MikeRobinson

Tomorrow, yes... sigh ... ...

And don't expect a song to just pop-out like Venus on the half-shell, because that's not how creative writing of any sort actually works; or ever did. "Writing is rewriting." A good song idea probably won't come flowing out in finished-sequence; what does flow out will be a mix of good and not-so-good musical notions. If you can, read Stephen King's book, On Writing. In an appendix, he gives the first and then his final draft of a short story. The first thing you notice about the first draft is that it is "unexceptional." Even from such a seasoned pro. The last draft is much tighter. But, even so, Stephen encourages you in his book to write a completely different version, your own, and even to send it to him. In other exercises, he spells out a typical scene ("divorced woman alone at night, hears a noise on the staircase, smells his after-shave ...") and then challenges you to turn it topsy-turvy. And, lo and behold, it works. You gotta turn-off your schoolkid which says, "C'mon, what's the right answer?" (The same one that told you to keep your mouth shut in class to avoid embarrassment in case you might be "wrong.") There isn't a predefined "right answer." It doesn't exist. It's up to you. You start out with a very abstract pure-creative act, pulling bits of music out of wherever-they-come-from, but then you get into a very different sort of creativity where the stuff you're starting with is there, on the page, and it's not gonna move or disappear. You're clipping things, moving them around, creatively adding new stuff around that structure, and so on. Just as creative but very different.

Harmonies generally form chords. The alto singer often sings one-third down from the main melody. Other harmony lines are for some reason or another much more difficult to pick-out by ear (as you sometimes hear around you in church services when those around you try to do so).

Encountering this for the very first time, as any listener would do: The image is instantly recognizable ... daughters, bubble-gum. The lyric, with the possible forced-rhyme exception of what the parents are doing in the last line, is strong at that point. I will "suspend disbelief" about the premise of the chorus until I've heard the next stanza. But I do expect that stanza, and the first, to reinforce the deferred-promise contained in that chorus. The remainder of it, so far, are "snatches." And what you should be doing at this point is gathering up those precious 'snatches' and then sorting carefully among them as they come. Look at your first-verse; look at the unifying premise of the chorus (which often serves to provide continuity to a song ...). Consider, creatively, how the various "snatches" that you come up with might reinforce or not-reinforce those things. Also: bear in mind that you, as the creator, will be confronted with decisions. There's never going to be any Fairy Godmother that shows up and hands you "the answer." You're going to choose, very deliberately. And once again, no one's going to tell you what to choose and what not to. Don't Stop! You've got something here!! "The creator is the ultimate loner," and when he or she is finished, (s)he finds it utterly impossible to describe the actual process." Fortunately, in the company of other "lonely creators," (s)he doesn't have to. We already know.

I agree with DonnaMarilyn on this one, because if you sit around too much "waiting for the Muse," let's face it ... you'll starve first. If you wait for a song to pop-out in the finished form that you hear every day on the radio, well, I do think that you will be starving while you wait ... for Godot. Because I think know for certain that the song in question never popped into some songwriter's head in that form. Far more likely is that snippets of the song popped into someone's head at different times and in different forms, and that from these various sources, "the finished product that you heard" was devised. A sculptor who waited too much for "inspiration" would be found dead with a chisel in his hands, in front of an untouched marble block full of inspiration.

Keys can be shifted ... e.g. by a computer, or even by a kapo on a guitar. And BTW it's quite informative and useful to do that. For various mumbo-jumbo technical reasons, the keys are not the same. Another thing that you can easily do with a computer ... and it's not the same as a key-change but rather is a mode-change ... is to shift a block of notes up-or-down the staff, so that "C becomes C#" and so-on but the key does not change. When you're putting together a melody or a song, "first, just get it out of your head and onto paper." Once you've accomplished that, you can actually do a lot of rather-amazing things with it, e.g. using your trusty digital computer as your able assistant. In the same way that, say, Photoshop can transform a photograph, the computer can really help to do surprising(!) things to a song. But ... "it all starts with a song." Get the song first. Get "the idea that gets to me." Get it to a place where you can't lose it. Don't judge that process ... just do it. Because that's the one thing that a computer can never do. "Writing is rewriting," and you can never change that. Accept it. Get those first-drafts out of your head and do not destroy or tamper-with those "precious original first-drafts" in any way whatever. It don't matter if you're writing music or text or art: first, the gold must come out of the ground. Only then can it be refined.

