On Writing a Song for your Songwriter Character

I wrote a song for my book because one of its characters is a songwriter whose first song would be so successful it would eclipse all the other better ones she’d later write.

The first draft of my song contained lyrics like the preceding sentence.

There were many drafts. 

Writing a song when you’re not a songwriter, indeed not a musician, is a risky enterprise.

Writing a song for a character whose trademark is the song you’re about to write, riskier still. Especially if she’s a free spirit and iconoclast named Mette, who pens her most famous song at 15 by “…applying her Library of Congress inexhaustibility to regional styles of lonesomeness and penury…” while in the midst of an affair with the organic farmer who delivers free range eggs and baby spinach to the vegetarian café where she works.

There’s an argument to be made for leaving such a song to the reader’s imagination. Yet it’s hard to resist the title “He looks good leaving,” one I can’t take credit for given my habit of committing my partner’s quips to memory and later remembering them as my own.

Promoting a book can be hard on the nerves. But it’s part of the deal.  All those talented, hard-working folks show up for you –your partner, family, early readers, agent, editor, cover designer, copy-editor, proofreader, publicist – you need to show up for them. 

Writing a song throws something into the mix that’s joyful (though your default for melody might not be.)

And I knew I could leverage the generous souls in my life who have musical talent:  my daughter Fehn with her big soulful voice; my brother Tor, a Nordic reincarnation of Hank Williams. (They broke no rules before the lockdown to make this happen. Their gorgeous harmonies broke my heart.)

The words came together during some dreary November nights when Trump was contesting the election results and I had Lucinda Williams’ “I Lost It,” “Can’t Let Go” and “Concrete and Barbed Wire” on repeat, trying to reverse engineer her songwriting technique and failing; the combination of the two might have something to do with the lyrics that resulted.  

I don’t know how real songwriters finish songs, but I couldn’t settle on those final lyrics until I knew roughly how they’d sound sung. So I walked around my house pressing the voice memo on my smartphone (life really does imitate art—it’s a quirk I’d given my novel’s main character) trying to come up with a tune, singing a line of melody, hating it, erasing it, and starting over until I finally sang one line that pleased my untrained ears: “He don’t look good now.” The rest of the melody was built around it.

I recorded my own voice – with its Leonard-Cohen-as-castrati timbre– singing the whole thing through once, before sending the mp3 to my brother and daughter in the wee hours of the morning, worried they’d listen to it within earshot of others. They were sleeping. Before 24 hours had passed, my brother had re-recorded the song with a guitar, a voice inflected with grit and the wonders of pitch, key and time signature. Then he and my daughter went back and forth on phrasing and tempo and tweaks to the lyrics.  It was exhilarating to have them take it seriously.

That remedied something I hadn’t fully admitted to – a lifelong frustration at not being musically gifted. Something lifted. I could forgive myself, finally, for clearing a karaoke bar with a one-tall-can-too-many version of Karma Police. 

So yes, finish your novel. Do the hard work of selling it. But don’t take yourself so seriously that you can’t write a song.