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  1. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    I wrote well in school but was a terrible singer as a child. I wrote a lot of songs without knowing---or sensing intuitively--that some sounds are easier to sing than others. I didn't know that one 'sings on the vowel' or the difference between open and closed ones. For some rock songs, this may not make much difference, but it makes an enormous difference in songs written so that OTHER PEOPLE will also want to sing them. Looking back, I can see that many of my juvenile errors were rooted in ignorance of singing. I know a little better now and it's been a great boon to my songwriting. (It also enhances my appreciation of people who do it brilliantly.)

    Here's a short article about singing vowels and another about singing English successfully.

    http://singing.about.com/od/pronunciation/fl/

    Singing English Understandably

    (One need not be a singer to be a lyricist, but if one's lyrics are unsingable, it may be hard to find someone to sing them for you.)
    This is good stuff.

    ROCK

    The reason it doesn't matter for rock songs is that they don't care. The one that gets me is when they substitute yo for you, like Hoobastank did in "The Reason":

    I've found a reason for me
    To change who I used to be
    A reason to start over new
    and the reason is YO

    Yo is easier to sing in that high register, so instead of lowering the key or changing the words or learning how to sing better.... Do nothing.

    It's a good pop song with a good message. And it sounds good until they hit that awful note, not to blame the note, somebody should have....


    WRITING FOR SINGING

    To me, there are two things needed to take a line from simply saying what you mean to greatness:

    1. It has to be singable. That means in range. That means perfect prosody (in the old sense of accents falling on the right syllables*). And all the little things like the vowels on long notes, unambiguous consonants, whatever it takes so that the words flow and are not easily mistaken for other words. It should sound easy to do for the singer, even if amateur singers find it difficult. These are the essentials.

    2. And then there needs to be a little something extra. It could be an internal rhyme, or a rhyme that matches somewhere within the corresponding line in the previous verse, or a multi-syllable rhyme, or some other clever wordplay or notable thing. A great line is a line that may sound fairly ordinary even though it has these other qualities craftily embedded in it. In fact, a good lyric line should sound so ordinary that it could be taken for actual conversation, but not so ordinary that it could be mistaken for actual conversation (Oscar Wilde should have said that). It has to be special.

    *The way songwriting is taught in some places these days, prosody could mean anything. You'll hear teachers say stuff like a happy song in a minor key is bad prosody. Or a sad song with a fast tempo is bad prosody. They may avoid saying bad prosody by calling it reverse prosody or whatever. But to me those things have nothing to do with prosody. Those are issues of setting, not in a literary sense, but in a music-compositional sense. I insist on using the word prosody in the poetic sense where it means versification, the mapping of accented and unaccented syllables onto notes in a song so that in the end the pronunciation of each word is natural. That's what I call prosody, and I limit it to that in songwriting discussions (good luck with that in Nashville).

    By the way, I was in Nashville a few years ago writing with a team at a songwriter event. We arrived on a Thursday night, split up into teams, and started writing Friday morning. On Saturday afternoon each team presented their song to a panel of music industry pros to get a critique and potentially win a prize.

    I was writing with my nephew Chad (a known-good singer/songwriter) and internet friend Greg (a PHD in philosophy among other things). Chad can write, sing, and play. Greg is intelligent, insightful, and can also write (he could have written the whole song in Latin), and he plays a little guitar.

    On Friday morning Chad came in with a good idea for a song. He had a title, a cool guitar part, a sort of sketchy verse, and a very good chorus. I had a broken finger, so I found a cool slide thing that I could play along with Chad, and I sang harmony on the verse. We did what we could that first day.

    Saturday morning, Greg got up at 4:00am and rewrote the 2nd verse. So when we got together at 9:00am to finish the song Chad and I had some catching up to do. Actually, it mostly Chad, because he had to sing the song. So I sat in my chair half dozing while Greg and Chad tried to reconcile that verse.

    The song was about a couple on their 3rd date. The guy had taken her home, said goodnight on her front porch, and then driven away. But as he drove, he really wanted to go back, which he did do, so there was a happy ending.

    But Chad was having a problem singing the first line of the new second verse. So I woke up and asked Greg to see his notebook. The line said something about driving home that night (don't remember the exact words). I looked at it for a second and said, "Rollin' along into the middle of the night". Chad sang it and said, "That's perfect". And I went back to sleep.

    I thought the first verse was still rough. There was an issue of events not being in the right order. I had offered suggestions to Greg and Chad, but they didn't see the problem.

