / I thought I’d seen it all / til I saw you.” I like the internal-rhyming ‘ings’ in those lines (including the ‘ing’ of Eng-land). It’s often what I’m trying to do with the lyrics: keep it conversational but weave in internal rhymes, assonance and alliteration, so the words have an in-built musicality to them.

NB: it took some delicate prompting to get the AI to deliver the ‘Picchu’ ‘Beats you’ rhyme and it still doesn’t really nail it.

(As I mentioned in the previous post, the AI cover version process is a strange lottery – you can’t edit what it gives you, or ask it to repeat the same again with a minor change. Each generated track is like pulling the lever on a giant slot machine. All you can do is fine-tune the prompt and hope for the best.)

Another song that started with the title. I like finding these idiomatic phrases and seeing where they go.

I find it uncanny how AI can deliver a song like this. When it’s just voice and piano, and when the song is fairly ‘trad’ in nature, there’s less for it to mess up.

This title came from somewhere else. Several years ago, I remember listening to an episode of the Adam Buxton podcast and hearing the guest talk about the sad ‘backwards dance’ that you do when both parties realise a relationship isn’t working. The song unpacks that idea into the standard verse-verse-bridge-verse.

Incidentally, with all these songs, I never write the lyric first, then the music later. Both build themselves at the same time – it’s like the melody is the right foot, and the words are the left and I have to move both in order to keep going forward.

Jeez, another temporal adverbial. Again, this started with the title – taking a familiar figure of speech and trying to make it feel unfamiliar again. More than most songs on this album, I think of this as an ‘exercise’ that maybe doesn’t rise above pastiche. But in my head, I like to imagine pitching it to some hard-nosed publisher in the 1930s, who puffs on a cheap cigar and says “Sure kid, I’ll give you thirty dollars for it.” (I’m a kid in this daydream.)

Finally for now, this is a slightly less ‘Tin Pan Alley’ song. I was going for ‘happy tune, sad words’, which can be effective (also vice versa). I like to think of it as the kind of song Samuel Taylor Coleridge would write if he was reborn as a Nashville troubadour – where the sad singer communes with the rain, first lamenting it but eventually finding salvation in nature.

Side 2 next time. Thanks for reading / listening.

Hello, this is Nick Asbury here. You’ve not received a Songwritings post in a long while, mainly because Kate van der Borgh (co-pilot on this project) has inconsiderately become a successful novelist. And He Shall Appear is now out in paperback, while the Difficult Second Novel is currently in progress. Kate also continues to do other forms of writing and workshopping, so there’s not much room for the slow business of music-making.

In the meantime, here’s something I never expected to be sharing.

Thirteen Paper Moons is a collection of songs written by me and performed by AI. I created the lyrics and melodies, then recorded myself playing them on guitar and piano – these are the kind of recordings I used to send to Kate, which she’d then transform into something else: not just ‘performing’ them, but creatively interpreting them and taking them in new directions.

Thirteen Paper Moons is nothing like that. Instead, I uploaded my recordings to a website called Suno: the musical equivalent of ChatGPT. Having uploaded the recordings, I then asked Suno to ‘cover’ the songs, giving it a guide on style and instrumentation. A couple of minutes later, the songs come back, brought to life by a jazz orchestra, Appalachian folk band, or whatever else you prompt. (Further down in this post, I explain some of the details and limitations.)

It’s a truly unsettling technology – the kind of thing that would have struck Teenage Me as futuristic beyond all comprehension. In many ways, it’s also deeply dismaying and alienating. I’m fully aware of the ethical objections people have to AI in general, especially when it comes into contact with the creative arts. I’ll no doubt write more about this.

But this technology is also a gift to the massed ranks of pale and interesting bedroom songwriters like myself, who enjoy the process of writing songs, but aren’t gifted in performing them, or cut out for the inherently social business of forming bands, or skilled in the technical craft of creating music with GarageBand, LogicPro and other tools.

Many Tin Pan Alley songwriters were like this. Most were not performers, but behind-the-scenes lyricists and composers, who created the songs for others to perform. Irving Berlin was barely an accomplished musician. A self-taught pianist, he could play in only one key, and had a specially-made piano with a ‘transposing’ lever that shifted the internal workings to enable him to play the same notes but have the song come out in a higher or lower key.

I think Irving Berlin would have used the lever of AI without hesitation – at least as a means to an end. It’s a quick way to ‘demo’ a song and get it out into the world. For him, that would have meant a Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald eventually doing it properly. For me, this is as far as the songs will get – but it’s a way of documenting them in a way that would never otherwise happen.

As readers of Songwritings will know, the obsession round here has always been with Tin Pan Alley. I like its mix of the commercial and romantic, literary and populist. As an apprentice in the trade, I’ve consciously written some songs almost as exercises, so I admit to the charge of ‘pastiche’ that could be applied to some of these songs. But they’re also heartfelt and I’ve put a lot into them. And I think the results lend themselves to a technology like Suno, which is dreadful if you’re trying to create something raw and real like the next ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ or ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. But for genre music tied to a specific period, it does a more passable job.

Here’s the track listing – the whole thing is up on YouTube:

00:00 From Time to Time
02:52 Til I Saw You
06:47 Wrack and Ruin
09:57 The Backwards Dance
13:16 One of These Days
15:34 Copycat Rain
19:52 How Original
23:22 Is It Possible?
27:04 Shut Up and Drink
30:45 Rose-Tinted Blues
32:51 I'm Going Out of My Mind for Her
36:34 Caterpillar Song
40:40 For a Boy

Three notes on the production:

First, the results are wayward and hard to control. Having generated the cover version, there’s no way (for me at least) to edit it. If you prompt Suno to do the same again but without the saxophone solo, it’ll come back with an entirely new creation, quite possibly involving a saxophone. Each time you generate a cover version, it’s a roll of the dice. But with the right prompting and a bit of luck, you can generate something workable.

Secondly, the vocals are the hardest part. I find it does female vocals better than male, but I know some will find the delivery cloying in places. Quite rightly, you can’t prompt it to ‘Sing like Ella Fitzgerald’ because referencing any specific artist is out of bounds for copyright reasons. But ‘Female, 1950s jazz/blues light lyrical soprano with warm tone and conversational styling’ might get you close (or might not).

Thirdly, the album cover is a deliberate homage to the cover of Ira Gershwin’s ‘Lyrics on Several Occasions’, which I wrote about on The Book Cover Review. I wrote the text, used the book cover as a prompt, and AI did the rest. This is the world we live in now.

And one final note for long-time Songwritings readers: all these tracks are new, apart from ‘From Time to Time’. Since our original recording, I’ve reworked the lyrics as I was never quite happy with them.

Anyway, off you go, little album. Your title comes from here:

“It’s a Barnum and Bailey world,
just as phony as it can be,
but it wouldn’t be make-believe,
if you believed in me.”
From ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’
by Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen

’Cloud cuckoo land’ is a song we first shared a while back, but this is a new video for it. Once again, we’ve made it by trawling the Internet Archive for public domain footage, then splicing it together to echo the mood of the song (often in ways that surprise ourselves more than anyone). In this case, it’s a 1943 film featuring Daffy Duck and a world leader you’ll recognise.

We like to think the little fella clapping at the end is the same guy as in the Songbird video we shared earlier this year.

In other news…

Kate’s book is out today in the US!

Kate’s novel AND HE SHALL APPEAR is a dark academia tale, so you can expect creepy cloisters, arcane secrets, and characters who are too clever for their own good. Think Saltburn meets The Secret History (but without the bathwater). In the story:

A working class narrator arrives at Cambridge University feeling awkward and out of place. So he’s delighted to fall in with Bryn Cavendish: wealthy socialite, wild partier and amateur magician. However, things turn sour when the narrator starts to suspect that his new friend’s charms are literally occult.

Years later, the narrator is called back to Cambridge. And, back in the city, he fears that the ghosts of his past – and of his old friend Bryn – are waiting for him.

Above is the US cover. Booklist called this ‘An eerie, deeply disturbing tale that is as mesmerizing as it is provocative’ – and gave it a starred review!

The novel is out in the US on 1 Oct. UK readers will have to wait until January for their copy, but can absolutely pre-order from any of the outlets listed here…

Nick’s book is about to hit Canada!

In a vain effort to compete in the glamorous book news stakes, Nick is off to Toronto in November to talk about his book The Road to Hell at the Design Thinkers Conference. More widely, the talk is about following creative impulses for their own sake and seeing where they lead – a spirit at the heart of Songwritings.

If we have any readers in Toronto, please consider coming along. And for readers elsewhere, you can buy The Road to Hell in various places, including a big shop called Amazon – and there’s a Kindle edition coming out soon.

All of the above means we’ve not had loads of time to create music lately. But the spirit of this slow-burning project is that music will bubble up in its own sweet time.

In the meantime, we’re building up a nice little library of videos, ranging from the retro-futuristic I delight in you to the fever-dream surrealism of Been dreaming about you lately. You can fall down our YouTube rabbit hole here.

Thanks as ever for watching, reading, listening…

Hello! A slight change of tack in this post as we share a recent talk we did for the writers’ organisation 26.*

It took place in front of a select gathering over Zoom and includes us talking about how Songwritings started, our personal musical back stories, the parallels between lyric writing and copywriting, and a couple of examples of how our songs evolve from an original rough recording by Nick to a multilayered finished product by Kate. There are three videos in there, plus an exclusive insight into Kate’s childhood bassoon days and Nick’s highly influential ‘Busy Book 9’.

Back soon with more songs and writings.

For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (writer, D&AD Masterclass trainer, musician, first novel ‘And He Shall Appear’ out soon with Fourth Estate) and Nick Asbury (writer, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, purpose critic, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.

* Many thanks to Andy Hayes, Sophie Gordon and everyone who showed up for the Zoom call. We’ve edited out the Q&A towards the end as people on the call didn’t strictly know we’d be sharing it like this, but the rest is all here.

Zoom event: If you want to hear us talking songs, writing and songwriting, sign up here for a free Zoom hosted by writers’ organisation 26. (6.30-7.30pm on 13 June.)

NICK
So last time we shared ‘Sooner or later’, complete with a Charlie Chaplin video (edited from his 1915 film The Champion).

First, to talk briefly about the writing process, this was another one that started off with a common idiom. I’ve talked before about how I find idioms a useful starting point (see also From time to time and Cloud cuckoo land), and I believe other songwriters have done the same over the years. ‘Sooner or later’ just felt like an interesting title to work with, and I idly strummed while reaching for slightly stupid internal rhymes like ‘sooner’ and ‘opportun-er’, or ‘later’ with ‘this weight u-’.

The nice thing about ‘Sooner or later’ is it sets you up with a structure—so the first verse begins with ‘sooner’ and the second verse flips it round to ‘later or sooner’. Then the bridge introduces a fatalistic shrug of ‘Hopefully sooner, probably later’, again with a hint of internal rhyme in ‘whatever the universe decides’. And the sheer act of reaching for rhymes led me to ‘God provides’, which is a pretty bold statement, but I’m not sure it lands that way—it’s more like the singer’s trying to convince him/herself of something.

My memory is that I wrote it a few years back, before we started this project, and I was in a pretty downbeat state of mind about songwriting and my creative output in general. So even though it’s an upbeat song, I feel like it has this self-doubt and melancholy woven through it—mainly in that ‘probably later’ aside, and talk of ‘this weight upon my mind’.

Despite the ‘God provides’ part, it hadn’t occurred to me that you could read this as a kind of agnostic gospel song. But, as always, you’re good at shaping the music in a way that’s sensitive to the words—I love the jauntiness of the opening, the swelling church organ in the bridge, the gospel-style chant as it continues, and the key change that seems to come from nowhere after the second bridge.

KATE
I’m interested that you talk about the melancholy within the song—because, this time, I decided that my challenge would be to make the arrangement very straightforwardly cheerful! I thought of a conversation I had ages ago, when another writer suggested that ‘great’ works of literature tend to be tragic rather than happy.

(Now, I don’t think this actually translates to music. Sure, some would argue that even great ‘happy’ songs are tinged with sadness—for instance, You’ve Got a Friend, where ‘nothing, nothing is going right’. And I’m sure many perceive upbeat pop to be less ‘serious’ than moody indie. But who’s going to argue that I Want to Hold Your Hand isn’t a great song? Or September, especially when sung by a cockatiel?)

Anyway, I leaned into the cheerful vibes. Hence the trumpets! And the glockenspiel! Which I’m pretty sure would have frightened us off when we started this project. The dotted rhythm helps the song to feel jaunty, too—and making the guitar crisp, with a bit of silence between strums, helps to keep the accompaniment nice and bouncy.

But maybe the most cheerful thing is the key change you’ve mentioned. For me, it’s answering the singer’s prayers in a small musical way. So, after the first bridge, where the singer hopes that ‘God provides’, we return to the beginning of the song—the same key, the guitar strumming like before. But, while I tried to make the second bridge sound the same as the first, it actually takes us to a new key. I wanted it to feel like something big has changed without the listener even really noticing. As if the universe has delivered and is just waiting for you to realise. This is probably the biggest musical trick making the song sound hopeful.

