The Island Without A Name – Writing Music to Poetry
February 21st, 2010 | By Kal
In this blog I’ll be discussing what happens when you already have the lyrics before you’ve written the music. It may seem like something usual, trivial even, but as I mentioned in All I Ever Wanted – The Story So Far, lyrics are something I consider once I have a large chunk of the music sorted. To do it the other way around produces something different.
To explain how things work the ‘other way round’ (with the lyrics coming first), I wanted an example – a song where this had been the case – and here it is: The Island Without a Name.
Rob wrote lyrics to a song of the same name, a long time ago – BRK (Before Rob and Kal) and I suppose it reinforces the idea that we usually write lyrics to music and not the other way around. The song formerly known as Island was a completely different song might I add and the lyrics that we’ve ‘air lifted’ now form the verses of the song you see here, a song for which we didn’t come up with the basic musical idea until around a year ago. Four simple chords.
When you write a song, on an acoustic guitar, piano or even with just bass notes, as in this case, you don’t know the direction the song will take. What I mean by that is, no matter what melodies or chords you start with you can go in any direction emotionally. Do you want the song to sound cheerful? Eerie? Depressing (some people like that!)? It’s up to the the song writer, and in the case of our Mubla 2.0 project, it’s up to you. :)
In my experience, when we’ve written songs, Rob and I have started with the music, developed it to a certain level and then added lyrics. The words and the theme have been heavily influenced by the music we had to start with and while this might not be the case for other ‘artists’ out there, it’s how we do it!
So in the case of The Island Without a Name, Rob already had a set of lyrics, that he had used for a different song. (Perhaps if we ask him nicely enough, he’ll post the midi version of the song formerly known as Island!) With this set of lyrics came a set of emotions and a theme that we had to mirror when we developed the song.
The words refer to a break up. An angry one at that. ’You thought I’d be upset, but I’m not!’ And with that said, something that sums up my whole point is the ending of the song. You know the bit I’m talking about, right? Listen to version 4, and it’s where the electric guitar comes in. Rob added that part to the structure of the song not long before we recorded version 1, to give it a resurgent feeling which really suits what the song is about.
We had some lyrics and a mood. We then brought in a musical idea, and fleshed it out with the feeling of the lyrics. You provide your comments that we work on, and Dave and Matt (soon!) come in and add their expertise. As I say it’s not the way we usually do it, but maybe with how well Island is turning out, it’s something we should do more often. ‘Writing lyrics to poetry’ has a nice ring to it. Let us know.