    So, at 3:00 that afternoon we go to the place and play our songs for the pros. The place was great, a music club closed for the afternoon except for the bartender and the sound man. Both of those guys did their jobs nicely.

    When it was over, and we got to talk to the pro panel for our critique, here's what happened. The guy from Brad Paisley's production company said that he couldn't follow the first verse, "But when it got to 'Rollin along into the middle of the night', man, I was right there with you." I thought, hey, that's my line, but of course I didn't say anything, because it wasn't so much that line (I just made it singable), but the organization of the whole second verse, Greg's work, that made it work.

    I still feel like we could have fixed the first verse, but neither Chad nor Greg grokked what I was about. They didn't see the problem. But you have to question everything. Everything you write, look at it, and ask yourself, "Why does this suck?"

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  3. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lazz
    I think Hartman says "trough", too.
    I shudder.
    Sometimes one is in a ditch with few choices. What else rhymes with awful? Lawful and waffle come to mind but they don't seem to be of much help. Given the circumstance, I think "troughful" was a good choice, not a bad one, if only because this is a song about drinking and a trough is something to drink from. One can only expect so much elegance in a dive....

  4. #28

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lazz

    Singer-songwriter syndrome is a dark and dismal corner for songwriting. Joni and Dylan are pretty much a genre each to themselves.
    Alec Wilder wrote well of Dylan's gift for melody. Yes, melody. He treated Dylan (-as a subject) as a tunesmith. Dylan can craft a long narrative line and sustain it. (Easier said than done.) Chuck Berry was brilliant at this too. Strong narrative flow is no insignificant gift.

    Here is the opening of Dylan's "Tangled Up In Blue" (-from memory). This does not come across as 'deathless poetry'---it is not--but it tells a lot of story in a few words.

    "Early one morning the sun was shining and I was layin' in bed,
    Wonderin' if she'd changed at all and if her hair was still red.
    Her folks they said our life together sure was gonna be rough---
    They never did like mama's homemade dress; papa's bankbook wasn't big enough."

    Dylan's line flow better than many assume they might. "Blowin' In The Wind" is easy to sing and hard to forget. No small feat.

  5. #29

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lazz
    I can see it. I can read it.
    But I don't get what you mean.
    It makes no sense to me.


    Can you feed me some f'rinstances so I can follow what you mean, Ken?
    Are you including, say, "Louie, Louie" in your latter category?
    Not necessarily. "Louie, Louie" may have been a completely thought out, strategically written, thoroughly crafted song. We don't know for certain which is which. But we can safely say that both have succeeded.

    How can anyone learn to write songs by studying just one practitioner?
    I didn't say that was the only thing. It's just what he told me. It may have been the first influence, the biggest influence, or just one of many. That's not important. What's important is that he found a model to follow.

    Anyway, how many sunsets do you need to see before you can paint one. If you're a good painter, the answer is ONE!

    When somebody wants to become a painter, they study art.
    When somebody wants to become an actor, they study theatre.
    When somebody wants to direct movies, they study film.
    But it is an article of faith and self-deception that anyone can write songs without regard for history and tradition.
    Nobody said otherwise. And by the way, the guy I'm talking about has been writing songs every goddamn day for a long goddamn time. I never said he took any shortcuts.

    And, incidentally, he spent most of his writing life not caring whether his songs were commercial or not. He only wanted them to be good, which everybody admitted they were.

    Your friend, for instance, wants to be a songwriter so he studies Bob Dylan, innocent and ignorant of Salvador Dali’s warning that anything NOT grown from tradition is plagiarism.
    No, he is a songwriter. This is a heavy cat. We do not know the limits of his knowledge or ignorance. We simply know that the writings of Bob Dylan influenced him. Some of the stuff he has written, most of it decidedly non-commercial, is out of the realm of Dylan.

    He has lived beyond his wants and pondered beyond what most of us are capable of in terms of imagination and lyrical creativity.

    How do you deduce that my friend's writing did not grow from tradition?


    Singer-songwriter syndrome is a dark and dismal corner for songwriting. Joni and Dylan are pretty much a genre each to themselves. But the subsequent hordes are largely musically impoverished, claim melody notes from their chords while sticking resolutely to triads. They own a guitar, have learned a few grips and shapes with no understanding, and believe their job is to strum a simple repeated progression and cram what they have to say in words inside however many bars and beats there happen to be passing by. That’s a very different style of working to the ones I consider more productively worthwhile to talk about and learn from. The guys ploughing that field neither need to know nor even care about those other elements of musical sound involved in language like cadence or rhythm or regard for prosody.
    I'm sorry for your lack of understanding.

