How does Kal come up with Lyrics?

December 10th, 2009 | By Kal

I was speaking to a friend who I had not seen for a while.  She’d been on the site, as most of my friends have been coerced to, but as I hadn’t seen her, I hadn’t introduced it to her like I would most people I know.  For me, this is a nightmare, because it leaves me unable to ‘help them shape their view’ shall I say!  What happened though was really useful, because it got me thinking.

Anita said, “OK, so you’ve got these song ideas and you develop those, but how did you get to that stage?”  And she’s right of course, because we haven’t covered that have we? So from now on I’m going to endeavour to describe it to you. What happens first?

Lyrics

Anita actually mentioned lyrics when she asked me about how I came up with songs.  What did I think up first – lyrics or the music?  Good question.  The answer is, I don’t know.  Both come to me at different times, and when I come up with one it doesn’t come neatly packaged with the other.

Let’s take lyrics, hey, I’ve titled this lyrics already so I’m kinda duty bound.  Lyrics can come at any time.  Generally something really really good or really really bad happens and when I have some time to myself (generally when I’m travelling), I get my phone out and write a text about it. Save, drafts, come back to it later. I don’t try and make it rhyme – if that happens, it comes later.  I just write whatever comes to me to get it out and ‘bottle it up’ in words.  A lot of the time it’s more for healing than for anything I’ll actually use, but I find that trying to force words onto a page, sitting a piano, and making them rhyme always sounds emotionless.

Maybe I haven’t been to Brit school and don’t understand, but for me, lyrics are about what you feel at a particular time, not what you can brainstorm!  With that said, my lyrics aren’t particularly abundant on the songs we have so far.  In fact, they only appear in one chorus – I Wanna Know.

I wanna know if she knows,
I wanna know if she cares,
I wanna know if she’s playing,
I wanna know if she’s there.

I first came up with these lyrics over a year ago.  I wrote them because I’d recently met someone and I couldn’t figure them out.  They seemed to have a certain way about them, that I didn’t particularly like.  The question was, did they know that they were doing it? And if they did, did they care?  Obviously it annoyed me at the time.  I can still feel that, everytime Rob or I sing those lines. It’s almost like having a picture, documenting a particular feeling I had.

Testimant to this, I feel, is the fact that in recording 1 and even in recording 2 of I Wanna Know, when Rob sings these lyrics in the chorus, it changes the feel of the song completely.  From a verse that is a little eerie and fairly contained, emerges a much more aggressive feeling.  Someone shouting for answers, which is exactly what I felt at the time.

On what I think is definitely a related note, and to definitely muddy the waters of what comes first, the music or the lyrics, I had already worked out the tune for the chorus along with the chords before Rob and I started to work together on it.  If I’d written those lyrics down, showed them to Rob and he’d thought, I know I’ll put them in a song, here, they might have lost their original meaning in the swapping of ideas.  But with me writing the music and already singing the chorus, the original feeling stayed intact.

I tell you what!  I’ve got a few ideas for lyrics on the go at the moment.  Let me get back to you with them very soon and we can see where they go and it will really demonstrate the whole process I’ve tried to describe above. Stay tuned, Lyrics II coming soon!

Can’t Help Me Now – The Lyrics

November 10th, 2009 | By Rob

Here we go then! The first blog in the Can’t Help Me Now series – the lyrics! If you’re not there already then you might want to open up the Can’t Help Me Now song page in a new window so you can follow along.

As you may have guessed this song was inspired by and is itself the recollection of a dream. It was written at 3am in the morning after waking up in the middle of the night. I like to write late and already having some of the chords written from the day before, I decided to start penning the words while still half asleep!

The verse refers to a girl who’s supposedly not ordinary yet in the name Mary-Jayne she has one of the most common names possible in English speaking countries! Quite honestly, this was the name of the girl in my dream which left me with a dilemma – do I change the name and lie to myself and the expression of my dream or do I change it to satisfy my desire for being more creative as a songwriter?

As you’ll hear in the recording, for the moment I’ve decided to say it how it was. This choice will inevitably offend many but hopefully for those that read my explanation some of the purists among you will be satisfied. I want to be true to the dream and the mere contradiction itself in my opinion is also reflective of this. It’s a state in which more often than not reality is distorted and things don’t always make sense.

Equally the use of the Spanish name Ana Perez is something that is worth discussing. In this case again, in the dream there was indeed a Spanish girl on a bus but unfortunately she wasn’t kind enough to tell me her name so I’m left with the struggle of having to invent a name for her.

At the time (half asleep still!), I chose Ana Perez because I know that’s a common Spanish name and therefore thought it would fit nicely with the whole Mary-Jayne thing. However, I’ve since changed my opinion and in particular while I’ve been writing this blog I’m realising that if I truly want to be faithful to the dream then I need to somehow convey that I didn’t get told her name in the lyrics and not just make something up for the sake of it!

It’s worth noting that because the vocals on all the recordings are only guides and due to be replaced at the final stage of the recording process, it’s still possible for me to make these changes before the songs are finished. One of the benefits of Mubla 2.0 – music made in front of you, is that you get to see the changes that happen in song writing and recording that until now haven’t really been discussed or talked about.

Moving on to the chorus: “you can’t help me now, you can’t help me now”. What does this mean and how does it relate to the verses. Well, the truth is…I’m not sure if I actually know myself.
PAUSE…SHOCK HORROR
“He wrote the song and he doesn’t know what it means?!! Shoot him! He’s not a real songwriter!!”

That’s right, those words were what came to me at the time and weren’t something that I consciously decided upon. I didn’t set out with the intention of writing a song called Can’t Help Me Now. Instead a song called Can’t Help Me Now wrote itself for me. I wish I could explain better how this happened and I know I’m not alone in feeling this because you’ll often hear songwriters in interviews saying how their best songs often seem to write themselves.

Anyway, they made sense to me at the time and still do. When I sing these words I’m imagining looking at myself in a mirror saying them. I see it as self admission that you can’t go looking for love and most definitely not in your dreams. A bit like those great songs we just talked about, I’m of the opinion that love is something that will come to you and not you to it!

Finally, we should probably talk about the repetition of the first verse near the end. It’s always been in my mind to write a different third verse or a modified version of the first verse that maybe ties things up a little. As of now I haven’t managed to sit down to do this just yet but I will and re:guide vocals mentioned above, this will of course be possible. The guide vocals on tracks at the moment are merely there to help us in coming up with extra parts and as stated previously are not the final version!

Right so there we go…that’s the story behind the lyrics to Can’t Help Me Now…so far. If you already had your own interpretation of them then please don’t let what I say affect you too much! If life was meant to be interpreted in one single way then we wouldn’t have all of the differing world religions, cultures and languages. Music holds true to this and if you disagree with what I say then I’d love to hear from you through a comment at the bottom of this blog post. I’m a real believer that songs are never truly finished and the meanings we pertain from them can change and evolve over time. I’m in no doubt that Can’t Help Me Now will be a further example of this. Enjoy!