Sometimes, I think that the thing which really inspires me is the surprise that happens ... when you've been fooling around with a lyric trying to put a tune to it, or fooling around with a tune trying to put a lyric to it, or more-commonly both at the same time ... and then you're taking some of the ideas that you first came up with and working a little more with them, and ... "all of the sudden, hey!" Now, it might not be an angelic epiphany and in fact it almost-certainly isn't, but you realize that something "better" is there in front of you that wasn't there a minute before. The teacher (probably ...) who said that "writing is rewriting" unfortunately was correct. Inspiration might bring you the germ of an idea but it won't hand you the whole thing on a silver platter. Still, it's inspiring when it hands you anything at all. The difficulty, and I suppose the craft, comes from learning how to develop those snatches of originality into a product.

Maybe we all can "learn a little lesson in reality" from our journalist friends from the past, who hammered away at their typewiters(!) knowing that "the deadline" was 3:00 PM. That was the moment, set in stone by the typesetting technology of that day, when the words that they had written would be sent to the Linotype operators to be fashioned into the printing-plates that would duly manufacture that day's "Final Edition." I very seriously think that "the immutable realities of" those days made better writers of those journalists. But, I think that it also pointed out that, in the very pragmatic world of journalism, you just can't produce a "Pulitzer Prize winning" article every single day. But you can produce "a salary-paying" article every single day! And, from among those articles, a Pulitzer Prize winner just might be discovered ... if you manage to very-consistently produce one every single day. "Fortune favors the well-prepared ..."

I think that this is a great piece, Anthony, and very thought-provoking because it talks about songwriting and lyric-writing as what it is ... storytelling. Every song is poetic writing of some sort, and it somehow invites the listener not only to recognize a character (in just a few well-placed phrases ...) but to be drawn right into his or her story. Thanks for sharing!

"The secret of writing," of any sort at all, really is ..."re-writing." I firmly believe that this is categorically true, no matter what sort of creative writing you are doing: music, prose, a poem, a magazine article, advertising copy, a screenplay, a news story, or what-have-you. "The secret is: there is no secret. Make of it what you will!" Anytime you read a piece of writing, or listen to a song, always remember that you are experiencing the final draft; not the sometimes-grueling process that lead up to it. You are experiencing both the product of "inspiration," and a pure decision-making process. (Furthermore, you're not in the position to be able to know exactly what did finally transpire! It just seems like inevitable, pre-ordained magic. Illusions are like that ...) Keep a faithful record of everything: your initial idea, your subsequent revisions, your rewrites, your brilliant inspirations, your ideas that didn't make the cut (but you kept them, nonetheless), and so on. Don't crumple-up any piece of paper. Keep them all in a loose-leaf notebook, perhaps with a light pencil-mark through them. (Any one of those "discarded" ideas might well appear again, some time in the future.) The "finished" song or lyric that you finally come up with is, after all, merely a "finished song or lyric." (In other words, the time finally came when you said, "FISI = F*** it: Ship it.") Even though in hindsight it might seem to someone else that "the song popped up out of a clamshell, like Venus (i.e perfectly-formed and totally starkers ...)," you, as the creator, will always know how much of a decision it was; and how much of a compromise. (But, hey: you don't have to tell anybody else ... let 'em think it really is magic.)