    Too bad. They can do like that if they want but it ain’t for me.
    I want to do the best work I can, and keep working with the best musicians I can.
    God bless you.

    Lyricists need to develop musicianship, an ear, and be alive to melody and harmony if they are to work most effectively with the best composers. Most of the singer-songwriter pop-rock crowd don’t go for those values and fail to see their relevance.
    That may be true. What does that have to do with me. I don't associate with that kind.

    But if I’m working towards something with a top-notch musical collaborator, I need to be fairly conversationally fluent in the musical/structural concepts at play and confident of their emotional effects. It helps me do my bit, better. I have to be hip to nuance and tone. Unlike the relentless singer-songwriter fraternity, I am writing for someone else, other artists, so I can’t get away with any old crap like they can.
    I'm sorry you have such a bad attitude. Where is this coming from? Who do you write for? How do you do it?

    And here’s a very loud "later!" for inspiration.
    Inspiration is a myth for the amateur to swallow.
    Others don't have the time to wait around.
    So, add something to the conversation. Tell us how you create masterful works without inspiration.

    Some great songwriters have admitted the difference between when they were inspired and when they were simply crafting a song because it was required. Pros can do it either way. How do you do it?
    Last edited by kenbennett; 08-09-2015 at 06:16 PM.

  6. #30

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    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    Sometimes one is in a ditch with few choices. What else rhymes with awful? Lawful and waffle come to mind but they don't seem to be of much help. Given the circumstance, I think "troughful" was a good choice, not a bad one, if only because this is a song about drinking and a trough is something to drink from. One can only expect so much elegance in a dive....
    I remain resolutely unconvinced.

    If we are in a ditch with few choices, we can't afford to overlook the option of filling that useless ditch back in, covering it up, and re-engineering a different route, starting somewhere else and affecting a new orientation.

    I can't remember the full story from Furia or biographer David Hajda, or even how deep they dug into it, but Strayhorn spent three to five years pulling at the song, poking at it, primping and polishing, getting it just right!, he was persistent, driven, and would never have settled for the clumsy clunk buckets-of-blood of "trough-ful of hearts". For me, it's such a shockingly poor choice that I can't believe it. It makes no sense to me that he would do that. There are just too many available workable alternatives.

    Mind you - I've been wrong before.

    Linton Garner, old school-mate of Strayhorn, nonetheless liked it the way I told it.
    It's the only way that makes sense.
    (to me)

  7. #31
    destinytot Guest
    "A troughful of hearts" does jar with me, but surely it needn't have gruesome connotations? I can't help but feel queasy at the thought of human offal (sorry).

    'Trough' appears to derive from words for 'wooden vessel' or 'wooden container'. Perhaps its meant to signify size - a pocketful, a bucketful, a.. (you get the picture)

  8. #32

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    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    Sometimes one is in a ditch with few choices. What else rhymes with awful? Lawful and waffle come to mind but they don't seem to be of much help. Given the circumstance, I think "troughful" was a good choice, not a bad one, if only because this is a song about drinking and a trough is something to drink from. One can only expect so much elegance in a dive....
    My instincts tell me that trough was the word.

    Mark, the question is not what rhymes with awful. Lyric writers think this stuff out in advance. They have ideas and words that rhyme with those ideas which are relevant to a lyric they are crafting in their mind. They don't usually paint themselves into a corner. I mean they have a plan and do not necessarily use an end-line word they haven't already thought of a rhyme for. It's part of gathering the material for a song.

    The songwriter friend that I was defending against Lazz told me that that's what he does every day in his morning jog. He goes out with a song idea in mind. During his run he thinks of key words that express the ideas and actions that will happen in the song and comes up with rhymes before he ever writes the song.

    He already has the story. He already knows how he's going to lay out the plot. So just before he writes the song he goes for a run and somehow works out rhymes in his head. Even though he doesn't have actual lines yet, his ideas are solid enough to choose key words and think of good rhymes for them.

  9. #33
    I'd say it's got to be "troughful". It's crazy how neither of these seem to be commonly used words I could find much about .

    "Trothful" apparently has a completely different meaning and is an adjective. Don't see how it could be that. Couldn't find "troughful" in any online dictionary , but that was on my phone.

