I was going through some of the bits and pieces of paper that I used to write down lyrics and chord progressions and I thought I would share them with you. As organized as I try to be in capturing my songs, sometimes I get inspiration when the only thing I have at hand to write things down is an envelope or a scrap of paper. These notes can show the process of writing songs better than any description I can provide. Sometimes the lyrics come yo me cleanly and some times I struggle to get the right words (as can be seen by the crossed-out words and lyrics out of order with arrows showing where they belong. Sometimes songwriting is messy and that is evident here.
Now onto the notes....
The sheet above are some of the lyrics to "Silly Actors Guild" (this song has not been discussed yet but that will be coming soon). As you can see, I was coming up with lyrics and needed to get them written down before I forgot them so I grabbed an envelope that already had information on it and I had to work around what was there. What you see is a couple of the verses, the chorus, and the beginning of the bridge with the chords.
Above you see an envelope I grabbed to capture some lyrics for two different songs. The first is a verse from "Real Enough" that was a late addition that was needed to maintain the structure of the song. The second part is what finally became the chorus to "Forever Stay". Again, the words come out pretty cleanly. The next one will show how messy things can get.
Above we see the chorus to "Make me love you" (an older song that I have not discussed yet). As you can see it took a while to get to to the final lyrics. Here, I was trying different things and the final result was a combination of the things I tried. Just to be clear, the final lyrics to the chorus are:
Make me love you
Make me care
Take my heart
Take me anywhere
Just remember my love for you
And try to see, the better of me
A recording of this song is on my soundcloud page here.
This is an early version of the first verse for "Make Me Love You".
The above two sheets show initial versions the lyrics for the second and third verses and the chorus for "Mountain Freedom". These lyrics represent a "stream of consciousness" that I try to get down in order to capture the ideas I want in the song. These lyrics are cleaned up later and then slightly modified to make sure they match the timing of the song. The chord progression is an early version of the chorus and was modified in the final version.
These two sheets contain the lyrics to "From Town to Town". This song was written pretty quickly (at least a version of the lyrics that is very close to the final version). Just for reference the lyrics that begin "The pretty señorita..." is for the chorus and the lyrics that begin "When I have nothing..." is for the bridge. The rest are lyrics for the verses.
This collection of sheets contain the lyrics to "After Thoughts". The initial version of this song came to me fairly quickly. I did jump around a bit when writing this song. I wrote a couple of verses then the chord progression on the second page is for the bridge. The lyrics after that are the chorus followed by more verses. The lyrics that start with "Better feelings..." were an alternate for the chorus followed by some drum loop notes. the lyrics that start "You can't say I told you..." are for the bridge. After that the rest of the lyrics are for the verses. The reason I'm going into this is that it shows the process I go through in writing my songs. I get bits of inspiration for one part of a song while working on another part (like coming up with the bridge chord progression while working on the chorus - 2nd page in this set).
These last few sheets sheet contains a revision of the lyrics for the first verse and chorus to "Make Me Love You" as well as an initial version of the second and third verses. As you can see here, I was trying a number of different things before finally settling on the final lyrics.
Just to show you how things evolve, here are the final lyrics for the verses:
I sit down on the park bench the songbirds serenade all around
Peace comes over me like a lover soft and warm I can feel the embrace
After a while I must move on this calm binds me like a ball and chain
Sometimes my mind might wander don’t forget that I still love you
You won’t let me down, if you don’t stay around I will be part of you
I might be distant from you never forget that I still want you
You don’t listen I’m not saying this silent movie we’re stranded in
We look in each others eyes suddenly words don’t mean a thing
So we walk out to the future the unknown’s brightness can blind us so
And here are the lyrics for the chorus:
Make me love you, make me care
Take my heart, take me anywhere
Just remember my love for you
And try to see, the better of me
I hope you enjoyed this peek into the early versions of my songs and get some insight into the process (if you can call it that) I use when songwriting.
The recordings for most of these songs are on my soundcloud page here.
Enjoy,
-Ron-
