Songlines #2

How do we make a song sound like what it's about ?

Here’s a piece of music that creeps around you on tippy-toes. It’s a thief, stealthily preparing for some hardcore thievery. Somehow, it’s also specifically a panther. More incredibly still, it actually sounds pink. It has suspense punctuated by cheerfully detonated jump-scares, all of which come with a wink and a nod. It’s seriously silly; it even gets a bit sexy and burlesque, but only enough to slightly confuse a six year old (if that six year old is me). There’s a conversational, almost speech-mimicking section in the second sax solo, and it all crackles with a certain air of knowing sophistication; an almost meta sense of “Look ! Here are some things that music can do !”

But how does it create this experience, and do it in a way that we’d instinctively understand ?

Listen to this, by Charles Ives:

The Unanswered Question is a musical enquiry into that most knotty of questions: why are we here ? But how can we ask anything, let alone something so profound, with no words and with just some markings on a page and a bunch of humans with musical instruments to translate them ?

Here’s the TL:DR version.

Sustained Strings = “The Silence of the Druids – who know, see and hear nothing”.

Solo Trumpet (which, as instruments go, has a closer relationship than most to the human voice) = “The Perennial Question of Existence”. Listen: it’s playing an actual question. Over and over.

Woodwinds = “Fighting Answerers” (who, eventually ‘realise futility and begin to mock the Question’).

Now listen to Jerry Goldsmith’s opening theme for Alien, and hear how he uses the same tools (and some of the same notes, to be fair) to evoke our helplessness in the face of an indifferent universe (and a toothy xenomorph).

We all have some understanding - even if it’s subconscious - of the devices built into the language of music so that it can express… well… anything. And express it in a way that everyone can understand. It’s pretty much miraculous; this much we know. But how does it work ?

At its (very) simplest, most of us would recognise that a C-major chord sounds positive or upbeat; that C-minor sounds sad; that C-sus4 sounds unresolved or uncertain; that Cflat7#5(b9) sounds… complicated. We don’t even have to know them by name, or understand how they’re put together; we mostly just know.

We know that we can play or sing notes loudly or softly to create dynamics. We know that we can choose instruments with certain tonal characteristics to complement or contrast with one another. We know that we can have more than one melody happening at once, to create counterpoint. We know that we can articulate notes using certain techniques to create a specific mood: short, staccato notes stabbing away like a knife in a (shower) murder scene, or arpeggios agitatedly twitching in time to overhead time-lapse shots of city traffic at night; long legato notes flowing like a hand passed across rippling ears of corn; low notes sounding a warning: something bad is going to happen if that badly underwritten character continues down the cellar steps; odd-numbered time signatures (a count of five, for example) creating a sense of tension as we’re crushed beneath the wheels of the war gods.

If we’re producing our own music, we can add effects to the separate elements in our composition to imprint them with further meaning. Distortion could signify aggression, or something badly remembered, falling apart as we listen; a big reverb (think of reverb as a physical environment for a sound to exist in, rather than just as an echo) creating a sense of cathedral-like grandeur or perhaps just the loneliness and isolation of distance; little or no reverb on a voice suggesting a whispered intimacy or a claustrophobic threat.

If you want to make something sound cold, how would you do that ? What might be the right instrument with which to create a sense of yellow ? What does frustration sound like ? Why are saxophones sexy (see how Bernard Herrmann uses brass to take us from New-York-as-Hell, into New-York-as-Hella-Sexy, below) ?

The possibilities are so vast and so interconnected when you start putting all this together in your head, that suddenly you’re trying to carve a statue from a solid piece of marble, armed with little more than a plastic spork and a box of Elastoplast for the blisters.

Here’s another example, this time a pop song by The Blue Nile that figures pretty highly in my musical education. I have no idea if any of the following was intentional, but my suspicion is that it doesn’t really matter. Once you nudge your brain across onto this set of tracks - making your music truly congruent with its lyrical content - I suspect that your subconscious confidently starts makes informed decisions.