    The only occurrence I COULD find was in the title of a book, "A Troughful of Pearls". It's apparently very rare , and I don't know anything about it . Not that I know anything about literature....

    Without knowing anything about it, I would assume it has to be a reference to Christ's words re. "throwing your pearls to the pigs" from the sermon on the mount. It's a deliberately stark, dramatic, image. I think that title captures it pretty well, if that's what it's referencing.

    "Lush Life" is pretty stark and ironic itself. After talking briefly about having found love supposedly, it goes back to the reality of life being awful . I don't see that he's describing hearts here anatomically. Had to be in the romantic sense. although I suppose it could be kind of double entendre.

    Any kind of romance would now be boring after the loss? I don't see what "troth" has to do with anything in that part of the song.

    The most important factor, for me, is that "awful" and "troughful" actually rhyme. "Trothful" would rhyme with "moth full", wouldn't it? If you're from the Midwestern United States, you may pronounce all of these with the same vowel, but that's not correct. "Offal" and "awful" are pronounced differently as well. In addition to the vowel being different, the consonant in between is also different. I don't think these kind of rhyme cheats were as common at the time.

    I like "troughful". It fits the context of the song for me.
    Last edited by matt.guitarteacher; 08-09-2015 at 09:51 PM.

  10. #34
    destinytot Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
    The most important factor, for me, is that "awful" and "troughful" actually rhyme.
    One of those songs where some of us have no choice but to fake an American accent...

  11. #35

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    The "troth/trough" question is tricky. TBH I hadn't analyzed it as much as some here, but my subconcious interpretation was "trough".
    In certain "old world" drinking establishments, there was very commonly a trough built round the entire perimeter of the bar. (You can still see one in the city I live).
    To me, it conjured the image of the "lushes" round the bar being the same as the contents of the trough. Perhaps.

    Now " distingue' ".....that's a whole different matter.

  12. #36

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    Quote Originally Posted by pubylakeg
    The "troth/trough" question is tricky. TBH I hadn't analyzed it as much as some here, but my subconcious interpretation was "trough".
    In certain "old world" drinking establishments, there was very commonly a trough built round the entire perimeter of the bar. (You can still see one in the city I live).
    To me, it conjured the image of the "lushes" round the bar being the same as the contents of the trough. Perhaps.

    Now " distingue' ".....that's a whole different matter.
    I used to think that bit said 'distant gay traces'! maybe I'd been reading too much about Billy Strayhorn!
    Last edited by grahambop; 08-10-2015 at 07:35 AM.

  13. #37

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    I always thought 'troughful' though odd, made some sense. As if he was expressing disgust with the whole messy business of being in love.

  14. #38

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    Back on the farm, a trough was the thing we put food in for the hogs.

  15. #39

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    Quote Originally Posted by kenbennett
    Back on the farm, a trough was the thing we put food in for the hogs.
    I think that's a slightly different milieu than the setting for 'Lush Life'!

  16. #40

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    Quote Originally Posted by Lazz
    I remain resolutely unconvinced.

    If we are in a ditch with few choices, we can't afford to overlook the option of filling that useless ditch back in, covering it up, and re-engineering a different route, starting somewhere else and affecting a new orientation.
    That is always an option. And you are free to stick to your view, but in so doing you leave yourself in an awkward position you fail to realize: "troth full" does NOT rhyme with "awful." "Trough full" does.

  17. #41
    destinytot Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    That is always an option. And you are free to stick to your view, but in so doing you leave yourself in an awkward position you fail to realize: "troth full" does NOT rhyme with "awful." "Trough full" does.
    The Great Vowel Shift...
    Last edited by destinytot; 08-10-2015 at 10:06 AM. Reason: to press shift

  18. #42

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    Quote Originally Posted by kenbennett
    My instincts tell me that trough was the word.

    Mark, the question is not what rhymes with awful. Lyric writers think this stuff out in advance. They have ideas and words that rhyme with those ideas which are relevant to a lyric they are crafting in their mind. .
    When rhyming, the word one is rhyming with is paramount. English is considered a rhyme-poor language. (Italian is rhyme rich.) We all know this because of the important word "love" and the dearth of good rhymes for it. (Glove, shove, er, um, dove, oh, and there's of!) Ten thousand love songs and five-six rhymes for that word. (The number one reason for not putting 'love' at the end of a line, though of course it still happened, as in "I Can't Give You Anything But Love".)