One thing that I have definitely found to be true, in all forms of creative writing, is that: "writing is rewriting." In other words, "it's the nature of the beast ... plan accordingly." When you listen on the radio (say...) to a "finished" song, well, it certainly sounds like a "finished" composition, and if the composer etc. did their job well, it might even sound "inevitable." Like absolutely nothing else could possibly have been there. Like absolutely nothing else (heh...) could have crossed the composer's or the arranger's minds. But that's simply not how the creative process actually works. When you come to a point of your songwriting where you "simply can't decide which one" of the ideas in your mind "is right" ... strive to capture all of them. (After all, you're probably using a computer and if so you'll never run out of disk space. And if you're not, then you certainly won't run out of paper, either.) The reality of the situation is that most of "the ideas in your head" might well be perfect in different musical situations. (Shania Twain, for example, would routinely produce a "country," a "pop," and a "dance" variation of all of her songs. Each one of them was an appropriate re-mixing of the same base recorded tracks, each one customized to a particular commercial target.) There is a dimension of "creativity" which transcends the creation of any particular musical idea or phrase, which deals at a much higher level with the construction of a salable musical product. The product incorporates a creative blending of all of these musical "raw materials" to meet the expectations of a particular market. When we tune our radios and listen to a "finished" song, then we are of course listening to au fait accompli, and we are also necessarily listening to one version. As consumers, we simply do not know just how many "other" versions there might be! But as fellow creators, we (should) know better "how the trick is done." And here's the best news: "You're officially off-the-hook!" You're "in" on the little secret. You know that there is, and that there always was, "more than one finalist." You also know that there probably will be "more than one 'winner,'" depending on exactly what you decide 'the target' is. You are the creator. Edit: And let the record show that, in some cases, the copyright owner has made (IMHO) dreadful mistakes. Jon Bon Jovi blew away a genre with his original multi-platinum version of Livin' On A Prayer, only to subsequently (perhaps on an extravagant qualuudes trip? produce an IMHO ghastly twelve-string ballad version of the same thing. Such is the power of the copyright-owning songwriter. Same song, yes, but ... "OMG."

I, for one, am very glad to say that I have never listened to "music" like this ... and I never will. "Both Beethoven and PTA meetings now come in spray cans." While I have no problem with someone finding a way to produce a steady supply of "salable product," and a market into which to sell it, the world of music fortunately is endless. You can turn out "squeeze cheeze" by the double-bucketful and find a way to sell every bucket ... but I'm not going to be one to eat it, nor am I going to jump up and down and say about what you've done, "eureka!" Nope. Bzzt. Not gonna happen.

As your gentleman friend correctly pointed out, there are no "rules." Only guidelines as to what other people have found "works well." (Of course, "what works well" is in part based on solid mathematical underpinnings, as J. S. Bach explored in much of his work.) I suggest that you start with your instincts, and certainly those of your esteemed associate, with regard to "what works well," and then you explore various possibilities in what is a very much experimental way. ("Try it on. If it fits, keep it. If not, set it aside. Discard nothing.") Certainly, people like your friend probably have a very "battle hardened" perspective on music-making, that is to say simply in the sense that they had to "get it done." Get product out the door, so to speak, and make it really good. There's something to be said for that, because it helps you to set boundaries upon your indecisiveness. As various writers have said at various times, "the two best things that ever happened to me were a job, and a deadline." A 'creative writer' has forever; a journalist has until three o'clock.

A big thought that comes to my mind right now is that ... when we listen to anything-at-all "on the radio," then we are merely hearing someone's final choices. Certainly not(!) the only ones that could have been made. When you are composing something that is entirely new, and no matter how you go about actually doing it, one thing that really hits you squarely in the face is that there are, in fact, no "right" answers. There is no judging-committee sitting just off stage that's going to ring a celebratory bell if you "get it right," nor a gong if you "get it wrong," or anything else in-between. You are simply going to wind up making a fairly arbitrary choice. But here's what's really cool: you can always change your mind. Try something different. See what (else) works. See what you like best. Especially if you've got a computer involved. How many ways can you think of to re-harmonize a tune like, "Merrily We Roll Along?" Google that sometime. And the more interesting the melody is (e.g. a "pentatonic" scale vs. the 3-2-1-2-3-3-3 of "Merrily"), the more possibilities there are to explore. With no "right" answers! (Fair warning: it's addictive. )

