What Are the Songs About?

For me, the ‘modern era’ of songwriting starts in August 2014. It starts with me trying to flirt with a woman who has purple shoes and then finding out that she is gay. Rather, it starts with me writing some jokey lyrics for a song about this experience and a lot of people Liking it. This made me think of writing a full song and then that led me to perform it for the first time at the First Housewarming Party or Live in Llan’tud.

Since then, there have been a lot of songs – around 25 at the last count and that was not counting unfinished songs such as ‘Garrota de Barry Island’ and ‘If You Left Me Then I’d Have to Change (the Ringtone On My Phone)’. This year has been especially productive as I have set myself the challenge of having a new song for every month’s appearance at the Open Mic night in Swansea.

However, there is a question that I am often asked. It is not ‘where do you get your ideas?’ (which I expect) but ‘what are the songs about?’ The answer is usually ‘four minutes’. It seems slightly odd to me because my only intention is to make people laugh. I practise to the point where it seems unpractised and every performance is accompanied by a mental stocktake of where people laugh and where they do not laugh and therefore ideas on how to improve the delivery or the timing. Sometimes it is all about the audience – the poets of Swansea are very good at seeing a rhyme coming, so they gain more from the jokes that subvert rhyming or language, for instance.

For those who will not accept that it is all just a bit of fun, I will admit that sometimes there is a deeper message. I really dislike the conventional ending, as anyone who has read my short stories will also know, but sometimes hiding within the song is a thought or a feeling that might elude most audiences when they first hear the song and laugh (hopefully).

I think that there are three types of song. The first type starts with a phrase or a saying which strikes me as funny. The most obvious example of this is the song ‘Death By Plums’. The title was simply a phrase said by Anneka Bisi and she added, ‘that would be a good song title – just don’t ever mention my name in connection with it’. I am doing well in keeping to that promise, as you know. The song then became a rather ridiculous tale of puns about fruit, but its start was simply that phrase.

The second type is the song about a situation. This is most obvious with a song like ‘Tania Shakes Her Head’, which is all about terrible male chat-up lines. The title for that song was actually a line in some Minutes I had written at work, but a conversation at work the next Monday about bad chat-up lines started me to think about whether a song was possible. This year I intended to write a follow-up ‘Tania Goes Online’ but the online dating song morphed into something slightly different.

The important thing to note is that none of these songs are about people. It is odd, but people do like to say from time to time ‘ah, that song must be about X’. Often X is themselves. However, none of them is actually about someone. Sometimes a person is a starting point, but they are never the whole story.

The third type of song is one based around a person or an event but which has some other humorous meaning to it. Yes, I did once meet a woman in a gay nightclub in Reykjavik and the song ‘We Will Always Have Reykjavik’ started with that incident. However, the details in the song are changed to fit the humour and the ultimate point of that song – that if you are not able to speak the same language as someone and you only meet her once, then she can never break your heart – is far gloomier than most people realise. Julia once told me that that was one of her favourite songs because of all the creative rhymes for ‘Reykjavik’. That is a good illustration of how it works sometimes.

Yes, originally there was a woman in Kiki’s Queer Bar who asked me to dance with her, but the song is not about her. I remember sitting on the coach to Keflavik airport at two in the morning and scribbling down the notes while Dr C looked on. I said to him, “the key line is going to be ‘then you said you were heterosexual and I thought ‘oh, that’s my type’”. That did get a big laugh when I first performed it (not so much the second time – you see, I can tell you how often each one has been performed and how well it did). Who are all the song about then, you might ask?

One thing I find when looking back on songs (and, indeed, writing of any sort) is the degree to which it reflects the time that it was written. ‘Civil Servant With Big Dreams’ sounds like it should be about a woman who I met on a date and who was a civil servant but wanted to be a folk singer. Actually, it reflects that whole period of my life when I was going on dates with middle-aged women who were full of ideas about how good their life could be, but who did not take any action to make it better. The details are taken from all sorts of conversations with all sorts of people. For the office activities mentioned in the song, I thought about working in WCVA and making tea and coffee for people (which I did rarely, I will admit). From there come the lines, ‘she wasn’t born to spoon out the sugar, she’s a civil servant with big dreams’. Of course, the reference is both to making tea for people as well as being nice to people.

That might make you think that for all these songs are supposed to be funny, they can sometimes have a deeper meaning. Often this is by accident, but it is something that I know. That key line in ‘Lesbian With Purple Shoes’ – ‘Don’t let love change your footwear’ – is supposed to be preposterous and raise a laugh, but it also says something deeper about how you should not change what you enjoy just because you fall in love with someone. People enjoy the funk and frivolity of ‘The Girl Who Brings the Courgettes to the Party’ but at the heart of that is a plea for generosity and sharing natural resources. You see, it sounds better as a fun song about courgettes, doesn’t it?

I tend to think that any song can be put in one of these categories – something based on a strange or surreal phrase, something that is based on an incident or a person or something that is trying to make a deeper point. However, there is no song which is ‘about’ anyone.

The first time I performed ‘Song For [Name Redacted]’ was in Swansea at an Open Mic night that Julia was attending. The song owed its life to me reading the Guardian in Eastbourne and seeing the story about a woman being sued by her ex-husband for making jokes about him in her comedy act. I wondered what a censored song would sound like. For maximum comic effect, it would have to be a love song (because they are so personal). After I had performed it for the first time, Julia asked me who it was about. When I said that it was not about anyone, she seemed disappointed. Perhaps there is something about creativity that makes people want to attach it to people rather than ideas.

That would be a good point to end this blog. Creativity is all about the joy of creating something new rather than about any one person. It sounds great, perhaps a bit like flower-arranging except that the bouquet is made up of ideas and feelings from many plants. Except of course, I do have a more cynical view of creativity. Look at what I have written so far about each song – it is about my view on love, my view on generosity, a phrase that appeals to me, a desire to make people laugh. Ultimately – and I think that this is true of all creative people however much everyone should deny it – it is all only ever about me.

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