datamusicata

It’s official. We crossed a quarter of a million hits yesterday, and we’re not even nine months old—that happens at the end of next week. I cannot believe that a quarter of a million times you people have logged on to this site. Thanks and thanks again. If there’s anything that you want me to address, please let me know.

On Wednesday we were talking about song writing and there’s an aspect of it that I wanted to address but it didn’t fit into what developed, so today I want to address metaphoric continuity. Sounds like a mouthful but simply put, you have to stay on the same page, perspective, or example for at least the entire verse. Unless, of course, what you are doing is stringing together as many mindless rhymes as you can to create a different surreal picture. That is a legitimate direction as well, but today, we’re sticking to this topic.

So many times in the lyrics of amateurs you will hear that they’ve mixed up the metaphors. It’s hard for me to do, as my mind doesn’t work that way, so let me give you an example of staying within the metaphor. I have a song called “Stop This Rain”. It’s a song about depression coupled with double entendre of the seemingly endless Bush reign, and the tag line is, “nothing’s going to ever stop this rain.” I’ll give you the third verse which, keeps within the boxing metaphor.

Do I go one more round? In spite of in all?

Or throw in the towel and just take the fall?

It’s a bad situation and I cannot remain

Where nothing’s going to ever stop this rain.

It’s nothing fancy, but I stay in the reference and it usually makes for a much tighter verse. One more round; throw in the towel; just take the fall, are all phrases that came out of the boxing game. Everyone knows what they mean, but they are all from the same source, and that’s what makes for a more impactful and thougthful lyric.  

The first time that I became aware of this technique was decades ago when I was writing a song called “Wishing Well”. It’s a surreal bit of poetry that goes:

Insanity’s train is long and slick, with yawning wide open doors

Humanity’s queued to take take the trick and there’s always room for one more

The chorus is

It’s a nightmare on wheels and it’s moving, ride a spell, cyclic hell

Here we go round evolution, a monkey’s parade to the wishing well

In the second verse, I wanted to play around with words and phrases that come from an electrician’s world, so I used conductor, overload, crossing wires, and contact. The verse goes:

"Inside of each coach conductors smile; they won’t betray overloads

But prey to a cross of wires while embracing a contact they know"*

Then back to the chorus. You can see that even tho it’s a surreal bit of work, I do stay in the same metaphor for each verse. Not only does it make for tight writing, but it is truly fun to try and weave those things that are unique to some area, such as electricity or boxing, and there is also the possibility of there being several meanings or interpretations of the words. I really enjoyed spelling prey as the word for the hunted and then juxtaposing it with the cross of wires, which could also be seen as a crucifix, so it could be heard as the devotional, “ pray to a cross of wires,” or as a victim being “prey to a cross of wires” I liked the aural ambiguity, even though I wanted the victim perspective. And as I say, it’s fun.  As an exercise, pick some subject, area, profession...something that has a evolved vocabulary unique to that work place and try to write a verse for one of your songs with those words and phrases.   This is also a wonderful way to break a writer's block.   Try it, ...you'll like it.

We’ll take a look at what folks wrote from the verse I started on Wednesday in the next post.

*wishing well by james lee stanley, copyright 1973, wordsend music, bmi/wren musci, bmi