Here's something totally off-the-wall ... "Decisionally Disabled" ... Let me ask you: if you heard that line, versus having read it on a page, would it in fact have "the same impact?" Quite frankly, I am not convinced. "Decisionally Disabled" is, after all, a strictly visual "turn of the phrase." Every single thing about it depends on "prosidy." And (alas..) nothing more. Consider, on the other hand, this extremely striking line from a now-famously successful commercial song: "I might-a been born 'jes plain white trash,' but fanc-y was-a my name!" To my way of thinking, this punch-in-the-nuts lyric, as so masterfully performed by Reba McEntyre, is to be counted among the penultimate example of "an emotion as a song hook." In this memorable lyric by Bobby Gentry, the crux of this song has nothing at all to do either with rhyme or with illiteration: "Well, I can still hear the desperation in my poor Mamma's voice ringin' in my ears..." Her mamma knew that she was knowingly selling her daughter into a life of high-society prostitution ... ... and her daughter, years later, subsequently ... knowingly ... and with her head held defiantly high ... defended her. "Top that!!" "Take that..." (oof!!) "... as a 'song hook!'" Trust me: "just get out there and do this" ... both in terms of Reba's performance and the magnificent work done by the various other actors and actors in this six-minute clip, and you will surely for the rest of your life have nothing more to prove (heh... $$$$!!) to anyone at all. You will make much money. You will have earned it.

So, "tunesforyou," can we please hear your songs now? Couple million "jes' folks" out here maybe, who just love music and who knows what might happen to those songs in the Internet age? Ditto thou, "HoboSage." Let us hear it. Heck, I know a fellow who's a naturalist now who at one time was the bass player for a band that would one day be known as "Creedence Clearwater Revival." They were squat-nothing then, and he went his own way and ('cept for one fairly inconsequential writer's credit which is basically good for lunch money, I think ...) continues to make his daily bread as a naturalist. No one has the gift of foresight. No one who's playing friendly gigs with a squat-nothing band has any way whatsoever to know that one day it might turn into a squat-something band. And, realistically, I don't think that you should kick yourself ... unless, in this hyper-connected day and age, you neglect to "try again." it's an altogether different world out there now, folks.

I wish that I could go back and pummel one of my early music teachers with a wet noodle for demanding, "don't play by ear!" (And I probably would do that now, 'cept she's dead.) Everything that you do when you play music is, to some degree or another, "by ear," because you are making sounds and as you do that you are listening to those sounds. If you don't, then you are at best a copy-typist and your performances will sound mechanical (which they are). Reading notes on a page, and moving your hands, and listening to the sounds produced, all takes the skills of different parts of your brain, and the part that ought to be most fully engaged is the auditory part. "It don't mean a thang, if it ain't got that swang." But, even so, there is value in figuring out how notes are written down on a page, even if (as is the case with me) you are not able to "sight read" something that you've never seen before. My "hand/eye coordination" skills are not exceptional; in fact, they are quite poor. You can learn a lot by watching. Just look, at the shape and flow of the notes on the page. If the measures are drawn to equal size, as they generally should be, the notes might be thickly bunched-up or sparse. Going up steeply or gently. Going both one way and another way at the same time. Or, going in parallel... close together or far apart; at different rates, or synchronized. Or, standing still. Are there curved lines arching over groups of notes, or connecting one group to another? All of these things are a cue to play it that way. Postscript: ... and if you don't play it exactly as-written, they call it "improvisation." Post-Post-script: ... and, in the foregoing statement, "I am being flippant, but only to a point!" Every musical performance is a real-world event between two human beings even if there's a recording in the middle. A musical "mistake," if graciously and quickly handled within the constraints of music, can be ... and, indeed, it is... creativity.