Do you have a tendency towards melancholy or cheerfulness when you write? And do you think writers sometimes tend towards tragedy, in a bid to be taken seriously? Bringing the conversation around to brand world, do you think there’s anything of this in the recent craze for ‘purpose’, which you dissect rather brilliantly in your new book The Road to Hell?

NICK
Ha, nice pivot to book promotion!

First, I love how you talk about that key shift at the end of the second bridge, like the music is raising the singer up without them really knowing about it. Thematically, it’s perfect. And I like how the video (another found and roughly edited copyright-free film) reaches a turning point just as the key is changing and the dog decides to return his master’s past kindnesses by defending him in the ring. Good dog.

I think the film shares some of the ambiguity of the song—it’s partly a happy story about karma paying off in the end, but also involves Chaplin blatantly cheating by turning his lucky horseshoe into a hidden weapon. I love his agonised look to camera and heavy sigh as he glances up to heaven and hopes God doesn’t mind.

But enough about him, let’s talk about my book. Or at least for a little while. I think you’re totally right that commercial brands are drawn towards more po-faced, tear-jerking advertising because it somehow feels more serious and credible, even though it often leads to unserious and not very credible results. And maybe there is some parallel with songs, in that it’s hard to write a good song that’s purely happy or laugh-out-loud funny, and it feels more serious and ‘arty’ to write a break-up album or wistful love song.

That said, I think a lot of great lyricists are really good at humour. Morrissey knows how to tell a joke, Bob Dylan has written some outright funny songs (like Bob Dylan's 115th Dream or Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat) and Tin Pan Alley was full of witty lyricists. But often the wit was combined with darker moods. There’s a lovely line in Anthony Burgess’s book ‘This man and music’, where he writes about the Tin Pan Alley lyricist Lorenz Hart, who led a pretty dysfunctional and ultimately doomed life. Burgess writes: “With Hart and his followers there is a certain ambiguity of feeling, wit in the service of frustration or neurosis”. I like that turn of phrase—”wit in the service of frustration or neurosis”—you could certainly apply it to Morrissey.

I suppose I should mention that my book shares its title with a Chris Rea song. That has a pretty dark lyric, come to think of it. “And the perverted fear of violence chokes a smile on every face / And common sense is ringing out the bell / This ain’t no technological breakdown / Oh no, this is the road to hell.”

He seemed happier on the road to Christmas.

Anyway, two questions for you:

– Is there any song, or specific part of a song, that’s guaranteed to make you laugh/smile? And any that’s guaranteed to make you well up?

– Same question for ads. (And for all my wider purpose scepticism, I think its totally understandable to well up at ads—just as long as it’s not WeBuyAnyCar.)

KATE
Hmmm, to be honest I’ll cry at anything. Especially if I’m allowed classical options, like Janet Baker singing Dido’s Lament (Jeff Buckley did an incredible version of this) or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing Angels Ever Bright and Fair. Also a struggle to get through Roberta Flack’s Do What You Gotta Do and Sammy Davis Jr’s Mr Bojangles.

Funnily enough, I was listening to Everyone Into Position by Oceansize yesterday, and I was reminded that the last track makes me weirdly emotional. Then, thinking of songs that made me cry when I was a kid—Puff the Magic Dragon, Bright Eyes, The White Cliffs of Dover (things we used to sing at school, for some reason)—I realised they all have something in common… Without getting too technical, they use a particular harmonic shift very prominently: the shift between the first (or ‘tonic’) and third chords of their respective keys. In major key songs like these, going from the first chord to the third means moving from major to minor, which is partly why it sounds so melancholy. This same thing happens in the tear-jerky soundtrack to Edward Scissorhands. Listen here, from 1:10. I’m clearly a sucker for this musical trick.

(Going back to the Oceansize track—lyrically, I love how the album title creeps into the vocals unexpectedly, at what feels like an unusual point in the phrase: a surprise, like when you’re out walking and you suddenly come across an incredible sunset.)

As for songs that make me laugh or smile… Love Sensation by Loleatta Holloway makes me feel pure joy. Same with Wilson Pickett’s version of Hey Jude. And I adore Carole King’s You’ve Got A Friend, which I’ve already mentioned. But songs that make me actually laugh are trickier. The first that comes to mind is a goofy example: Fatally Yours by Alkaline Trio. It describes a failing relationship:

I don't hear from you no more
But I get the message
You crashed your car through my front door
I pulled you from the wreckage
You told me that you missed me
But you meant with the grill and hood
(You'd kill me if you could)

I just love the audacity of starting a song with what is essentially a Dad Joke.

When it comes to ads, I might go for an oldie. And a musical one: the Burger King 1812 overture ad. As a kid, I used to look forwards to seeing it because it made me laugh so much. Especially the little parp eight seconds in. A genuinely brilliant kazoo performance. I’ve spent years trying to persuade myself that what I like in comedy is acerbic, Stewart-Lee style social commentary but I should probably just accept that the things that really make me laugh are funny noises and people falling over.

NICK
Yes, I’ll always prefer Vic and Bob hitting each other with frying pans over the more cerebral stuff. (And I always liked their Cadbury’s Boost ad—slightly rippled with a flat underside.)

That Burger King ad has to be one of the best ads-without-any-words—such a pure idea communicated in sound and music. Love it.

Oceansize—never heard that one before but can totally relate to the sense of melancholy expressed through the medium of loud guitars. The drum pattern near the start reminds me of New Grass by Talk Talk, which is fairly high on my blubbing list.

Weirdly, I remember having Puff the Magic Dragon in my head a lot as a kid—I’m only finding out now that it was a Peter, Paul and Mary song, and it was a proto Toy Story narrative about a little boy growing up and no longer believing in his dragon friend. I’m not sure I ever knew that as a kid, but definitely picked up on the vibe. As you say, the shift from major chord to its third chord (so C major to E minor) is the main part of it—definitely something I recognise that as one of the go-to shifts in sadder songs.

As for funny songs, I guess there are lots of great country music titles. How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?, I'm So Miserable Without You, It's Just Like Having You Around etc. My main smiling moment is probably in Morrissey’s Suedehead—the agony and archness of the last line in this part: “You had to sneak into my room / Just to read my diary / It was just to see, just to see / All the things you knew I'd written about you / Oh, so many illustrations”.

And sad songs—could list so many, but if I was an actor who had to cry on demand, I’d probably think of Bruce Springsteen’s Walk Like a Man, written about his father. “Now the years have gone and I’ve grown / from that seed you’ve sown / But I didn’t think there’d be so many steps / I’d have to learn on my own / I was young and I didn’t know what to do / When I saw your best steps stolen away from you / Now I’ll do what I can / I’ll walk like a man”. Probably too saccharine for some, but gets me every time.

ANYWAY.

We’re both writing this during the time of Klopp’s departure from Liverpool, which hits hard for us both, and brings to mind an actual late-Tin-Pan-Alley song, originally written for the musical Carousel—You’ll Never Walk Alone. It’s good isn’t it?

KATE
Ha, a song that will make us both smile and cry. It’s such a great one for a football crowd to sing. The lyrics, about standing together in adversity, are perfect for a sporting setting. And, musically, the song feels like one long build—the melody starting off low and soft before reaching up to those stirring high notes at the end.

I really like this video, in which a Broadway producer explains how the music pulls away from its harmonic home at important moments such as words like ‘storm’, and how the ‘sweet silver song of a lark’ ends up being quite distant, harmonically, from where we started. Almost as if the song is saying: it might be quite a journey, but things will get better in the end! As the producer says, harmony can ‘move us around emotionally’, which I guess is exactly what we’re trying to do in ‘Sooner or later’ too.

One thing the video doesn’t mention, which is one of my favourite bits of the song, is the line that creeps chromatically upwards, the first time you hear the words ‘you’ll never walk alone’. You can hear it in the strings, both in this Broadway recording and in the Gerry and the Pacemakers version. When a musical line moves chromatically (in other words, using all the notes of a scale, with no gaps) upwards, it’s as if the line is creeping steadily higher—which makes us feel like the tension is being ratcheted up. (I guess it’s not dissimilar to the steadily rising pitch / tension you get from Shepard tones, like in the movie Dunkirk). For me, it’s the perfect build up to the determined final lyric, repeated now, ‘you’ll never walk alone’.

NICK
Yes! Love the way you’ve described that. I agree about the chromatic ascent—feels like slowly edging your way up a mountain path, or a league table. Always seems weird that a song with such vocal range can become a terrace favourite, but it somehow works.

And at the risk of sounding bitter, it’s way better than Manchester City’s Blue Moon, also by Richard Rodgers, but with a Lorenz Hart lyric that he deliberately phoned in as a ‘will this do’ joke. It’s a song about a loser feeling sorry for himself until some random act of magic turns the moon into oil money gold, so maybe it’s appropriate.

Seems unlikely, but it would be nice if ‘Sooner or later’ was taken up as a terrace chant: ’Sooner or later, my hour will come’. I might try belting it out on the Macclesfield Town terraces, but you may have more luck up in Burnley.

Thanks everyone for reading and listening—and please join us on that Zoom if you can. For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (writer, D&AD Masterclass trainer, musician, first novel ‘And He Shall Appear’ out soon with Fourth Estate) and Nick Asbury (writer, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, purpose critic, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.

We love sharing these new things on Songwritings. This time, it’s a simple lyric with lots of internal rhyme and inner turmoil, in which the singer tries to believe things will work out eventually—and who knows, maybe they will. That’s what the gently gospel-tinged melody makes it feel like anyway.

The video pieces together scenes from The Champion by Charlie Chaplin, in which an initial act of kindness finds some kind of reward in the end. Or at least that’s one way of reading it.

We’ll write more about this in our next post. In the meantime, thanks to everyone who reads, watches and listens to this stuff.

Lyrics:

Sooner or later,
opportunity will come
knocking at my door,
so what would I cry for?
Sooner or later,
my hour will come.

Later or sooner,
this weight upon my mind
is gonna get lighter.
Life’ll get brighter.
Sooner or later,
I’ll get my time.

Hopefully sooner,
probably later,
whatever the universe decides.

Hopefully fortune
will knock on my door soon.
Sooner or later, God provides.
God provides.

Sooner or later,
later or sooner,
later or sooner,
sooner or later…

Also on Soundcloud

Other songs on our YouTube channel

For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (writer, D&AD Masterclass trainer, musician, first novel ‘And He Shall Appear’ out with Fourth Estate this autumn) and Nick Asbury (writer, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, purpose critic, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.

For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (writer, D&AD Masterclass trainer, musician, first novel ‘And He Shall Appear’ out with Fourth Estate this autumn) and Nick Asbury (writer, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, purpose critic, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.

NICK
This is one of the first songs we released, way back in the mists of 2022. Lyrics and melody by yours truly, arrangement and vocals by Kate. And what vocals they are—I love how the song does so much with nothing more than bass, finger clicks and a few singing Kates.

The video is new and an excuse to share the song again. It’s edited from a public domain cartoon called The Song of the Birds (Max Fleischer, 1935). I’ll explain later my five-step process for piecing these things together.

Somewhere along the line, video has become a pretty big part of this project. When you’re sharing songs online, it helps to give people something to do with their eyes. So at some point I went off in search of copyright-free footage, which led to a natural overlap with the Tin Pan Alley era, because so much film from that time is now in the public domain. You can see our growing collection on YouTube.

I’m no great cinephile and certainly no expert editor, but it’s uncanny how you can find a video, splice out a couple of scenes, and discover it fits spookily well with the themes and shape of a song you wrote 80+ years later. And it gets me thinking about the whole relationship between words and images. It’s nice to listen to music in its pure audio form and see what it conjures up. But it’s also nice to gaze at album artwork (something we do less these days), or watch a video that enriches the music in some way (something we do more these days). Any thoughts on all that?

KATE
Yes, the link between music and images is a big topic, isn’t it? Like you say, cover art can change the way we think about an album. And, separately, music can describe scenes from real or imagined worlds quite ‘literally’—which is what’s beginning to happen with our videos.

Back when I was a child-bassoonist, our county band played the fourth movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique—and our conductor explained that the music describes a man dreaming of being walked to the guillotine (in the version above, he imagines his beloved in the crowd at 4:21, just before the blade falls, the head rolls and the crowd begins to cheer).

There’s also Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, which uses an unusual 5/8 time signature to evoke the rowing of the oarsman who is carrying you across the water to the afterlife (you can hear it from the off and throughout, but my fave moment in this version is probably the big dramatic one at 8:46).

I think this kind of ‘painting’ with music can be a helpful ‘way in’ for people who struggle with classical music. There must be lots of us whose introduction to this music was hearing Peter and the Wolf or Carnival of the Animals, either on telly or at school. And, of course, it isn’t only relevant to the classical world—even before I saw the video, I could never hear Knights of Cydonia without hearing a literal galloping cavalry at 0:49.

