Okay…here’s the new song for this week. It’s a few days late, but you can read my excuse in my post from Monday.

I sat down yesterday with my mind set that I’d write a song. Sometimes…or most of the time, I do this with some instrument in hand (guitar, mouth harp, pentachord), but yesterday morning I was doing some writing trying to come up with something just on paper with a pen. Here’s how it went:

First I thought of what style I really wanted to write in. That’s to say, what style I would really like to play in. And I realized I’d been writing songs in one way for awhile and so, maybe, I should do something different.

So I made up my mind to go for a softer song. Something nice and beautiful.

Next I tried to figure out what I wanted to say. I wrote this line first:

If I’m not there

Then this one:

If you don’t find me there you won’t find me anywhere

And then:

If you can’t find me there don’t bother looking here

And finally:

If you can’t find me where I was
Don’t bother staying there cause
I won’t be back any old day

And just like that I had a repeating chorus line part. I tweaked it one more time, so it said this:

If you can’t find me where I was
Don’t bother staying there because
I won’t be returning this-a-way

So, I had the meat of my song done. That’s what a good chorus line is. Everything else just helps hold it together. So, I needed some sort of something to hold that together and make sense out of it to someone who wasn’t me. Cause I already knew what this song was about, but who else could tell that just from the chorus line?

At this point I asked myself a few questions:

Who’s looking for me? Where am I going? Do I even know? What am I going from? Did I say goodbye? Why did I leave? Do they know why?

I wrote these out. That’s what’s in my notebook. And that’s basically what formed the whole song. I wrote 3 verses from those questions in about 10 minutes. The second, third, and final verses. So i still needed something to start off the song. I felt those each jumped into the story a little too abruptly.

I worked at that first verse a little and then I took a break. After a couple hours I came back fresh, wrote the first verse pretty easily, did some cleanup of the whole song (you’ll notice the chorus line is a little different than the original), and then set out figuring out how the melody of the song went.

Now, I did have something basic in mind while I was writing it. And I did pick up my guitar while I was writing the initial verse just to make sure it fit what was in my head and the style I was going for. But once I finished the song I realized it was a little boring and I had to work on the music to make it sound better.

I’m not totally sure I’m at the end of that. But I wanted to get the song posted (mainly because I need to start working on another new one for this coming Monday…so i’m not behind or late again).

Anyway. That’s the whole ball a wax. Hope ya like it.