I frankly suspect that the "differences" that you are feeling ... the "what key am I in?" question ... probably has mostly to do with your intuitive sense of what are called "modes." Let me quickly and simply illustrate modes ... using the all-white keys of the keyboard throughout my brief example which now follows. Start playing a melody, say, Merrily We Roll Along, and begin it on-or-about "C." In other words, the melody emphasizes the notes "C", "E, and "G" such that they clearly become the "1st, 3rd, and 5th" notes of the scale that you are playing. Now, shift your hands one position to the right, and, without playing any black keys whatsoever, play Merrily again. Give the same emphasis that you did before to the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of where you are now. Do the same thing again ... six more times. Wow. Now, stop and consider the seven very different "songs" that you just played ... all of them Merrily ... all of them played on just the white keys of the keyboard. Some of them sounded odd; some, minor; some, a bit melancholy; at least one, avant garde; the rest, just plain weird. Some of them felt "okay," but some of them might even have tricked your hands into inserting a black note or two just to relieve the tension. Wow! So... what actually happened? Well, if you look closely at "all white keys," you'll notice (of course) that there are black keys in-between some of them and not others. If you count the intervals between the keys, "from 'C' to shining 'C,'" you'll find this pattern: W-W-H-W-W-W-H. (W=Whole, H=Half.) (There's a black-key between C and D; hence a "whole" step, but there's no black key between E and F; hence a "half" step and so on.) (Pick any other key you like and play it: the same pattern emerges: W-W-H-W-W-W-H. Play the "G"-major scale and ... if you sharp the "F" like you're supposed to ... guess what: same pattern!) In other words, as long as you play the same pattern of whole and half steps, it doesn't matter where you started. But, when you kept "all white keys" the same while you shifted your hands ... you were, in fact, doing something else entirely! Look closely. When you shifted your hands, you shifted the pattern, e.g. W-H-W-W-W-H-W (one shift); H-W-W-W-H-W-W (two...), etc. Even though, throughout, you were playing "all white keys," and even though the song you were playing was Merrily, the intervals between the notes that you were playing changed every single time. And they didn't change randomly: they changed according to a very specific pattern that was shifted. Had you played other songs that involve more notes of the scale (Merrily of course involves only four), the difference would have become more pronounced. You can do the same thing without moving your hands at all using the "Transpose" feature of some keyboards. And that is what "modes" actually are. They are shifts, or perhaps rotations, in the standard pattern of intervals. Probably the most noticeably different of those "all white keys" scale was the sixth one, which sounds unmistakably minor, and which in fact is called the relative minor. All white keys, but it starts and ends with "A." (Strictly speaking, any consistently-used pattern of intervals constitutes a "mode." The pentatonic (five-step) scale used in oriental music is a sort of mode. The whole-tone scale is another sort of mode. Musical purists might disagree as to terminology, strictly speaking, but the essential notion is the same.) This is the very very simple notion behind "modes." And you have just demonstrated for yourself just how profound a difference it actually makes in your music. Now, all you need to do is to assign bizzare-sounding names to each one, prompting generations of music students to remember mnemonic phrases such as, "I Don't Pet Little Monkeys After Lunch." (Yup, there exists not one simple concept that a music professor cannot make infinitely more difficult ...) Yeah, we naturally think about music as being all about notes, but it's probably far closer to the truth to say that it is all about the intervals between those notes. There are, of course, two ways that we can think about "shifting the pattern." The way that I described is, "keep the color of the keys the same, but shift your hands." The other way is to keep your hands still and then figure out what changes you need to make here-and-there to produce the shifted pattern. Trust me, the latter approach is much the more disturbing approach to demand that your students must use on your Music Theory 101 final exam. "Bwa-ha-ha-hahahaha!"

And as usual, whatever you do, and preferably before you start doing it ... sit down, write a letter to yourselves -- that is to say, an agreement amongst yourselves, a written statement of your undestanding. Both of you sign it and date it and each of you keep an original-signed copy. Whenever you decide something, write and sign another page. Both of you keep all of them in a file-cabinet drawer or banker's box ... basically, forever. You don't have to notarize it; you don't have to hire a lawyer. Just write it down, whatever it is, sign it in your own hands and date it in your own hands. Each keeps a copy that is demonstrably identical to the other. This does two things. First of all, it causes both of you to think! What are your understandings, really? Have you thought it through? ("Now would be a good time, Scotty...") When you see things writ down in black and white, that just triggers different pathways in your brain than a handshake does. It prompts you to consider things that maybe you hadn't thought of yet, just by sitting together and hashing it out and writing it down. You can always change it later. In writing, of course. The second thing that this does is to give any third-party something that they can objectively look at and consider. Maybe they want to license it! But first, they want to know what they're getting into. (And, so do you!) They properly want to be sure that their is covered, legally speaking. They want to do due diligence, 'cuz they can't run the risk of not doing so. They're going to want to make copies of what they looked at for their assterisk-covering files. And that is when the old Boy Scout motto pays big. Nothing says "pro" more than preparedness. I really enjoyed watching Judge Wopner go in the original People's Court. Time after time after time, former-friends appeared in his courtroom and they said they had an agreement and that it had gone wrong and ... time after time ... they actually had nothing objective to look at; they had no idea what the agreement was. Something had happened that neither of them had anticipated or considered. The judge had to make a straight judgment-call and of course no one was happy ... but, what else could he have possibly done? Wopner always said, "Get it in writing." Even when someone handed a single piece of paper to the baliff, you could see JW's visible signs of relief.