Of course, you might say that music’s superpower is in not having to be literal at all! But then, we’re talking about songs, with text, which potentially brings a degree of ‘concreteness’ to the music anyway.

I’m going to bounce the question back at you, and perhaps you can bring us back to songs and band art. What do you think about music and images in general?

NICK

Yes, this is actually a chance to share a recently-launched Kickstarter involving some friends of ours. Designer/musician Jamie Ellul and writer Jim Davies are putting together this lovely book of band logos and the stories behind them. Contributors include our mutual writer friends Tim Rich and Fiona Thompson, as well as your brother and esteemed designer of the Songwritings logo Matt Baxter.

You can definitely see how the choice of band name and accompanying logo shapes your impression of the music. And that extends into the cover artwork—I know many people first got into graphic design by spending hours gazing at Vaughan Oliver or Peter Saville covers. Being a writer, I specifically remember poring over the text and small print of album covers: reading the names of the band members, or the studio where it was recorded, or the songwriting credits. All vital, nerdy information that could send you off in other directions.

I guess what music and images share in common is that they’re non-verbal and non-literal (at least with purely instrumental music). And because they call on different senses, they can fit together really beautifully, especially in videos. ‘Hurt’ feels like an even better song when you see the Johnny Cash video. Or you can do something more jarring, like setting Vietnam footage to What a wonderful world.

KATE
God, that scene from Good Morning, Vietnam. The friction between the music and images really does burn.

I’m so glad you mentioned Logo Rhythm! I’ve pledged for my copy, plus pin badges because I’m treating myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a graphic designer who isn’t a massive music nerd (a compliment, folks) so this book is bound to be a banger.

Just in case Jamie and Jim don’t have space for it, perhaps we should mention the infamous Party Cannon logo. According to bassist Chris Ryan, the logo not only bagged the band some new listeners but is also being taught on art and marketing courses in UK universities. For full disclosure, it seems the poster above was altered, with the colours added for comic effect—but these are the real logo colours, and even in monochrome it looks nothing like anything else in the death metal arena… I smile every time I see it.

Going back to music videos, there are also those that exist as artworks in themselves. I remember loving the video for Just by Radiohead because it’s like a short story. It’s the kind of thing you could set to all kinds of tracks (in fact, my memory used to trick me by pairing it with Street Spirit), and yet the music and the video seem perfectly matched—they both describe the alienation and impotence it’s possible to feel in modern life, but in totally different ways. Maybe it’s a bit like a writer who adapts a book for film—they try to preserve the heart of the work but in a new format.

Can you tell us a bit about how you approach the videos for Songwritings?

NICK
Yes, that Radiohead one is really good—I remember seeing it years ago, but (like you) I’m not sure I could have told you which track it was.

So here is my proprietary five-step process for making the videos:

1. Go to archive.org—a great collection of films that have come into the public domain.

2. Enter related search terms (romance, songbird, business, dreaming, etc). Filter for pre-1940.

3. Eventually find something that feels so uncannily right, it’s as though it’s been sent by a kindly ghost from 100 years back.

4. Download the mp4 and drag it into iMovie (which I’d barely used before this).

5. Splice out bits, rearrange bits, occasionally adjust the speed of bits, to get it working with the music. Be amazed at how quickly it all comes together.

So far, this has worked for:

Been Dreaming About You Lately, where I didn’t have to do any splicing—just picked an appropriate 3 minutes of the film. And I no doubt found ‘Dream of a Rarebit Fiend’ by searching for ‘dreaming’.

I delight in you, where I searched for city and work-themed stuff and eventually found Metropolis. This needed the most splicing and rearranging—I felt more like a proper film auteur.

I wanted you to know—probably the spookiest one, where I searched for ‘romance’, found Romance Sentimentale, and discovered a section worked perfectly for the song lyric (with another more abstract section for the bridge). Lonely singer stares mutely out of window, then plays the piano to express herself. Thank you Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein.

And now Songbird, where I actually did a whole other video to start with, but it was a bit of a stretch thematically and tonally (based on a film called It’s A Bird). Then I found The Song of the Birds (Max Fleischer, 1935) and—again, with minimal editing—a section of it fitted perfectly with the shape of the song.

KATE
For me, it’s a reminder that so much of the creative process is about serendipity—trying stuff out, seeing whether ideas fit together. I only managed to write a novel by writing the wrong things loads and loads (and loads) of times. You wouldn’t believe how many scenes and characters and plot points ended up in the bin—and how many times two completely unplanned things clicked conveniently into place.

It's not that I don’t believe in inspiration. It definitely happens, of course. But maybe it happens because you’ve spent ages striking (potentially crappy) ideas against one another, like bits of flint, and they’ve generated the spark of something good.

NICK
Yes, I bet that process of splicing and rejigging videos has a lot of parallels with writing a novel. Serendipity is a lovely word for the process. Google tells me it comes from Horace Walpole’s The Three Princes of Serendip, a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. Which plays into my hobby horse about creativity not being a purpose-driven process, but almost the opposite.

I guess there’s a reason why some of this serendipity happens: there’s that idea of the seven basic plots and stories having a similar shape over time. So The Song of the Birds begins darkly, then reaches a turning point, then switches into a happy new day. And the song follows the same structure.

And I like how the story isn’t a perfect fit—the song is about thwarted romance, whereas the film is about a destructive boy learning a lesson. But there are lots of thematic echoes at the right moments. ‘You were wrong, bird, to be so carefree’ as the bird falls from the sky. ‘This morning, I’m mourning my loss’ as the bird is carried to its grave 😢 ‘Cut to tomorrow’ as the sun is about to rise 😊

With all of them, I like this sense of repurposing older material, from the same era that inspires the songs. I’ve started thinking of this whole project as a conversation conducted across the years, from one time period to another (as in the title of our first song From time to time). There’s a 1920s feel to some of the music, but it’s also its own, more contemporary thing—especially in recent tracks like I delight in you. It’s nice to feel we’re exploring somewhere old but also going somewhere new.

KATE
Ha! ‘Accidents and sagacity’ should be the new Songwritings brand values. Most of our posts (and songs, to be fair) start with us throwing ideas hopefully into the air and seeing how they land. Which seems like a good place to wrap up this post, another happy accident…

Thanks everyone for reading, listening and watching. Kate and I had an earlier conversation about Songbird here, talking about the power of sad lyrics with happy tunes (or vice versa). In a subsequent post, we got onto things like the etymological links between breath and spirit/life, and the contrasting links between worry and strangling or the loss of breath. That post is called Don’t give us your worries, give us a song. We’ll be back with a new song soon.

Dear one and all,

Here is a brand new video for a song we released earlier this year, called ‘I wanted you to know’. The video adopts our usual technique of repurposing public domain footage, in this case from Romance Sentimentale, directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, starring mysterious Latvian singer Mara Griy, and released in September 1930. Thematically, it’s a pretty uncanny fit.

The song came from a piano piece by Jake Sanders, augmented with lyrics by Nick and alchemised with vocals by Kate. The three of us talked about it in a wide-ranging conversation here. The whole thing was an exercise in serendipity that makes this project so worthwhile, along with the fact that people like you are listening and reading. Thank you!

Other releases this year include Been Dreaming About You Lately:

and I Delight in You:

All three have been punctuated by conversations on regrets and inner monologues, hynagogic states and ghosts and personal boundaries and human purpose.

Next year, Nick has a book about purpose, called The Road to Hell, coming out in the spring. And Kate’s debut novel And He Shall Appear shall appear with Fourth Estate in the autumn.

We’ll hopefully make time for more songs and writings in between.

Wishing you lyrical love and musical merriment

Kate & Nick

Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (copywriter, novelist, D&AD Masterclass trainer, singer, musician) and Nick Asbury (copywriter, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.

NICK
So last time we shared a new song called I delight in you. In this case, I’ll stick my neck out and share my original for anyone who’s interested—because it’s a good illustration of how Kate takes the raw material and transforms it.

The lyric and basic shape of the melody is all there (apart from one subtle but important chord shift in the chorus). But all the dynamics, beat, pace and harmonies are new and seem kind of magical to me—like turning a black and white picture into something technicolour.

Writing-wise, it started with the chorus—this basic refrain I had looping around my head for a while. The chorus lyrics are deliberately sweet and romantic in a heightened way, so I felt like the verses needed to introduce a contrasting darkness, and that gradually led to me to this story about someone who struggles through the drudgery of the working world, but finds love and meaning at home. It was only in retrospect that I realised I’d written a song about purpose, which is my hobby horse over on Thoughts on Writing. Rather than searching for purpose through brands and corporations, it’s about the far more common experience of finding purpose outside work. But I guess we can come back to that.

For now, my question is… what did you think of the song when I sent it? And exactly how did your version take shape in your head? Do you hear what it’s going to sound like and set about creating it, or is it more messing around in Garageband and seeing what emerges?

KATE
I’m glad you mention sweetness, because that’s exactly what I noticed on first listen. Hearing that opening chorus, I felt that the singer’s sentiment towards their lover was very pure. There’s no bemoaning the difficulties of relationships, no grappling with complex feelings. Just the disarmingly simple idea: though life can be hard, you make me happy. The vocabulary you’ve chosen helps, I think—the words are straightforward and somehow clean, which gives the chorus a frankness that feels both innocent and charming.

I also thought—and I hope I’m not getting too personal here—about you and (your partner) Sue, and how nice it would be for you to present her with a finished version of the song! Which brings me to my first question: how much of yourself do you put into your songs, generally? We know that writers’ work is fuelled by their personal lives, but is there a limit to how much of ourselves we should share? Are there topics you wouldn’t touch in your poetry and songwriting? Do you think it’s easy to set boundaries, and have you ever come close to crossing yours?

(Funnily enough, the Nepalese writer Mukahang Limbu asks these questions in the latest edition of The Author. It leads to an interesting idea: while we often think of creative writing as a form of healing, can it in fact be retraumatising? Can what we see as therapy actually be, in some circumstances, an unhelpful kind of rumination?)

In terms of how the version took shape… I thought about the singer, slogging away in their slightly unfulfilling day job. And I decided: I should create the whole song at my desk, on my laptop. That meant I wasn’t allowed to record any ‘live’ instruments. There was no playing the piano, no strumming the ukulele this time. All I could use was the library of instruments within Garageband, plus my voice.

And that in turn made something else happen. To play the Garageband instruments, I used ‘musical typing’, which is where you use your computer keyboard like a piano keyboard. But this is tricky and a bit limiting (for instance, you can only see one octave at a time, and you have to press a key to move up or down the octave—NOT something you have to do on a real piano). So, although in other songs I’d actively tried to use more complex chords, here I found myself using very simple ones. And somehow this seemed to complement that purity of sentiment I’ve talked about.

NICK
I love that idea of desk-based music. I’ve always liked how we use the word ‘keyboard’ to describe the interface for both piano and writing. And you’ve tied that knot even more tightly by using the writing kind to create the music. Am I right in saying you don’t even attach a microphone to your laptop – just sing straight into it? In which case, it really is laptop music on every level.

Your questions about personal boundaries are fascinating. With all these songs, I’ve never had any personal, confessional dimension in mind—I think of it more as an apprenticeship for a trade, where I’m trying (sometimes in quite a mechanical way) to get my head round the formal challenges and just build something that works. For example, with that opening chorus, I think my honest motivation at the time was about structural questions—I liked the idea of opening a song with just a really simple, declarative statement, and then it was just playing around with these echoing aye and oo sounds in the words. That’s not to say personal stuff isn’t making its way out on some level, but it’s not the primary driver. Fortunately, I don’t think this will come as a crushing blow to Sue, who has tolerated my musical leanings for years, usually with a healthy reaction of nodding and smiling. (For the record, she was a particular fan of Been Dreaming About You Lately though—must be a ukelele thing.)

But I’m not averse to writing personal stuff in other contexts. In three and a half years of writing the daily Realtime Notes poems, I did sometimes veer into pretty personal family stuff (with Sue’s blessing whenever it happened, and keeping Asbury Jr’s name away from the algorithm.) Fortunately, throughout that time, I never really had a major personal drama to contend with—and I often wonder what would have happened if I had. I instinctively agree with the idea that sharing personal stuff isn’t always going to be cathartic and healthy—it could just dramatise and externalise things that are best left to work themselves out inwardly. And I’ve always been suspicious of the ‘tortured artist’ idea. I think the best art is about mastery of a certain craft, form or medium, and the work exists independently of the creator. (That was definitely the case in Tin Pan Alley, which had a Stock Aitken & Waterman approach to industrial-scale production of romantic songs.)

I find this affects the way I respond to art too. I’ve never been massively interested in the biographical details of the artists I like. If someone told me Yesterday was actually a song about a Paul McCartney break-up, it wouldn’t really make the song any better or worse for me. But then it is interesting knowing that Blood on the Tracks was Dylan’s break-up album. It’s just that it’s a lot more than that too—they’re beautifully crafted songs.

