Words, Words, Words...

I find it interesting how different the person I am and the writer I am can be. As a person, I'm quiet and tend to say things as succinctly as possible. As a writer, I draw things out with strings of metaphors that often hide the thing I'm trying to say from being understood by anyone other than myself.

But why is this?

I know why I became a writer, but how I became one is a different story. Words and writing were not something I grew up having a pronounced interest in, and it was flippant jokes that led me to start writing both lyrics and prose. I like to say it was spite, but if I'm being honest, I think there was a part of me that was curious to see if people would admit they were wrong when I failed at the task.

Then I didn't exactly fail.

Where did all of these words come from? That's the question I've always found rather hard to answer, but maybe it wasn't as difficult as I had made it out to be. When I think about my younger days, as I was still gestating the idea of becoming a creative type, the most formative voices in my head were the kind that threw a lot of words at the wall to see what stuck.

Jim Steinman was never concise with his writing. He penned long, languid lines that took a full breath to get to the end of. Some of his lyric sheets look like short stories, so from my very early days I was being taught songs could, or even should, say as much as possible. There was a degree to which it resembled the writings of the beat generation, who used torrents of words to capture the manic energy of the lives they wanted to lead. You could say something in a mere sentence, but it would never mean as much as overwhelming people with the magnitude of what you were thinking or feeling.

Next came John Popper. Anyone who has tried to sing the bridge of "Hook" at karaoke knows what I'm talking about here. Whether it's "But Anyway" ripping through lyrics so fast you don't realize he's talking about toilet seats and puns about the past, or "Optimistic Thought" sounding like the tape may have been accidentally sped up a bit too much during the mixing stage, or especially the lines in "Business As Usual" I've never been able to get my tongue to spit out, Popper's songs were similarly filled with words atop words.

Then I found Elvis Costello, who was the angry young literate of the new wave. Going through his early records is an experiment in songwriting, as he tells stories, tells jokes, and seems unconcerned with the very idea of how many lines and syllables a verse should have. He was purging his mind to a collection of chords, and the more you say the smarter people assume you to be. Was "Oliver's Army" astute criticism of Thatcher-era England? I don't know, but I do know verbosity is the reason his off-handed use of slurs, not to mention writing a song actually called "Two Little Hitlers" was able to sneak by the good taste of some of us.

Words let us hide in plain sight, and perhaps that is the lesson I took from these writers more than anything else. If you say too much, people won't be able to pick up on what the most important parts are. You can be honest about things you're uncomfortable sharing, and only a select few people will know what you have even said. That's the beauty of metaphor, and what I think writing has given me; the ability to feel like I'm talking without ever saying anything.

As I have shared my writings with people, and looked for collaborators to help me where my voice fails, there is one bit of feedback I get more than anything else; My words are deep, but too voluminous. When I have sent demos of songs to singers, they often ask me how they are supposed to sing that many words in the space I have given them. Even when the language is lovely, it's daunting.

I tend not to even notice this, as a youth spent miming to all of those songs filled with so many words has inured me to how unusual it can be for everyone else. So much of popular music features words that are dull, repetitive, and sometimes barely there at all. We train our voices to sing short lines where there is time to stretch each note for dramatic effect. Much of it is built on the power of the voice, rather than the movement of the melody. Maybe that is just the difference between songs written for the singer, as opposed to being written for the writer. It's hard to say.

The point is merely to say that we often are more profoundly influenced by the music we hear than we might think. Thought it doesn't happen at the conscious level, musical grammar does seep in and direct us toward the way we hear future music. For me, that meant I was put in a position where words became one of the most important pieces of songs. I was listening to music with so many of them, they couldn't be ignored without losing a huge chunk of the song.

That helps to explain not just why I write the way I do, but also why I listen the way I do. I find myself disappointed so often in the music I'm hearing, because there are either few words, or there is little care that was given to them. When these writers are churning out generic words that neither say anything interesting, nor say it in an interesting way, it's difficult for me to find the whole product interesting.

So no matter how much people might find fault in my writing, or not understand how to use it to express something in themselves, I think I would rather fall on the side of doing something interesting. That means I'm destined to have an audience of one, but I wonder if there's much to be proud of in being the master of telling people what they already know.

I'm either too proud, or too stupid, to find out if that success is worth mashing my soul into the cookie-cutter.