When working on a song and concentrating hard on the component parts – lyrics, melody, chords, rhythms – it’s easy to forget that we respond to songs primarily as SOUND. That is, not to the particulars but to the overall sound, and the feeling we get from that.
This is more obviously true in a recording of a song (Paul Simon has said, “The way I listen to my own records is for the sound of them; not the chords or the lyrics.”), but I think that when writing the song it’s also important to be tuning in to the sound.
Practically speaking, what does this mean? To me it means, while writing, to at times let go of consciously judging the meaning of the words, the flow of the melody, the aptness of the harmony… and just feel the sound of it. Do the words feel right… in their sound? Does a word, a note, a chord, a rhythm, break the flow – even if it makes ‘sense’?
In a way, the parts of a song add up to the whole… but there’s also something else going on… feel, vibe… the thing that (hopefully) got me excited and started the song going in the first place – for example, the sound of a certain word and a melody note together, or of a melody phrase with a particular chord voicing… It’s so important to maintain contact with this as I engage with (and sometimes get lost in) the nuts and bolts of the song’s construction.
It’s a ‘feel’ thing… It steps outside the clearly definable and conscious and into the realm of tone, timbre, feeling… It’s not an excuse for lazy songwriting… but it can’t be ignored. It’s why some songs are great… even if they’re bad when you think about them. Because there’s a feel there, a vibe… and along the path from song to recording/performing, that didn’t get lost. And I think that’s even more important than a song being ‘well-written’, as much as I believe in songs being written well.
“If it sounds good, it is good.” – Duke Ellington