    How many times have we heard 'self' rhymed with 'shelf' because there aren't many other choices in English?

    "Awful" has few rhymes in English. I think "trough full" was in inspired choice, not a poor one. Though it sounds a little phony because, well, who says "trough full"? But then, the drunken alkie singing "Lush Life" is pretentious, so some latitude is given.

    It is said of Lorenz Hart that when he had to come up with a lyric, he made a mark for each syllable in a line and a "suck" or [f-word] at the end, then left the room with Richard Rodgers and a piano in it to walk around New York to craft a lyric. First he had to fix the tune in his head, and that's what a "dummy" lyric did. Then he worked out the lines we all know and love. Often there were constraints----'this is the song about them meeting' or 'this is when she tells him she's leaving' or 'this is after he loses the girl' or whatever. And of course, the tune was set.

  19. #43

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    Here is a lyric (excerpt) I wrote many years ago and still consider good:

    "I'd rule the world, an infinite range,
    The diamonds in my pockets would be small change;
    I'd reign supreme, if I could sing---
    And I'd have it all 'cause I wouldn't want anything."

  20. #44
    destinytot Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    When rhyming, the word one is rhyming with is paramount. English is considered a rhyme-poor language. (Italian is rhyme rich.) We all know this because of the important word "love" and the dearth of good rhymes for it. (Glove, shove, er, um, dove, oh, and there's of!) Ten thousand love songs and five-six rhymes for that word. (The number one reason for not putting 'love' at the end of a line, though of course it still happened, as in "I Can't Give You Anything But Love".)

    How many times have we heard 'self' rhymed with 'shelf' because there aren't many other choices in English?

    "Awful" has few rhymes in English. I think "trough full" was in inspired choice, not a poor one. Though it sounds a little phony because, well, who says "trough full"? But then, the drunken alkie singing "Lush Life" is pretentious, so some latitude is given.

    It is said of Lorenz Hart that when he had to come up with a lyric, he made a mark for each syllable in a line and a "suck" or [f-word] at the end, then left the room with Richard Rodgers and a piano in it to walk around New York to craft a lyric. First he had to fix the tune in his head, and that's what a "dummy" lyric did. Then he worked out the lines we all know and love. Often there were constraints----'this is the song about them meeting' or 'this is when she tells him she's leaving' or 'this is after he loses the girl' or whatever. And of course, the tune was set.
    I love that process - for self-expression. But I could never contemplate writing songs for other people to sing.

  21. #45
    destinytot Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    Here is a lyric (excerpt) I wrote many years ago and still consider good:

    "I'd rule the world, an infinite range,
    The diamonds in my pockets would be small change;
    I'd reign supreme, if I could sing---
    And I'd have it all 'cause I wouldn't want anything."
    Love the idea, but not sure about the prosody.

    EDIT It's just the last line that I find tricky; I can't make 'wouldn't want anything' work with 'if I could sing'.
    Last edited by destinytot; 08-10-2015 at 11:48 AM. Reason: addition

  22. #46

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    "Prosody and melody, why the two are an unlikely pair,

    Harmony and euphony, with these, then you haven't a care."

  23. #47
    destinytot Guest
    Quote Originally Posted by goldenwave77
    "Prosody and melody, why the two are an unlikely pair,

    Harmony and euphony, with these, then you haven't a care."
    True - it's the effect on the listener that matters.

    To be clear, what I'm unsure about is whether the natural placement (spoken) of those lines' prominent syllables lends itself to song.

  24. #48
    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    "Awful" has few rhymes in English. I think "trough full" was in inspired choice, not a poor one. Though it sounds a little phony because, well, who says "trough full"?
    I agree. Again, I think it's a statement which compliments the tone of the rest of the lyric (and music) very well.

    Besides which, what are these questions everyone is asking? What does "trough have to do with anything? Who says "trough full"?

    Come on guys....

    Then next line gives the answer...

    "would only be a boar..." :-)

    Apologies....

  25. #49
    destinytot Guest
    'Boar' to 'hog' to 'hogshead' to 'lush'.

  26. #50
    Quote Originally Posted by destinytot
    'Boar' to 'hog' to 'hogshead' to 'lush'.
    ;-)

    Mush? Rot? The misspelling of "boar" and "offal"? Maybe "trough" is the key to the whole thing.

    All we need is something to do with a grassy knoll here...

    :-)