Let me bounce the same question back to you. How important is that personal dimension to your own writing, or to the art you like?

KATE
Yeah, I just sing straight into the laptop. Outrageous, really, but production has always been pretty homespun over here on Songwritings.

And yes, I suppose the ‘tortured artist’ idea is what I’m getting at—that sense that good art comes from something deeply personal, often painful. In his Red Hand Files, Nick Cave criticises the idea of the artist-addict and their ‘holy suffering’. But he isn’t saying that suffering is meaningless to art—he’s saying that drink and drugs create a numbed, ‘flattened’ kind of suffering, when the exposure to all the sensation of life, both happiness and suffering, is what can potentially nourish creativity. He even talks about ‘meaningful suffering’ (which, perhaps dangerously, is leading me to think back to some of our conversations about Catholicism…)

There’s the variously-attributed quote about writing being easy: ‘you just open a vein and bleed’. I’d love to have a clever challenge to this, but I found it to be kinda true when I was writing my novel. I don’t find it easy to get into the ‘flow state’ some writers describe, but whenever it happened I was usually tapping into very personal, emotional experiences. And I had plenty of those to draw on, as I put a lot of myself into the book—my protagonist is a Northerner studying Music at Cambridge University in the early 2000s, which is exactly what I was twenty years ago. The writing definitely felt different when I was digging into those old anxieties, joys, hopes.

And, to return to that idea of rumination, it did sometimes feel uncomfortable to go over and over those feelings. Especially because it began to blur real life and fiction. My protagonist’s time at university is the most magical time of his life, and so he replays his memories obsessively—so, in revisiting my own experiences, I not only reanimated my teenage neuroses but started to feel a bit like my own tragic hero. So, all a bit meta.

NICK
Yeah I can certainly imagine it helps to draw on direct experience if you’re writing something as deep and sustained as a novel—and that must be a weird kind of self-therapy on some level. I remember you saying you were known as Northern Kate in Cambridge, which is simultaneously endearing and kind of ‘problematic’. (For any readers who don’t know, Kate’s debut novel is officially forthcoming and officially exciting.)

I’ve no idea what would happen if I tried to write anything directly based on my university years—not that anything terrible happened, but it would probably be traumatising for me and boring / embarrassing for everyone else. (As a side note, I’ve always have a bad memory and have never understood how people write their memoirs. What with having no inner monologue, not much inner vision and a self-clearing memory, I’m not sure exactly what does take place in my head—I may not actually be conscious.)

By the way, I think of I delight in you (and I guess all of our songs) as having a ‘protagonist’ too—in the sense that it’s some notional person who (unlike me) has a job that involves commuting. But then there is some overlap—‘try not to unravel as I travel through each daily compromise’ is often how work can feel. I should come back to how that relates to the video in a bit.

But it’s funny you brought up Nick Cave as I was just about to do it myself. I think he has a very wise and humane attitude to questions about art vs artist, or art vs politics. And it’s haunting and heartbreaking that his Skeleton Tree album reads like such a direct lament for his son, when most of the album was completed beforehand—like art is about processing things that haven’t even happened yet. I love his Red Hand Files and see it as a new form of art—the ‘artist as agony aunt to the planet’. It’s such an interesting way to connect with people. And he’s always hovering around questions of the divine and transcendence and even… purpose.

There are lots of questions I could ask you at this point—how did you feel about being called Northern Kate? Do you think northernness creeps into your singing voice in any way—is that something you had to think consciously about? And how do you relate to the protagonist in our song—do you recognise that kind of attitude to work and finding purpose somewhere outside it?

KATE
I love the idea of art being about ‘processing things that haven’t even happened yet’.

On the university question, I must say that I’m deeply suspicious of memory. Especially when I’m remembering times so long ago. One of my favourite books is Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which deals beautifully with the unreliability of memory. The narrator asks: ‘How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life.’

BUT I think I had mixed feelings at being Northern Kate. On the one hand I was dismayed, because I thought my Northernness was possibly the least interesting thing about me. But I also leaned into the label—honestly, I probably preferred to be known for something rather than go unnoticed.

On the work/purpose question… I find the song’s attitude to work very refreshing. And important! I’m extremely fortunate that I love my work, and to anyone who finds meaning in their own careers: awesome. But, to me, the idea that we should all find purpose in our work is… deeply weird. For a start, it’s simply impractical and potentially classist—for instance, what if the jobs available in your local area are fine but don’t set your heart alight? Does that make your life purposeless? What if the thing that brings you most joy isn’t the same skill that makes you money? More than one friend of mine has spent time feeling strangely dissatisfied by their (perfectly successful) careers before realising: you know, it’s okay if my career isn’t the most important thing in my life.

And, at its worst, I think the idea of finding purpose in work is kind of sinister. It invites us to give more of ourselves to employers than we potentially ought (a bit like the way we expect NHS workers to go above and beyond because they’re ‘heroes’). If we can convince ourselves that our work is what gives our life meaning, we can justify giving away evenings and weekends to our bosses when we could easily be spending that time actually having boundaries and doing the many other things that make life meaningful. Like I say, if you do find your purpose in your work, that’s great! Good for you! But to suggest that everyone else should do the same seems to be setting a target that isn’t possible for us to meet. (Feels like this is an interesting time to be having this conversation, what with the emergence of ideas like quiet quitting, which turns out to mean ‘doing your actual job instead of constantly doing extra work for no extra reward’.)

NICK
Yes, as you know I’ve written a LOT about purpose in recent years. And I’ve found that, the more sceptical I get about the idea of corporate/brand purpose, the more interested I am in the idea of human purpose, and even cosmic purpose. I think a lot of people can and do find a personal sense of purpose through their work—but it’s a very different thing to some shared, top-down corporate purpose. Equally, many people have a healthy attitude to work as a means to an end—a productive way to spend the 9 to 5 while funding their wider interests in family, art, travel, friendship, religion or whatever else.

@brielleybelly123im also getting sick leave me alone im emotional ok i feel 12 and im scared of not having time to live

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And many people actively dislike or resent their work and the drudgery of the commute, which is totally understandable (this TikTok Gen Zer was widely derided for complaining about it, but I can totally relate.)

Speaking of drudgery, I should mention the video for I delight in you. I was digging round the Internet Archive for out-of-copyright film footage and was reminded of Metropolis by Fritz Lang—considered one of the great early sci-fi films. It’s set in a world where the workers slave away in a subterranean city, while the elite enjoys a life of creative and spiritual fulfilment above the surface. There’s a complicated plot in which Maria rallies the workers to revolt, and at some point is replaced by a fake, Robot Maria who tricks the workers into following her instead. It’s hard to untangle the entire plot and its symbolism, but I like to think Robot Maria could stand for corporate purpose—this beguiling idea that poses as revolutionary but actually just puts a seductive face on the status quo.

I stitched together a few scenes in iMovie and matched it to the music, and I like to think it works pretty well. I especially like the cry of ‘To the heart machine!’ at the end. It’s a cry of revolt, but I also just like the resonance of the phrase. Apparently Fritz Lang was inspired to make Metropolis on first seeing the New York skyline in the 1920s. This is my own flight of fancy, but I like to think of Tin Pan Alley in its heyday, somewhere among those skyscrapers. And the songwriting industry at the time could be thought of as a kind of ‘heart machine’—a production line for these intimate, romantic songs that mapped out every possible state of the human heart in 32 bars, and yet was also resolutely commercial and down-to-earth. I think To the heart machine! would be a good album name if we ever do one.

We’ve covered a lot here, haven’t we?

KATE
Ha, yes we have. And I’m pretty sure I’m repeating your own ideas about purpose back to you. I probably got half of them from Thoughts on Writing in the first place.

I’m glad you mention the video. One of my favourite moments is at 1:50, where we have the lyric ‘I rise’. In the song itself, we simply seem to be talking about our protagonist getting up in the morning. But alongside your scenes from Metropolis, the line becomes a call for a true uprising: a rallying cry for every ordinary worker (part of me sees them as all the Northern Kates and Northern Nicks, throwing off the idea that they’re obliged share the ‘values’ of the profit-driven entity that pays their wages).

But—while railing against the capitalist machine—it’s intriguing to think of Tin Pan Alley as a production line, with writers who trudged to work and maybe, now and again, just dialled it in. Makes you think about where exactly in a production line the ‘heart’ can exist. Perhaps some songs came from their writers’ deepest suffering; perhaps others didn’t exactly come from the heart but meant a huge deal to the listeners who loved them.

Anyway. To the heart machine—wherever and whatever it means to you.

Thanks everyone for reading / listening. For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (copywriter, novelist, D&AD Masterclass trainer, singer, musician) and Nick Asbury (copywriter, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.

I delight in you,
find a light in you.
Every day a new
horizon to ride to,
I find in you.
I delight in you.

So work isn’t going so well.
Nobody wants to buy
what they want me to sell.
I come home in the dark
and turn into our street,
where my heart starts to beat.

I delight in you,
find a light in you.
Every day a new
horizon to ride to,
I find in you.

I rise and rationalise,
try not to unravel as I travel through
each daily compromise.
And descending in the lift,
at the end of every shift,
however late, the weight starts to lift.

And if I could change a thing,
I’d change everything,
but for just one thing.

I delight in you,
find a light in you.
Every day a new
horizon to ride to,
I find in you.
I delight in you.

Also on YouTube and Soundcloud

Video contains edited scenes from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927).

We’ll write more about the song and video in our next post. For now, thanks to everyone who comes along for this ride. Music is a strange and subjective thing to share with the world, but we delight in doing it.

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For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (copywriter, novelist, D&AD Masterclass trainer, singer, musician) and Nick Asbury (copywriter, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.

For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (copywriter, D&AD Masterclass trainer, singer, musician) and Nick Asbury (copywriter, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, with a side interest in Tin Pan Alley songwriting).

NICK
So last time we shared this new song called Been dreaming about you lately, complete with a found video from 1906 (which I’ll explain later).

First, I don’t know if you’re meant to say this about your own work, but I really like the song! Especially with what you did to it. As usual, I sent you a rough guitar and piano recording, and you took it somewhere else entirely.

It took me longer than usual to write—I had the first four lines of melody and lyrics in my head for over a year, but struggled to work out how the whole 8-line verse would fit together. There’s a slight oddness in how the rhyme falls on ‘phanTOMS’ and ‘comes’, or ‘shadOWS’ and ‘goes’, with that slightly truncated last line.

I think of the whole thing as an exercise in the ‘mosaic’ writing, mastered by people like Ira Gershwin (lyricist brother of George). I was conscious of trying to map particular vowel sounds onto different parts of the melody, so that it sings in a nice, easy way. I could nerd out at length about all the internal assonance and alliteration—for example, the soft ‘f’ sounds in ‘fragments, fleeting, floating up like phantoms’. (On the other hand, I might get kicked out of Tin Pan Alley for rhyming ‘lately’ and ‘await me’—technically it’s not classed as a perfect rhyme, but I decided it was OK.)

Two posts ago, we talked about inner monologues, which you have and I lack. I think of this as a kind of inner monologue song, where the speaker is conversing with his/her own brain, wondering why these dreams keep surfacing.

I feel like there are two ‘voices’ in the song, both lyrically and melodically. So lines 1 and 3 have this little melodic flourish, while 2 and 4 are more fragmented and static. Then it switches with lines 5 and 7 being more fragmented and 6 and 8 loosening up. So it feels like it’s alternating between these two registers, and the lyrics do something similar—relaxed, conversational phrases like ‘Been living a life without you’ or ‘Days are normal I find’, mixed with heightened poetic stuff like ‘paths not taken / winding in the shadows’.

So there’s this inner struggle playing out in the whole thing, where the speaker is trying to remain outwardly breezy, but is also perturbed and increasingly haunted. And I feel like that really comes out in the music. Is that how you saw it too?

KATE
Yes, totally—I love that duality. Although it isn’t a happy song, it has such a jauntiness about it. That bouncy rhythm really suits the fragile cheerfulness of the singer: ‘yeah, I’m fine without you, I’m doing well’. I tried to exaggerate the bounce with the ‘dum-ba-dum’ backing vocals in the second verse.

I also loved the twist in your title! In songs, dreaming about a lover is often a fond or reassuring thing, but here it’s unsettling, even creepy. This is regret as recurring nightmare, a love story tipping into horror.

(Of course, there’s also something meta about the song, since it’s such an ear worm—I find that the catchy melody plays over and over in my head, as if I can’t forget it.)

Going back to what you’ve said about internal alliteration and assonance, the two ‘voices’—there’s so much craftsmanship in your lyrics, even though you manage to make each line sound effortless. That stuff about the melody switching from static to loose and back again… How much of that is conscious? I’m thinking of the different ways we often approach creative work: the free, instinctive, dreamy stage versus the more technical refining and polishing part.

