Pulling Granny from the flames

As I've mentioned before, one of the great things about being a member of NSAI is the song evaluation service by pro writers. You get 12 online and 2 in-person a year with the membership, and I'm pretty sure you can buy more if you want. 

I don't want to give away any of the lyrics, but as an example of the kind of feedback you can get, here's an evaluation I got on July 2.

Evaluator feedback

FORM

• V / V / PRE / C / V / PRE / C / INST / PRE / C

SUGGESTIONS

• Edit down your chorus by 2 lines
• Only do 1 verse at the top of the song
• Don’t do the pre chorus after the instrumental break. Consider writing lyrics for the break and turning it into a bridge. Then go straight into the final chorus
• So: V / C / V / C / B / C or V / C / V / C / INST / C

TITLE/HOOK

• It’s a good hook. I suggest you don’t give it away in the verse. Save it for the chorus.

LYRIC

• You have a lot of good lines and images and it’s a good sentiment. In general it works well. Perhaps it would have more impact if you were more defined about who you are talking to. It could be your listeners, and that’s fine, but if you can put more of yourself in this, it would have more impact. You basically say the same kinds of things through out the song, so there’s room for different angles and other aspects of the subject that would be less redundant.

OVERALL IDEA

• This is a good theme. I hear this more for the Folk/Americana market.

MELODY/METER

• This is very melodic. The lift towards the end of the chorus works really well, but I suggest you have it come in 2 lines sooner and do the edit I suggested above.

CLOSING COMMENT

• This can use some tweaking, but it’s very cool. Off hand, I can’t think of any artists that would cut this, only because I hear this more for you as an artist, and other artists that would do this kind of thing, usually write their own songs.

What I did with it

After a week of feeling pretty sad and rudderless following the motorcycle accident, on Saturday morning, I got my sorry ass out of bed and went to Bosco’s in Hillsboro village for lunch. There are 3 other café/brunch spots on the block but they all had insane line-ups. So I went to Boscos. And it turned out to be the perfect place for what I had in mind. It’s bigger and quieter that the other spots, so better for me to think straight. They don’t have any breaky grub, but they’ve got a wicked lunch menu. 

I ordered the grilled chicken breast sandwich: soy and pineapple marinated chicken breast grilled and topped with fontina cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, and basil mayonnaise. Then I pulled out the computer and opened a PDF of the song feedback and a Word doc of the lyrics.

The core idea behind the song is about looking forward to your dreams in a positive way – and I think I put a nice little lyrical spin on it in the hook. Still, I was a bit anxious about the hook/title when submitting the song, because it’s a bit a mellow and mushy. Also, there's a fine line to walk when putting a twist on a familiar phrase or notion. The hook worked for me, but I didn’t know how it would hold up under someone else's scrutiny.

So, I was really happy to read “It’s a good hook. I suggest you don’t give it away in the verse.” I had the hook lyric starting each verse as well as the start and end of the chorus. I was on the fence about that before I submitted it for evaluation, and I’d already been through two or three major re-writes of the song. Again an interesting example of pro feedback in line with a weird feeling I’d had in my gut. I need to stop second-guessing my gut. I keep telling myself that, but it seems I'm not always listening. The same could be said for situations outside writing... Thankfully, that's not what this blog is about!

VERSES
It was easy enough to edit the hook out of the verses, which were structured like this:

Hook line
Rhyme A
Rhyme A
Rhyme A
Rhyme B

Getting rid of the hook intro quickly shortened and evened things out. Before it was like each verse had a prologue, as if I was telegraphing a pass across center ice. Now I just get down to the business of sliding the puck ahead. I haven’t edited the demo yet, but each verse is 1 or 2 bars shorter, depending on the edit, and therefore 3-6 seconds shorter, depending on what comes before it (ie: intro vs chorus).

For the time being, I haven't cut from 2 to 1 verse at the beginning. Here’s my thinking so far on that: In the original, the prechorus started at 0:30 and the chorus at 0:42. The verses move much quicker now since the ‘prologue’ is out of the way and because the other lines are pretty short (7 syllables in lines 1-3 and 5 syllables in line 4). After the edits, the chorus will still start around 0:36. And I feel like V2 really adds a nice depth to the idea. So I kept it.

Next, I considered this comment: “Perhaps it would have more impact if you were more defined about who you are talking to. It could be your listeners, and that’s fine, but if you can put more of yourself in this, it would have more impact. You basically say the same kinds of things through out the song, so there’s room for different angles and other aspects of the subject…”

This was totally accurate. I had a bunch of nice ways of saying very similar things. So I needed to decide which said it best, then come up with something more to add. The ‘who’ was a bit tricky. In reality, when I wrote the song, I was pep talking myself, but also thinking of language that a couple of friends use for positive thinking and imagining them giving me the advice.

I ended up trashing V3 and V4, and writing a new V3 that adds another layer to the concept as well as suggesting a relationship between singer and listener.

I know, this is all really abstract without being able to read the lyrics. How about this: before, I had three verses that described fire engines. Now I’ve got verses that describe the fire engine, the guys on it, and the granny they pull from the flames. 

CHORUS
The old chorus rhyme scheme was A A, B B, C C, but with the singing pauses in there, it actually sounds more like this:

Lead-in phrase
End rhyme A
Lead-in phrase
End rhyme A
Lead-in phrase
End rhyme B
Lead-in phrase
End rhyme B
Climb-out rhyme C
Into hook rhyme C

Oy. That looks complex, and I know what the real lyrics are. So your head’s probably spinning! I took the advice to shorten and simplify. Now it looks more like this:

Lead in phrase
End rhyme A
Lead in phrase
End rhyme A
Lead in phrase
End rhyme A
Climb out rhyme B
Into hook rhyme B

Which is essentially a 4-line chorus instead of a 5-line chorus. What the heck was I thinking?

Not only did I delete lines, but I edited the ones that remained, so they do all the work of the old chorus, plus a nice extra nugget from an old verse that got cut.

BRIDGE
I took the existing melody of the instrumental break, combined it with some edited lines from old V4 and presto: bridge.

RECAP
Now the structure is this:

    V / V / PRE / C / V / PRE / C / B / C

Instead of this:

    V / V / PRE / C / V / PRE / C / INST / PRE / C

All the parts are shorter now, and they build on each other, instead of reiterating the same idea. Truck, firemen, granny instead of truck, truck, truck.

Something else interesting is that this is the first time in my 20 something years writing that I worked on lyrics without picking up a guitar to try them out. The guitar’s absence forced me to focus and be more efficient with my time. Of course, it was a bitter-sweet evolution, since the catalyst is the cast on my fret hand. But it was definitely a good lesson in editing and focus.

I tried playing guitar today. If I hold it like a cello, I can strum high on the neck like a vertical Johnny Cash and fret G and C. But even I don’t have a chord progression that simple. So the guitar wasn’t out of the case for very long.

But the song is stronger now, and that’s what matters for this post.

ML