It just never hurts to do simple things when posting a lyric, like putting © Copyright by Me at the bottom of the posting entry. This alone is sufficient to make it clear to anyone (or, to any court) that you do regard the material as "this belongs to me..." and that you said so in what you took to be (and it is...) "the proper way." Your intentions are perfectly clear, whether or not the validity of your ownership claim has been decided. Thus, anyone who (you allege ...) subsequently stole your stuff, could not claim to have "somehow, gosh Your Honor I don't know how it happened, 'innocently' overlooked" something or other. And, that's step #1: establishing that yes, your claim is credible, and so, there probably is something for a Court to decide and to act upon. As they say, if you want to assert that somebody took something that belongs to you, you want to make sure they can be objectively seen to be holding the bag. ("You say that you made an innocent mistake, but I can see for myself that this just could not plausibly be so ... therefore, the plaintiff clearly has a case.") Tend, attentively and consistently, to your own fields. Behave obviously and consistently as someone who has a valuable right, and who therefore (of course) wishes to assert that valuable right, would simply be expected to behave. See to it that your intentions are clear and plain, whether or not you dotted every single "i" or crossed every single "t," and you will have just gone a long way towards being able to (should the need ever arise...) objectively prove it to a third-party who's wearing black robes. We already know that John & Co., as attentive owners of the site where (let us say...) the alleged infringement began, are "on their toes," so if you ever did discover what you think to be an infringement, the Court might also look closely at what you did next. That you did promptly (on such-and-such date in such-and-such way) send notice to the site owners, who (being the diligent site-owners that they are, and therefore clearly in no wise parties to the infringement...) promptly shut-down the entry and banned the offender; that you did at least attempt (on such-and-such date and in such-and-such way) to give cease-and-desist notice to the alleged violator, and so on de dah de dah de dah. You put up the right signs around your pastures, and, when someone stole your valuable horse, you timely began to send the posse out after them, and you can document when and how and where. "Yup! Looks like a valuable horse to me, and, yup! Looks like a theft to me."