I also wonder what you think about those different modes of creativity, either in your own work or in our industry generally. Personally, I wonder whether in this world of productivity hacks and Atomic Habits, of ‘morning routine’ videos that teach us how to cram more and more into our day, creatives are really encouraged to spend time dreaming. (To get a bit literal for a sec, the author featured in this podcast mumbled the central idea for their book while asleep. Thankfully their partner overheard.)

Then maybe we can talk about the ukulele, which was rather more instinctive than refined…

NICK
Yes, good call to talk about dream states given the nature of this song.

I know our mutual friend Tom Sharp is a fan of hypnagogic writing—jotting down what comes to you during that liminal state between sleep and waking. I do it too, in that I often find myself lying half-awake at night or early in the morning, with a vague tune or lyric in my head. Most of them don’t merit being written down, but I like to think the ones worth keeping will somehow stick in my head. (I believe a young Lennon and McCartney had a similar trust in memory. Without access to easy recording technology, they’d leave a song half-finished at night and trust that one of them would remember the tune the next day—and if not, it probably wasn’t worth remembering. I wonder how many promising songs never made it.)

These days, voice notes make things easier. Before that, it was dictaphones. I remember reading about Robert Palmer keeping one by his bed for ideas that came to him during the night. Apparently that’s how he wrote Addicted To Love—it amuses me to imagine him singing that opening riff into the recorder while his wife sighs and rolls over.

Going back to the writing of this song, my description of the process makes it sound more conscious and methodical than it really is. Most of it is instinctive in the moment, and I’m not claiming it’s a massively complex technical achievement to write a verse that vaguely flows. But there’s a lot of plodding, conscious thought that comes in between the instinctive parts—just generally listening to, reading about and pondering songwriting, so that when you’re in the instinctive place, your instincts are more refined.

I think a lot of the creative process is like that—the ideal is to get into a kind of flow state where it feels like your mind is working almost independently of any management: all the cogs just whirring in this instinctive, pleasurable way. That makes the process hard to remember afterwards, so all you can do is post-rationalise it. It’s tempting to see it as a kind of magic, and maybe it is in some sense—lots of creators (and maybe songwriters in particular) talk about this feeling of the song coming to them from somewhere else. I can’t exactly say I’ve experienced that, but then I’ve never written Yesterday or Like A Rolling Stone. But I still glimpse it—it is weird how the key moments of inspiration are the hardest to remember.

I don’t think I’ve ever written copy in a hypnagogic state—I wonder how that would work out. How about you? I imagine hypnagogic states can be pretty useful for novel writing or working out some tricky plot point.

KATE
Unsurprisingly, this all makes me think about Dali and his ‘slumber with a key’. You’ll no doubt have heard how he’d sit himself in a chair, with a key in one hand and a plate on the floor beneath the key. Then he’d rest—and as he dropped into sleep, the key would fall noisily into the plate, waking him immediately. It meant he could briefly access that hypnagogic state, but quickly be conscious enough to remember it.

Also, I’m pretty sure Stephen King has a similar approach to Lennon and McCartney in that he doesn’t jot down story ideas, but rather trusts himself to remember the things worth remembering. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know how many chilling stories never made it onto the shelves.

Given the creatives who endorse hypnagogic states, it’s a bit daft that I haven’t explored them myself. Saying that, the idea for my novel (which I really hope to be able to tell you more about at some point) came in a subconscious way: it was an honest-to-god shower moment. There I was, washing my hair, and the central idea plopped into my soapy head. Frustrating, as I’m not sure how to make it happen again…

But most of the novel writing was a very conscious puzzling-out, like doing a Rubik’s cube or something. Given the story I was telling—which is about a college friendship that goes badly wrong in a spooky sort of way—I knew there were certain things that had to happen, certain scenes that would need to appear in some shape or form. For instance, it seemed clear that the first half of the story would be about the friendship developing, and the second half would describe it falling apart. Which in itself suggests some kind of turn at the midpoint. So it was often a case of me thinking ‘how do I connect these things’? Sure, there was plenty of space to be dreamy while thinking about character, setting, all the rest of it. But those things had to fit within the objectives of each scene (OK, by this time he needs to fall in love, by this point he’s going to feel betrayed etc.). I guess it was like building the the East and West wings of a house and then working out how to join them up. Certain things suggested themselves.

NICK
All totally makes sense, especially the shower moment—it’s one of the few times in modern life where our brains get forcibly detached from our phones and other sensory inputs for a few minutes, so the subconscious stuff spots its chance and rushes to the surface. I’ve definitely had a few ideas that way.

I hope we’ll get to talk more about your novel at some point—it’s a form of writing that I’ve never come close to tackling. All the macro-thinking about plots and characters intimidates me—I think I’m more comfortable wrestling with syllables and lines.

Going back to our song, I really like the ukelele driving the whole thing—I guess it’s the instrument I associate most with Tin Pan Alley. A couple of years ago, I discovered Charlotte Pelgen on Instagram—she does some lovely, simple versions of songs from that era, often based on sheet music she’s found and dusted down.

For example, I love this version of ‘I’m a dreamer (Aren’t we all)’. (Another song about dreaming, now I think of it.)

I like the way ours starts off with ukelele, but then builds into this richer soundscape, with the musical-hall-esque piano (which is so well done) and that very appropriate siren sound going off at the end, emerging in a way that suggests it’s been there all along.

KATE
If we’re talking about the arrangement now, I should say (if it isn’t already obvious) that I don’t actually play the ukulele. But when you said you imagined it in the song, I felt I should at least try to make it happen. I was Up North visiting my parents at the time, so I asked around to see if anyone local had an instrument I could borrow—and Martyn Smith from the Cliviger Ukulele Band very kindly lent me his. After that, I did a bit of Googling to find the right chords, and thankfully I only needed a handful.

I think, as well as harking back to Tin Pan Alley, the ukulele fits with the ‘cheerfulness’ we’ve talked about. It’s a fun instrument that doesn’t take itself too seriously, so helps create that (albeit superficial) lightheartedness. Same goes for the music-hall-style piano, with its festive clanging. Along with the vocals, these two instruments seemed enough—there’s a temptation in Garageband to keep on layering and layering, but I’m finding that (much like in writing) the trick is often in knowing what to leave out.

The backing vocals are of course meant to sound like ghostly oohs and aahs. And in the bridge, I wanted to create an effect almost like a church choir, something a bit faux-serious and baroque—hence the interlocking vocal lines. You might be surprised to hear that I was kind of inspired by ABBA’s Lay All Your Love on Me and its incredible chorale-style chorus.

The only other thing in the mix, bar the string-siren effect in the bridge and at the end, was the chunky chain necklace that I used as percussion. This was my cheeky nod to another phantom: Jacob Marley and his jangling shackles. Couldn’t resist.

To make a brief diversion into the world of ghosts (one of my fascinations, as you know), I like that your song has the feel of a ghost story. Yet this ghost is not the soul of someone dead, but the impression of someone living. It makes me think of this brilliant book, which explores the changing nature of ghosts—how, after the Reformation, they became ‘doctrinal impossibilities’ (they came from the purgatory-belief of Catholicism, which was all being binned), and so had to reinvent themselves, first as demonic spirits, later as tricks of the mind. Hilary Mantel, who talked about ghosts a lot, posited that they could be unfulfilled potential: ‘When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners.’ Just like all those unwritten Beatles songs and Stephen King books!

NICK
Damn, I love that ghost as unfufilled potential idea—I think it’s exactly what the song is about. Ghosts not as dead things, but as lives unlived. In which case, we’re all creating ghosts every second, as infinite potential paths in life collapse into the only one that we’re able to choose (at least in this particular universe and timeline).

Domestic wraiths and phantoms also bring to mind the film that accompanies the song, where mundane items of furniture come to life. It was a slightly random find—when we share these things online, I feel like some visual support might increase ‘engagement’, but we haven’t exactly got the budget to hire a yacht and go full Duran Duran. So I found myself searching for out-of-copyright footage, which led me to The Public Domain Review and a 1906 film called Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.

It’s such a strange film—I believe it was produced as a promotional piece for the Edison Company, and the ‘special effects’ were designed to show off its advanced technical skills. The story is based on an inexplicably popular New York Herald comic strip that tells the cautionary tale of a man who steals some Welsh Rarebit (the actually-really-nice melted cheese on toast delicacy). The thief is punished by having weird cheese dreams. Without doing any actual editing, I laid our song on top of the last three minutes of the film and it actually fits pretty well, with a few happy coincidences—like the bed flying out the window as the bridge starts, or the man covering his ears as the siren goes off at the end.

I like that the film comes from a similar era to the music—maybe I should try it with some of our other songs. I’m no expert, but am increasingly drawn to that whole period of early-20th-century history. That film would have come out during the Teddy Roosevelt era, when he was doing his best to rein in overweening corporate power—plenty of parallels with today. And songs like I’m A Dreamer would have come out during the Great Depression, when the roaring ‘20s came to a traumatic end, adding some extra poignancy to the lyric—“He's ideal, but then he isn't real / And I'm a fool, but aren't we all?”

KATE
I could hardly believe it when you told me that you hadn’t edited the film. It fits so perfectly.

And I’m glad you bring up that period, because it’s also the golden age of… the ghost story! There’s a suggestion that people turn to the supernatural at times of uncertainty—for instance, I’ve read that fishermen who sail on the wild and unpredictable sea typically have more superstitions than fishermen who sail on lakes. We lean towards magical thinking in times of upheaval—say, times of great technological and scientific progress (I have to remind myself that when Dickens wrote The Signalman, the railway was not a quaint spooky thing but a relatively new and dazzling technology).

So, the turn of the 20th century is when you get key texts like M R James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, W W Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw… It’s also when there’s a massive interest in spiritualism (famously embraced and promoted by Arthur Conan Doyle), accelerated by the awful loss of life during the First World War.

Feels strange to think that the technologies causing us so much anxiety now will create different ghosts: an AI Lennon, putting out new music, reopening some of those potential life paths you mentioned. An alternative Stephen King, writing stories that the man himself never got around to. Creators who need no hypnagogic state, who will not dream, and whose process may be no more knowable than our own.

That last sentence feels like the ending to a decent ghost story, so we’ll pause there for now. Thanks as ever for reading / listening—always great to get comments and emails, especially from people pursuing their own musical adventures.

Some readers may be interested in Nick’s recent appearance on the Penteract Press podcast, where the conversation eventually gets onto songwriting, having covered politics and poetry, constraint-based writing, branding and self-directed learning.

Been living a life without you,
happy, mostly.
Whenever I dream about you,
I see ghostly
paths not taken,
winding in the shadows.
When I awaken,
the feeling almost goes.

Days are normal I find,
but tricks of the mind
find me at night.

Old flames flicker again
at the back of my brain
and bring you to light.

Been dreaming about you lately.
Visions of you
every night await me.
Nothing I can do.

Video: Excerpt from Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906). An experiment in matching songs to old copyright-free film footage. Found on Public Domain Review.

Thanks as ever for listening / watching / reading. We’ll tell the story behind the song in the next post.

And thanks also for the nice responses to our last post: Regrets, we’ve had a few

For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (copywriter, D&AD Masterclass trainer, singer, musician) and Nick Asbury (copywriter, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, with a side interest in Tin Pan Alley songwriting).

NICK
So last time we had a great conversation with Jake about how I Wanted You To Know came together—and there was one thing I forgot to say. It wasn’t exactly in my head as I wrote it, but I’ve always thought of that lyric having a Remains of the Day feel about it—this idea of an unspoken love that never quite makes its way into words, all hidden beneath layers of English reserve.

Towards the end of that last post, we talked about the contrasts between novel writing (which you know a lot about) and lyric writing—and it’s interesting because Kazuo Ishiguro (author of The Remains of the Day) started out thinking of himself as a songwriter. He talks in this Guardian interview about how he aspired to being a musician, “but there came a point when I thought: actually, this isn’t me at all. I’m much less glamorous. I’m one of these people with corduroy jackets with elbow patches. It was a real comedown.”

Even in his elbow patch mode, he kept up the musical interest. In 2007, he worked with jazz singer Stacy Kent, writing lyrics for four tracks on her album Breakfast on the Morning Tram. It’s interesting that the lyrics (like this one for Ice Hotel) are actually pretty wordy, but maybe that’s a coincidence—I’m not familiar with everything he’s done. And I do like what he says in the Guardian interview about lyrics being partly about what you choose to leave out: “One of the key things I learnt writing lyrics—and this had an enormous influence on my fiction—was that with an intimate, confiding, first-person song, the meaning must not be self-sufficient on the page. It has to be oblique, sometimes you have to read between the lines.”

It makes me think more broadly about the relationship between songs and novels, and writers who have traversed both worlds. Any thoughts?

KATE
Thanks a bunch for posting that scene from The Remains of the Day. Harrowing. In one read, that book broke my heart several times over.

Ishiguro is a great starting point for a conversation about songs and novels. In this interview he says that, ideally, both should haunt people in some way: “Songs that really work, we carry them with us all our lives. And when things happen to us, or when we feel certain things, or perhaps just when we happen to be in certain places in the world, these songs come back as our soundtrack.” He asks of books: “Does it linger in that person’s mind?… Has it found a tiny corner in that person’s life?”

Having wondered what it is that makes certain works ‘haunting’, Ishiguro suggests: “Maybe having something unresolved—deliberately unresolved—in the work, is quite an important aspect of this.” What do you think? In both The Remains of the Day and I Wanted You To Know, there is a sense of resolution—arguably, the gut punch is that finality, the door finally closing. But of course the thing about regret is that even when we know a chapter in our life is finished, we go back over it, again and again, as if we could change the ending (exactly the feeling your lyrics describe: “I wander through a maze / Of turnings that I missed”).

All this reminds me of a book I read recently: The Pallbearers’ Club by Paul Tremblay. Don’t be put off by the horror label! While it’s definitely spooky, it’s also a very beautiful and sad faux-memoir that details the narrator’s difficult adolescence—and, in particular, his troubling friendship with a woman named Mercy. Was she an emotional vampire who brought out the worst in him? Or was she something more sinister? Music is a huge presence throughout, especially the music of the punk band Hüsker Dü.

And it makes sense that, in a book about looking back on youth, the narrator talks so much about the music he fell in love with as a teenager. That music often keeps such a powerful hold on us—to Ishiguro’s point, it takes us back to that painfully intense time of high emotion and sprawling futures. Feel like there’s something to say here about songs, stories, memories, regrets—all constantly returning, all ghosts.

NICK
Jeez, you already said a lot there! I definitely think there’s a phenomenon where the music you listen to aged 17–25 sinks in deeper and ‘haunts’ you for the rest of your life. It’s almost like a physiological / neurological thing where your brain is still growing and the music gets woven into it. And I think that naturally gets tied in with the bittersweet emotion of regret—because it’s not just a negative emotion, it’s a close relation of nostalgia and hopefulness. I believe our mutual friend Tom Sharp said ‘Grief is love moving backwards’—you could say regret is hope moving backwards.

To carbon date my own brain, one of my favourite songs from my aged 17–25 era was Regret by New Order: “Just wait till tomorrow / I guess that's what they all say / Just before they fall apart”. Sigh.

I will have to look up The Pallbearer’s Club, but I like what you say about music being a presence throughout the book—it makes me think of the wider relationship between novelists and music.

I was reading this recently, by Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange). It’s mainly about his passion for classical music—he was a self-taught composer of several symphonies and once said “I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side”. He also wrote Napoleon Symphony, which he describes as a novel in four movements.

But the chapter that really interests me is about the lyricists of Tin Pan Alley—he talks about how lyricists like Lorenz Hart “oscillate between the cynical and the sentimental”, aiming for “a very natural conversational declaration which, by the happiest of accidents, has rhymes in it”. And he notes how a lot of those lyricists existed in service of the performer: “We are not dealing with egotistical romantic poets, but with skilled craftsmen serving stars.”

He also makes a point that has haunted me since reading it: why is it that the four-beat bar is so natural to music, but English verse has taken the five-beat line as its go-to form? He blames a French and Italian influence which projected iambic pentameter onto a language that doesn’t naturally suit it: “Whether we like it or not, when we hear a five-beat line, we are really hearing a four-beat one followed by the first beat of a second which is not permitted to complete itself.” I haven’t got my head round all of it, but I recommend the chapter—it’s called Under The Bam.

KATE
Ha, it’s funny you say that, because I can clearly recall the English lesson where we first learned about iambic pentameter. I sat there, thinking: five beats??

Thinking about how rhythm works across music and prose… Lots of writers will know the quote from Gary Provost, which suggests that it’s a certain variability—unpredictability?—that gives prose an appealing rhythm. (That and all the other stuff about the stresses falling in the right places, I presume?!) However, in music it’s often a certain regularity of beat that keeps our toes tapping. Do you have any thoughts about that? I feel like I need to understand more about poetry here, the difference between regular metre and something more free.. When all writing has rhythm, what’s the boundary between poetry and prose?

In one of her letters, Virginia Woolf said: “Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm… Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.”

Does this resonate with you, this ‘wave in the mind’? To be honest, I’m still trying to work out what it means to me. And, if you do experience waves—to perhaps go off on something of a tangent here—do you have an inner monologue? Or are you one of those people who ‘thinks’ in colours, sounds? I’m thinking about our different approaches to songwriting, and I’m wondering whether my (admittedly limiting) tendency to have the words lead the music is anything to do with my absolutely deafening inner monologue…

NICK
OK, we may have hit bedrock here! I have NO inner monologue! At least, I don’t think I do—and it sounds like I’d know about it if I had.

I’m fascinated to know more about yours—does it tell you what to say next when you’re writing something? Does it say “And so Kate puts the kettle on” when you’re making a cup of tea? Or is it more like the inner critic saying “Who do you think you are?” Either way, have you always been aware of it?

For my part, I wouldn’t say I especially think in colours or sounds either—but that whole area of rhythm and waves is interesting, because I think that’s pretty deeply ingrained in me. Weirdly, I might think in rhythm more when I’m writing prose. So if I’m writing one of my long spiels about purpose, I’ll automatically think about the rhythm of the sentence, paragraph and overall argument (as in the Gary Provost quote you mention)—because rhythm is part of the rhetorical effect. And it’s a deep part, in the sense that I don’t think of it as just superficial decoration to make a bad argument sound better. It’s more that the sign of a good argument is that it will fall out in satisfyingly shaped prose. At least, that’s what I like to think. (Closely related to rhythm is the idea of pattern and symmetry—I like the Greek idea of arguments consisting of thesis, antithesis and synthesis—synthesis being the ‘third way’ that resolves the tension and moves the argument onto the next phase. Interesting that synthesiser is a musical term too.)

Conversely, when I write poetry, I feel a contrarian urge to go against the rhythm and break things up a bit. But then the poet I most admire technically is Philip Larkin, who had a brilliant sense of rhythm that was no doubt linked to his love of jazz.

KATE
It blows my mind when someone says they don’t have an inner monologue. What’s going on in there?!

It’s hard to describe my own—if I focus on it, it quietens (I read somewhere that understanding our inner monologues is like turning up the lights to see what darkness looks like). A lot of it is conversation: things I might say, things I should have said to other people. But I talk to myself too. At night I’ll say/hear: OK, you really have to go to sleep now.

Maybe the volume of my inner voice is connected to the fact that I don’t visualise things very clearly. A friend once posited that book lovers can picture characters and scenes vividly, as if there’s a movie in their head, but I don’t at all. Perhaps that’s why I try to write stories in a very visual way, pointing at certain sights in a certain order—because I have to, as much for myself as the reader. The cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker suggests that, in classic style, a writer presents a ‘window on the world’—‘he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself’—and for years I’ve found that to be massively useful advice. The eternal human challenge: trying to get other people to understand what’s going on in our own heads!

Interesting what you say about thinking in rhythm. I’m not sure I do that, but I definitely think in big shapes—I’m conscious of an overarching flow, and of how a story will have to contract and relax over time. A very clever friend who works in TV once said that screenwriting is all about ‘architecture’, which I think is probably true for most writing (your point about the Greek structure leads us nicely onto three-act structures and other ‘templates’ that writers end up tussling with). But it’s easy for us to forget all that when we’re focused on the detail of turning the perfect sentence…

NICK
Speaking of which, Clive James turned a few perfect sentences, and he’s another writer who comes to mind in this whole context. He’s best known for his memoirs, essays, journalism and poetry. But like Anthony Burgess, he yearned to be known primarily as a songwriter, and came close to achieving it. A 1973 article by Charles Shaar Murray cited Clive James and his musical partner Pete Atkin as one of the best songwriting duos of their time (alongside Jagger and Richards).

They were heavily influenced by the Tin Pan Alley era, though Clive James’s lyrics tended to be wordier and more narrative in form. Personally, I struggle to warm to Pete Atkin’s singing style, but I do love the way Clive James writes and talks about music. He once told John Peel, “This is the work I’m known least for, but which is closest to my heart”. There’s a book called Loose Canon that’s worth seeking out.

KATE
One thing that struck me about the clip you shared is how Clive James talks about being inspired in his writing and music by a childhood painting set. He says: “That often happens to me now. When I’m writing, I go right back to my earliest vocabulary. Childhood vocabulary.”

It makes me think about your definition of regret: ‘hope moving backwards’. Such a lovely phrase. Gave me a little shiver, actually. Hope is so rich and complex, maybe even more so than love. (I think of the Pandora myth and of how, when all the evils of the world escape from the jar, hope is left behind… But is hope a comfort? Or another evil? And is it even hope?? Some say that ‘expectation’ is a more accurate translation…) I wonder if, in the end, that’s what our favourite music and our greatest regrets share—they take us back to a time of possibility.

And, to take us all the way back, maybe your Greek argument structure helps us to more fully understand the lack of resolution that Ishiguro is talking about. In The Remains of the Day, the narrator arguably goes through thesis and antithesis—he has an initial vision of the world that is challenged—but he never moves on to the synthesis part. Yes, he sees the truth of his life, momentarily. But he ultimately rejects it, because it’s too painful, and instead of growing and moving forward with new knowledge, he circles back to being the person he was at the beginning. Sob.

NICK
And so the bus of this Substack post pulls away and the reader is left weeping in the rain.

Or something like that.

On a more upbeat note, I feel like there are about 50 potential song ideas in this conversation. “Turning up the lights to see what the darkness looks like” is a great album title.

Thanks everyone for reading—would love to hear any of your thoughts, whether in comments or via email. We’ll return with another song and more writings soon. In the meantime, new readers can hear I Wanted You To Know and check out the accompanying conversation with Jake here.

NICK
Our last post featured a new song: I wanted you to know. I thought we could start by sharing the tweet where it all began. 

Jake, you posted this tweet one evening last June, and I remember playing it on repeat and loving it. I ended up writing a lyric, which I sent to Kate that evening, and in the space of a couple of days, we sent you a rough version of a song. It felt weird because we were elbowing into your song uninvited—I still think of ‘I wanted you to know’ as a cuckoo squatting in the nest of another song. I’d love to know more about where your version came from and what it was like to get that unsolicited email from across the Atlantic.

JAKE
The song really came from an emotional place in which I was navigating my recent divorce from a 25-year relationship, and trying to express the senselessness and romanticism I was feeling through music. I came home from being out with friends, and started with a diminished chord, which is one of the most tense harmonic structures we have in Western music. And I just followed the lines and pieced together a melody that was mirroring the rising and falling I was feeling in my heart. 

One of the things I relied on during the pandemic was my online community, particularly on social media, and specifically Twitter. I had the account originally positioned as a place where I could try and figure out what was going on, first with the disastrous Trump admin, and then with the global health crisis, and slowly it morphed into a place where I could connect with marketers and just ‘be real’, call out our hubris, share some of the research I was engaged with, and try and do what I could to make things better.

Being a creator on social media can be tough. You’re never really sure how people are going to respond to things you pour your time and sweat into, and over the course of a decade plus on these apps, I’ve come to realize that the amount of engagement you get to a snarky comment on something topical, vs. the reactions you get to art, are night and day. People love to talk shit about pineapple and pizza, but if you share a poem you wrote or a slice of music, everyone goes quiet.

It’s important to not take this lack of reaction personally—but being a jazz musician who’s focused and trained on creating obscure music, it’s something I’m better prepared for and my resilience is a bit stronger in this area. This is one of the reasons I reacted so positively to the music you two were putting up on your channels—really evocative and compelling art that just happened to be music, stuff that deserved to be ‘liked’ and ‘shared’, because I know how much those small movements of the needle can mean to creators.

So when I put up the original, instrumental version of the song, I was prepared for crickets, but instead was happy to see the music was affecting people. Nick, when you provided your positive comments and mentioned you were thinking about lyrics, I was of course thrilled to see this social media finally behaving as it was designed: using media to connect with society. 

NICK
Yes, for all the downsides, I still cling to that ‘social’ part of social media—the way it can help creative connections happen.

Chronologically, I should tell the story of the lyric next—then Kate can explain how she does her aural and arranging magic. 

Like I say, I remember seeing the tweet and loving the mood of it. There’s something about the way you delivered it, Jake—the occasional looks to camera as you shift to a new chord—where it really felt to me like you were trying to say something. I think that’s what seeded the idea for the lyric—this idea of having something to say, but letting the piano do the talking. For some reason, the title came to mind quickly. As a general rule, I try to mimic the Tin Pan Alley lyricists by looking for conversational idioms and fragments of everyday conversation, then transposing them into a song, where they take on a deeper meaning. 

So ‘I wanted you to know’ is the kind of throwaway, apologetic phrase people use as they’re trailing off—’Anyway, I just wanted you to know’. But when you put it into a song, it takes on all that depth of ‘Shit, I really wanted you to know! And now you never will!’ The scenario I had in mind is that the singer has been in love with someone from afar—maybe a work colleague. Now she’s leaving town and you never quite got round to saying anything beyond hello. 