The best thing to do is to go straight to "the source" and nowhere else. In the USA, that would be http://copyright.gov. Sometimes, paperwork is important ... especially in matters pertaining to law. If you might have to accuse someone, and seek restitution from the court system, then there had better be some neutral thing that you can actually point to, that an impartial judge and/or jury can definitively look at (regardless of what "you sez" or "he sez") and see for themselves. You can take a bundle of 1,000 of your very favorite darlings and register all of them, all at once, for about $30.00, so if you didn't get around to doing that, you can't exactly say that it was because of cost or inconvenience. (Your claim exists severally on every one of those songs; the ability to group them into a collection is just for everyone's pragmatic necessity.) Do it online. Ten minutes flat. You don't have to wait for the certificate to be mailed back. I'm not a lawyer, but I do know enough about law to know that the law puts a lot of credence upon how you actually behave with regard to things that you now claim to have extraordinary value. "So you say this nag (well, it looks like a nag to me, but then again, I don't know horses...) that you say this guy stole from you, is a million-dollar race horse. Well, did you ever put a fence around the pasture? Did you ever put up a guard? Did you ever even put up a "Posted: No Tresspassing" sign? Did you take out an insurance policy on the beast? Remember, I don't know horses, but I do know how people ordinarily behave with regard to property that they consider to be valuable to them. You say he stole your song. Did you put a © 2012 Me notice anywhere nearby? Given that you could have done so quite cheaply and effortlessly, did you bother to register it? (No, it isn't legally mandatory, but given that you now bothered to sue, why didn't you bother to register?) "We can dissect legal hairs later ... the first thing I want to know is whether or not your surrounding actions and behaviors were at all consistent with the claim that you now pray to this, my, court to enforce on your behalf against the defendant. He, of course, pleads 'innocent infringment' and he is presumed innocent ... why should not his defense motion now be summarily granted?" If you posted your song to a web site, that web site is probably copyrighted, and it has certain terms and conditions that everyone is supposed to have read and understood. So that is certainly better than tacking the thing up on a fence-post somewhere, but it also implies that you intended to allow someone to have access to the entire song versus. say just a twenty-second (useless) teaser slice of it, as, say, iTunes customarily does. Obviously, people send out complete "demo tapes" all the time, and the mere fact that you made the entire song available to the public does not mean that you intended to give them carte blanche with regards to it; it is fairly obvious to ordinary common sense that you didn't. What will be looked at most closely, then, is what limits you did intend to set, and how you made those limits generally known and generally knowable to anyone who might have happened by, including the gentleman whom you now call a thief. Etcetera.

Here, I think that there's an enormous difference between a song that someone merely finds offensive, and one that is devised by its creator to offend. I would more-or-less lump almost every hack rap-song into that category ... and then present the work of Will Smith (he of Men In Black fame...) as proof-positive that you can, if you work at it decently enough, produce a completely "clean" lyric that is good. If you "try to be offensive," I think that you generally consider yourself to be clever when the rest of the world merely considers you to be a jackass. (Ahem...) And yet, if you have "done your job right," then you are, inevitably, going to have offended someone. (But let's face it ... there are folks out there who are doomed to be offended.) The songwriter did not per se set out to offend them; they just wound up that way.

I guess it could be said that I collect books on writing. But still, to me, one of the very best of these is Stephen King's "On Writing." Because in that book he presents both the original and a final version of a short story ... and the original draft is "nothing much." ... here's a fellow who's made a fortune from one best-selling novel after another and ... he ... writes ... "nothing much." That was very enlightening to me. In other words: it wasn't all about "what Stephen King wrote the first time." Instead, it was all about what Stephen King finally delivered to his publisher. Big difference!!! The only perfectly-polished vixen who ever appeared fully-formed (and, let the record show, "utterly starkers ... ") from a clam-shell was Venus. The rest of us creative types are, I suppose, "on our own." Every time we listen to a song on the radio (say...), we're always listening to the finished version of the song, and if the songwriter (and the producer and the musicians and the recording engineer ...) did their job, it's bloody-well perfect. But it's absolutely impossible to tell (if they did their job well ...) just how much "blood, sweat, and tears" actually went into it. So, what's "the bottom line" for the songwriter? Heh... "You're off the hook!!" You don't have to "get it right the first time," because nobody (... other than Venus, of course ...) ever actually does. Or, ever actually did. Or... ever actually expected to. Creativity is a process. When you get to the end of the road, you get to admire the destination while blissfully forgetting the journey itself. Meanwhile, persevere. We all start at the same place: an utterly blank page. Perhaps an instrument in an utterly silent room. Where can we go from there? Absolutely anywhere. Take me there.

Variety is the spice of life. I always like to stumble-upon a song that "thinks differently," and as long as the finished product sounds pleasing to my ears, I'm all for it. The beauty of musical creativity is that it is truly boundless. "We are here now ... en - ter - tain us ..." That really is the name of the game, isn't it?

Plus ... never actually throw anything away. Keep every draft, every snippet. If you don't like something and want to discard it, lightly draw a line over the page and stuff it into an appropriate section of a loose-leaf notebook. After all, you spent time and creative energy developing the thing that you don't like anymore: don't let that effort go to naught, and who knows, maybe you'll change your mind.