So I imagine the first verse being the singer rehearsing what he might say in his head, tentatively notching up the emotional candour—Too bad to hear you’re leaving [bit casual]… I’m sorry to see you go [bit more personal]… I’m sad to hear you’re leaving [starting to put it out there]… And I wanted you to know. Then the second verse talks about how he’s always messing it up—I search for words and stumble… and somehow lose the flow… Beneath my breath I mumble… what I wanted you to know. 

The bridge goes off in a dreamy, abstract direction—I wander through a maze… of turnings that I missed… Then it culminates in the last verse, where I was really just replaying that Twitter video and doing a ‘write what you see’ approach: This sad piano playing… is the only way I know… my only way of saying… what I wanted you to know. I wrote that verse almost as a placeholder, thinking it was maybe a bit obvious, but I think it’s where the song comes together lyrically—and it turned out to be where Kate made it come together musically too. 

KATE
Well, I had the easy job with this one! Jake, you’d taken care of the accompaniment. Nick, you’d done the melody and lyrics. All I needed was to sing the melody and add a couple of extra vocal lines. There was no messing about with instrumentation, like: 'Should I use the ocarina or the flute?’ (see Cloud Cuckoo Land…) 

Jake, your piano recording sounded to me like a piano being played in a vast, empty room. Perfect for what, with Nick’s lyrics, felt like a painfully lonely song. So I tried to retain that feeling with the vocals. Instead of transposing the song to fit my natural range, I kept the original key—which put the melody really very low in my voice. After that, I added other vocal lines that go right to the other end of my range. The result is this big gap between the melody and harmonies: a feeling of space. Like a big echoing chamber, in which the singer has been left alone.

Nick, you’d done an interesting thing and repeated the word ‘only’ in that last verse. (‘Only’ is actually a very lovely word to sing, by the way, what with that open vowel at the beginning.) On the first ‘only’, I had all three voices moving independently—it’s actually the moment where the harmonies are rising to their peak, creating this sense of space. But on the second ‘only’, I brought the voices back together, almost collapsing back into one another on the words ‘way of saying’. And, for me, this is the moment when all is definitely lost. Throughout the song there’s been a chance the singer will muster the courage to say what they need to say… But when the voices fall as one, as if faltering, we can imagine that time is up: the object of the singer’s affection has finally waved goodbye and disappeared through the door.

NICK
Yes, that’s definitely the ‘all is lost’ part of the song—and almost the ‘all is found’ moment too, as he’s at least found a language in which to express himself musically. 

By the way, a quick aside on pronouns in songs—this one doesn’t have any gendered pronouns, which was generally the case in Tin Pan Alley songs. Songwriters deliberately avoided them because it created a bigger market of performers who might take on your song. 

In my head, I imagine the singer of this song being male—the awkward, introverted type. But it’s actually what I love about your vocals in this one, Kate. Because I imagine him being a mumbly, awkward bloke on the outside, but in his head he has these voices that sing like angels—and there are three of them interweaving, moving further way from each other, and then resolving into one voice, followed by silence (and that deeply expressive piano outro). So the poet in me likes the fact that it’s a male perspective expressed in female voices. Though of course that’s just my reading and others are available. 

So Jake, we batted this song to you and I’d love to know more about a) what you thought of it, and b) that piano intro and outro that you added.

JAKE
Again, getting the draft of the beautiful lyrics and haunting vocals over the tune, was just such a vivifying experience, because it seemed to make good on the promises of connection via social media. Writing lyrics and performing vocals are areas within my own songwriting experience I enjoy doing, and have done countless times on stage, but am not particularly skilled at. So when someone says they want a crack at it, it feels like such a huge gesture and vote of confidence, that it affected me deeply. I love writing and creating with others, and there are less and less opportunities for this kind of collaboration to work in our siloed and platform-based world.

One of the things an old colleague of mine said, in reference to finishing musical projects, is that when you think you’re almost done, you still have 80% of the way to go. I was happy with the draft as it was—but Kate, your suggestions to add an intro and outro made so much sense to the formula of the song: easing people in and out of this deep emotion was an important step. After some back and forth, and me inhabiting that space I created the tune in originally, I was able to add on some bookends to the song and get in shape for shipping. 

NICK
Going back to social media enabling connections, I was trying to remember where our paths first crossed, Jake. And I think it was partly when Kate and I put out our second song (Songbird)—and you chimed in with some massively welcome Twitter positivity. It means a lot when that happens, especially when it comes from people who know what they’re talking about. But as you say, it’s not exactly the norm. Every creative who puts stuff out on Twitter has had that feeling of tumbleweed or shouting into a void. And everyone has to learn to deal with it and find a way to keep going anyway. Kate, how do you feel about that—does it bother you to share something and then it doesn’t get much response? Or are you quite zen about it all?

KATE
My feelings have changed a lot over time. When I was a kid, I relied way too heavily on other people’s opinions, and it really bothered me if the things I did weren’t greeted with praise. So, as a young musician, I had a real problem with perfectionism—if I played a wrong note during a performance, I felt the whole thing was a disaster. (I remember performing Clair de Lune at a sixth form concert, and I was so anxious about making a mistake that I couldn’t enjoy a single second. These days, I’d kill to be able to play even half that piece.)

But, funnily enough, social media might well have played a part in making me more zen. I’ve never really invested in things like Twitter, so whenever I do check in I’m reminded of my own irrelevance—and that in itself is kind of liberating. I can do stuff without worrying what everyone thinks. At the same time, I’m more conscious these days that great art is compatible with imperfection. Some of the most powerful performances include moments that go a bit awry—like the Ella Fitzgerald recording of Mack the Knife, where she forgot the words and created a classic. I’m more aware now that making mistakes means you’re pushing your own boundaries, which has to be a good thing.

Obviously, as a copywriter, I have to care what people think, because the work exists to change the way people think and feel and behave! But Songwritings isn’t copywriting. And I think it’s important—especially in an age where it’s easy to consume, consume, consume—to simply be creative and put stuff out there. We can’t be too bothered about what happens after that. Especially when it comes to the tumbleweed you mentioned. Tumbleweed might be as much down to the vagaries of the algorithm as the quality of your work, and the most visible work isn’t necessarily the best. All that being said, it’s still a bit nerve-wracking to share stuff, as it’s nearly impossible not to care at all. It’s obviously nice when people like what you do!

JAKE
I think performing music, or a play, or singing, or sharing in public, is an inherently embarrassing thing, not just for the performers, but for the audience as well. Most people laugh at stand-up comedy not necessarily because it’s funny, but to break the tension that exists in the vulnerability of the act of being human in front of other humans. I was trained from a young age to solo and perform in front of not only my peers, but a disinterested audience—right up to conservatory-style training for my degree. I love that there are people who thrive off live music, but I also think there maybe a Nascar aspect to the enjoyment, not only watching for mastery, but also for car crashes.

So when it comes to social media, it’s really a mixed bag. Some people like something you’re not crazy about, and most times people ignore the stuff you really want them to dig. And that’s okay. One of the great benefits of performing and sharing music is that you learn how failure isn’t really something you can control, but more like something you have to subject yourself to, in order to get better. The most powerful lessons that have inspired me to dig in even harder into my art, are the times when the shit hits the fan. You learn quick about why, digest the ways you can avoid that, and then you go back out there and risk it again.

To me, creativity isn’t so much about brilliance, it’s mostly about resilience. If you can bounce back quicker, you can become stronger. Social media is a brutal and beautiful place to learn these lessons. 

KATE
I think my experience of music in higher education was a bit different to yours, Jake. My course was very traditional, and didn’t include much performance. Maybe if I had done more performance, I might have been forced to throw off my perfectionism sooner. My degree covered things like harmony and counterpoint, music history and analysis… Much of it was quite theoretical. (I think it suited me in the way that writing suits me—while there are those who enjoy thinking on their feet, I’ve always liked having space to wrangle with my thoughts for a bit before putting them out there. It’s why Text Radio was such a challenge for me.)

When you commented on Songbird, I loved how you picked up on the vocals weaving in and out of each other—because that definitely takes me back to my days studying counterpoint! (Even though parallel fifths are absolutely everywhere in contemporary music, they still feel a bit illegal to me.)

NICK
It’s funny, I realise I’m talking to two graduate-level musicians here and I never made it past the foothills—gave up formal training somewhere around Grade 5 piano. Anything since then has been self-taught, particularly when it comes to the more recent interest in lyric writing. For me, this particular song was really interesting because it’s the first time I’ve written lyrics to someone else’s melody, which is what most of the Tin Pan Alley lyric writers would have done. And it was such a nice feeling—like getting into an expensive car made out of diminished seventh chords and being allowed to drive it around. 

Jake, I know you’re a wordsmith yourself—I’d love to know what you make of the relationship of lyrics and music. And that time-honoured question—which comes first for you?

JAKE
Honestly, it’s such a confusing thing writing music, because it’s not only like a cart-horse situation, in terms of ordering the operations—it’s also like you have to raise a horse, cut down wood for the cart, find nails and tools to create all the necessary parts of that combination, and then you have to decide which place goes where. I liken writing music to spelunking, or cave diving. It’s all about getting into the ground, wiggling around, and finding small cracks in the barriers that may or may not lead to bigger spaces where you can feel free. In songwriting, you’re also dealing with the question of ‘Why am I even doing this?’ No one is putting a gun to your head and asking for music. So you have to ignore the why, and focus on the how and fully inhabit that space and honour the moments and feelings you have. 

NICK
I love that analogy of spelunking—that idea of big, cavernous spaces hiding beyond the tight constraints.

I was reading this book by Ira Gershwin recently and he talks about lyric writing as ‘mosaic writing’, where you’re fitting syllables and vowel sounds onto particular points in the melody—a form of highly constrained writing, and yet you’re trying to achieve this loose, American, conversational effect. 

He also mentions this great definition of song that he came across:

The people I really envy are the Paul McCartneys, who can somehow write ‘Yesterday’ with placeholder lyrics (famously it was originally ‘Scrambled eggs’). And it’s much harder than it seems to retrofit a lyric onto a tune like that—he talks about mulling over three-syllable words for the title and eventually landing on ‘Yesterday’ (and in the next verse ‘Suddenly’). Yet the lyrics unfold in such a natural way that it feels like a single, uninterrupted, spontaneous train of thought.

Kate, all three of us are wordsmiths here. At some point, I think the world will hear more about your novel writing, but have you ever been tempted by something ultra-concise like lyric writing? And what do you think of that whole words-music relationship in general?

KATE
Hmmm, I used to write lyrics when I was in a band. But I don’t think I had much talent for it. I was still young, and perhaps I didn’t know what it was that I wanted to say—so I ended up flailing, as if I were copywriting without a proper brief. Maybe, to go back to Jake’s analogy, I was also a bit afraid of what I might uncover down there in the caves! Maybe I’d find something emotionally challenging. (Or worse, maybe I’d find nothing at all.)

But it’s funny that I never got back into lyrics, because I really admire concision in writing. The boiling down of an idea to its essence: I find it kind of magical. Even in long-form writing. One of my all-time favourite novels is The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes and, for me, its brevity is a massive part of what makes it so incredible. I’ve read and reread the story, and every time I’m amazed that there’s nothing superfluous—every paragraph, every sentence more than earns its place. For all the pathos of human existence to be contained in so few words… The craftsmanship of it blows my mind. Another more recent example might be Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These, another teeny book that expresses so much of life, truth, love, everything.

When I wrote songs as part of my music degree, we always started by taking poems and then writing melodies / accompaniments to fit. So, the music was in service of the lyrics. It’s why that Gershwin quote is really enlightening for me—I’ve probably thought for too long that the words tend to lead the music, without considering that the combination of both words and music creates a third thing.

JAKE
Being a fan of musicals, I’m always amazed at what the lyricist and composer can come up with, referring to the book. Just feels like magic when someone can take a story about a serial killer in London who cooks his victims into pies, and come out of the other end with a musical like Sweeney Todd. That never fails to blow my wig off. 

NICK
Well, I feel like we’ve probably talked more to each other in this post than we did over the whole creation of the song. Creatively, it all happened in the space of about 48 hours, and all over long distance and via the vagaries of social media. But I feel really fortunate to have been part of that process. Jake, from both of us—thanks so much for doing this, and for tolerating our cuckoo in your nest. Anything more you can say to play us out?

JAKE
In many ways, I think this song and the building it up into a final product with two other talented artists, came at such a critical moment in my life. I think when we’re feeling low about life and all of it, you can trick yourself into thinking you need to be alone. While isolation is important to processing, music is this unique gift humanity has where the processing of internal moods and narratives is happening in a very external fashion. I was grateful that this small piano piece inspired feelings and reactions in others, and then we worked together to create something that didn’t belong to any of us specifically, but to all of us. And this was only possible when the contributors really honoured where the others took it: the piano inspired the lyrics, the vocals took that inspiration and fit it into the piano, and now it feels like you might need a jeweller’s eyepiece to see the seams in the final product—which is the hope of anyone making collaborative art. 

Thanks again to Jake for an inspirational conversation and collaboration. You can follow him at twitter.com/posmarketer, hear more of his music at whalehawk.bandcamp.com and check out his audio production work at audiocontentlab.com.

And thanks everyone for reading / listening—always means a lot.

I wanted you to know

Too bad to hear you’re leaving.
I’m sorry to see you go.
I’m sad to hear you’re leaving.
And I wanted you to know.

I search for words and stumble,
and somehow lose the flow.
Beneath my breath I mumble
what I wanted you to know.

Deep in the days,
lost in the mist,
I wander through a maze
of turnings that I missed.

This sad piano playing
is the only way I know,
my only way of saying
what I wanted you to know.

Music: Jake Sanders
Voices & vocal arrangement: Kate van der Borgh
Lyrics: Nick Asbury

Happy to share this sad song (bonus lyric video included—also up on Soundcloud). Jake Sanders is a creative marketer and Grammy-nominated musician/composer based in Denver, Colorado. We’ll talk to him in the next post, and share the back story of how this came together.

audiocontentlab.com
twitter.com/posmarketer
whalehawk.bandcamp.com

Thanks as ever for reading, listening, liking, sharing, understanding.

For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (copywriter, D&AD Masterclass trainer, singer, musician) and Nick Asbury (copywriter, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, with a side interest in Tin Pan Alley songwriting). We write about music and share our own collaborations.

KATE
So… last time, we talked about the key changes in our song Cloud Cuckoo Land. And since then, I’ve been campaigning relentlessly for us to do a post about notable key changes—good, bad, ugly. It’s especially timely given this recent study, which suggests that key changes in pop music are in decline.

Perhaps it’s worth clarifying: when we say ‘key change’, we’re talking about a moment when the music shifts from one place to another via some change in pitch—usually, the song seems to move up or down. In pop, it’s almost always up, which gives the music an emotional and literal ‘lift’ (like when Westlife get off their stools). But I wanted us to look at examples that are a bit more interesting. How about:

• The ‘extra mile’ key change

Key changes in pop often mean moving up a semitone, like in the Westlife example. Or sometimes it’s a whole tone, which is two semitones—see Whitney’s I Will Always Love You or the Backstreet Boys’ I Want it That Way (karaoke classics both).

But Stacy’s Mom by Fountains of Wayne jumps three semitones. At the guitar solo, the music pivots on the note E—this is the root note of the original key E major, but also the third note of C major, which is the chord that leads us into the new key of G. The change really registers when the vocals come in for the final chorus. Joyful.

• The ‘just kidding’ key change

Surely one reason key changes are in decline: they became a cheap trick, clunky ‘gear shifts’ executed without style, and began to sound formulaic and cheesy.

Which is why I enjoy Vulfpeck’s New Guru, which includes a shift at 2:31 that’s reversed a few bars later. (OK, maybe it’s not sustained enough to be a ‘real’ key change—but I like that the band plays with a musical trope and rejects it.)

• The ‘more-the-merrier’ key change(s)

No list would be complete without Beyoncé’s Love on Top, which moves through FOUR key changes to a) show off her incredible range, and b) create that feeling of almost delirious happiness.

On the hunt for other songs that visit several keys, I discovered this (charming), and this (erm), both from the capital of key changes: Eurovision. Also, remember Dizzy? That one constantly shifts keys, helping create a sense of lurching instability…

• The parallel key change

Sometimes, a song doesn’t feel as if it moves up or down. Instead, it might move from major to minor, or the other way around, while keeping the same root note—which might feel more like lightening or darkening.

There’s Runaway, by Del Shannon, which starts minor but switches to major at the chorus. Or While My Guitar Gently Weeps, by the Beatles, which does the same.

Or, if you’re looking for something more high-brow, how about I Saw the Sign by Ace of Base, whose instrumental moments are minor and verse / chorus are major…

NICK
OK, so before I launch into key changes, I have to admit I sometimes get confused by them. The Westlifes are easy enough to spot, but the more complex ones sometimes leave me wondering if it’s actually a key change or just a complex chord structure. My basic understanding is that it involves a fundamental shift, so that all the chords start revolving round a different root note.

In my head, I visualise it like Irving Berlin’s piano. For the uninitiated, he was the father of Tin Pan Alley and a Russian Jewish immigrant who more or less invented American popular music (White Christmas, Puttin’ on the Ritz, God Bless America). But he was a pretty limited, self-taught musician who doggedly stuck to the black notes on the keyboard—to the point where he had a special ‘transposing piano’ made for him, so that he could shift from one key to another by yanking a big lever. That’s my kind of key change—these days, we can do it with a setting in GarageBand.

• The indie key change

I tried to think of a few indie examples—REM’s Stand comes to mind, where the key change reflects the lyrical message about seeing familiar things differently. There’s also All Around The World by Oasis, where the key change only serves to make the song longer and more turgid—not their finest hour.

Then I remembered Cannonball by The Breeders. It’s one of the coolest song openings I know, and the coolest part is the casual key change in the bass at 0:29—almost like she changes her mind about which key to play it in. But it’s such an unusual way to deploy the key change trick. Combined with the rest of the opening, it’s like the band is gradually stirring itself to play the song, culminating in the vocal sliding in around the 0:51 mark.

• The country music key change

A few country and folk music examples come to mind. Earlier on, you mentioned I Will Always Love You. Disappointingly, the Dolly Parton original doesn’t contain the epic key change.

But there is a subtler one in Islands in the Stream—at the start of the second verse, around 1:24. I think there’s a tradition in country and folk music of using key changes to vary up what might otherwise be one-level songs (not the case with Islands in the Stream, which would be great either way). But there are other examples like the Pogues version of Dirty Old Town, or 100 Unread Messages by Gruff Rhys, which in turn pays homage to…

…I Walk The Line, where Johnny Cash traverses various keys throughout the verses, eventually returning to the original key in the final verse, only an octave lower. In some performances (not this one), he hums the root note to set himself before starting on each verse—which makes it feel like he’s dramatising the lyric and holding the line for the music itself. I like it when key changes reflect the theme of the song like that.

I want to enthuse about one of my favourite Beatles songs later. But first I want to hear more from the person in this conversation who actually knows what they’re talking about.

KATE
I don’t blame you for getting confused, key changes can be tricky. And definitely tricky to write about—am sure I’ll trip myself up at some point. I think the main thing is, a key tells you where the music’s harmonic ‘home’ is. So, in the key of C major, a song will revolve (mainly) around the notes of the C major scale. And, even if it dances off around some distant and complex chords, the music will feel as if it has arrived ‘back home’ when it lands on C major (which is why it will likely end on a C major chord).

However, just to show how nuanced this stuff can be, Sorry by Justin Bieber is in the key of E flat major… But there is no E flat chord in the song. Ha! We feel that the song is in E flat because of how the other chords behave, pulling towards there but always being frustrated. It gives the song a slightly maddening feel, a craving for resolution…

Of course, Western classical music is full of key changes. One that sticks in my mind is in the opening movement of Schubert’s 8th Symphony (the Unfinished), as it’s such a ‘moment’. After we’ve heard the first theme in B minor, the horns alone play a sustained D… This is the third note in the B minor scale, but also the fifth note of the G major scale, which is exactly where that D takes us next.

Perhaps more so than key changes, I love those moments where music feels harmonically unstable and disorienting. Like the opening of Chopin’s incredible Ballade in G minor, Op. 23, which must be one of the most thrilling pieces in the whole piano repertoire. From the opening octaves, you might think we were in A flat major, then—hang on, a bit of chromatic misdirection—is that C minor? But no, finally, we get to G minor. The perfect opening for this volatile, twisty, seat-of-your-pants piece.

Before we hear your Beatles thoughts, let’s go back to that study, heralding the death of the key change in pop… There are those who would link it to a more general decline in the quality of pop music. However, I actually get quite frustrated at people like Rick Beato, who complain that music is getting less interesting—when, really, perhaps it’s only getting less interesting if you look at it as a guitarist focused on chord changes. Maybe, if you look at the wild world of production and timbre opened up by digital audio workstations, it’s getting super interesting.

Do you have any thoughts on that? And why do we as humans so often feel the need to prove that the art of our youth was quantifiably better than the stuff of today? Is this a thing that happens in poetry too?

NICK
Yes, I definitely think it’s simplistic to equate key changes with music being more ‘interesting’.

I always like the punk ethos of ‘here’s three chords, now form a band’—and of course, blues music has always found endless variation in three basic chords. There are so many elements that determine how ‘interesting’ a song is—lyrics, melody, rhythm, texture, instrumentation, attitude. That’s why I think there’s no real limit on how many great songs can be written—any more than there’s a limit on how many great poems, novels, paintings or buildings can be created.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t debates to be had about the relative interestingness of certain periods. In pop music, I think the 1960s to 1990s will be looked back on as a kind of Renaissance period: an unrepeatable explosion and acceleration in innovation, caused by converging cultural and technological changes. But the 2000-2050 period could be equally interesting as the technology continues changing, just as the 1900-1950 period was fascinating and ripe for rediscovery. (In poetry as in music, it’s probably only in retrospect that you see the shape of the period you’re in. It seems to be part of the human condition that we yearn for the good old days, without ever quite realising that we’re living in the good old days, from the perspective of some future nostalgist.)

• The commonplace-to-cosmic key change

Speaking of nostalgia, you brought up the Beatles earlier, and I wanted to mention one of my favourite McCartney songs: Penny Lane. I believe he wrote it partly in response to John Lennon writing Strawberry Fields Forever, in which Lennon returned to his Liverpool roots and cast them in a psychedelic light. McCartney took the same idea and ended up with Penny Lane—it’s the best example of the two writers spurring each other on, and the two songs ended up as a double A-side. You could say it was one of the artistic peaks of that ‘Renaissance’ period.

There’s an analysis of the key changes here, so I won’t attempt the same thing myself.

But throughout the process of you recording Cloud Cuckoo Land, I kept being reminded of Penny Lane—there’s something similar about the key changes denoting this destabilising shift from the everyday world into a weirder place.

In verse 2, you achieved this brilliant percussive effect by (I believe) stomping loudly on your bathroom floor—which brings to mind commuters grimly stomping through a tube station in rush hour. Then it transitions to the bridge, with the bouncy piano feeling (to me) a bit McCartney-ish. And it all goes psychedelic with the key change up to the final verse, and the key-merging-singularity of the ‘reality is imaginary’ line.

So I’m going to claim there’s a similarity in spirit between Penny Lane and Cloud Cuckoo Land, even if it only exists in my head.

• The Terry Hall key change

My last thought before bouncing back to you… We’re writing this in the days following the sad news of Terry Hall’s death, where the one consolation is that it’s a chance to rediscover so much of the great music he made. I particularly love the way he never stayed in the same place for long.

I hadn’t listened to Thinking of you for decades, but have realised afresh what a great song it is—musically Burt Bacharachian, and lyrically very Tin Pan Alley-esque. The greats like Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter would nod appreciatively at the casually conversational rhyme of ‘sorta’ and ‘oughta’ in the opening lines. There’s a lovely morose romanticism about the whole thing—Terry Hall was so good at mixing the sweetness with a gruff realism: ‘Share moonlit nights / Breathing nothing but lies’.

Best of all, there’s a key change! You can hear it kicking in at the end of the bridge—at the lyrically appropriate ‘Let's open our eyes’ moment—allowing the whole last verse and chorus to shift up a tone. I love how the song nods to the Tin Pan Alley tradition (wordplay, internal rhyme, three verses and a bridge), but also adds in a proper 80s pop chorus. There’s a thesis to be written about how it ties together so many strands of 20th-century pop music in one three-minute song.

KATE
I love your point that we’re all unknowingly living in the good old days. You’d think there’d be some kind of evolutionary benefit to feeling optimistic about the future, about the new—an inducement to continue the species, maybe—but we humans seem inclined to forever complain that everything is crapper than it used to be.

(There is of course the idea that, instead of music being any less interesting, there’s no longer any such thing as a ‘mainstream’—and so, in this digital world, artists do fascinating things within their own niches and online communities, rather than just playing on MTV. Which means, if we can’t find anything exciting, maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place. To me, this feels like a way more compelling argument than ‘humans have, for the first time in history, forgotten how to create decent art’.)

I also love that you’ve wrapped things up with Terry Hall and those connections with Tin Pan Alley. Feels a bit like, after exploring some far-flung harmonies, we’ve arrived back home. Which in itself feels very apt at this festive time, when many of us revisit our roots (wherever or whatever they may be—for me, it’ll be the distinctive tonalities of Leytonstone and Burnley) before embarking on the adventure of another year.

So perhaps this is a good time to raise a glass to all the songs and writings of 2022, here and elsewhere—and to feel confident that things will be EVEN BETTER next year.

Thanks as always for reading / listening / sharing. Our meandering adventures in writing and music-making will continue in 2023.