I’ve always pictured the protagonist literally standing on a rooftop, looking over the city that he’s leaving for a new life ‘on graduation day, to look for independence’. The exultant ‘I am in love’ is directed up… out, over the city; perhaps to an actual love, but more likely (in my view) to his old haunts, the promise of a new life and the infinite possibilities of youth.

So, let’s break it down a bit.

In the opening hushed, upward arpeggios we hear the wind moving across the city, the opening lyric referencing washing blown off a line, ending up like ‘flags caught on the fences’. There are some metallic noises, perhaps an urban fox foraging in an alleyway, and then we hear a distant, highly reverbed trumpet; a lonely voice reaching out across the skyline. There’s pain in this parting, too.

Then Paul Buchanan starts to sing. There’s no bass or kick drum anchoring the song in the traditional sense, which makes the arrangement float. He is up, up; somewhere over the city, looking across it from his lofty vantage point. Pizzicato (plucked) strings suggest how he might be walking across the rooftops (lightly; carefully), and then a bass guitar plays that strange jagged downward motif, like a kicked can, zig-zagging its way down a fire escape. The strings then issue a staccato, see-sawing two note motif as he sends his incantation out over the rooftops. Are they car indicators, or perhaps neon signs flashing in time with his rising pulse ? By the time we get to the first bridge (‘the traffic lights are changing’) there’s a slurred-siren glissando back-and-forth from the violins, followed by the piano conversationally interacting with the pizzicato strings. In the background, here and there, we hear distant penny arcades and shop tills ringing.

There’s an interlude at 2.26, before verse two, where we’re grounded for a moment. Bass and a kick drum momentarily anchor proceedings to the ground before the verse begins and then we’re rising again, weightless. It’s a lovely moment of contrast, and when he returns to the refrain, he’s singing an octave higher, right at the edge of his range, giving us all the of plaintive longing that the song has been saving up for this ‘lift off’ moment, and it’s all the more glorious for making us wait.

Another fascinating example is Become Ocean (above). Often, composers, in expressing the oceanic, will focus on the drama of a storm; something we can connect to our relationship with the water. Become Ocean ignores our petty human concerns to create a sense of the slow, inexorable movement of a vast living organism, using a suitably huge orchestra to navigate slow dynamic shifts and limiting melody to a softly arpeggiating harp (raindrops on the surface of the water ?) in the sparsely used upper frequencies.

As a songwriter, thinking in these terms can be quite intimidating, because once you open this paintbox, the possibilities of the form multiply into endlessness, and - quite possibly, if we’re not careful - meaninglessness.

One way to counter this is to let the music tell you what it’s about. For our new album Somapolis, I sent my songwriting partner, Jana, rough instrumental ideas for all of the songs and asked her what stories she could hear contained within. When she came back to me with a guided tour around our imagined city and its inhabitants, I was able to break out the scale rule, the T-square and the compass and draft maps through the arrangement and production that would take the listener to the heart of the song faster and more effectively. It also meant we could connect the songs into a coherent and interrelated narrative

(*concept album KLAXON*).

You can hear, even in this early, unfinished, pre-lyric draft of Dead Man Dancing, that it’s restless; agitated. The rhythm programming is twitchy and it refuses to settle into anything until the chorus. In the finished version below, you get a sense of how we expanded on this idea, adding the early snare in the verses to ‘trip’ the rhythm up as the protagonist is pursued across the city. We wanted it to be bewildering, combining the small, needling noises of rats in alleyways with the epic architecture of the skyline; keeping the voice close for the internal monologue of the verses and then opening it out into the final, desperate cry to the heavens at the end.

Another way forward, if you’re working from a finished piece, is to be led by the lyric. Don’t get too tied to the instrumental part that has, up until this point, constituted your song. That’s just the pencil sketch, and you may not want those feathery grey lines showing through the shading in your final mix. Additionally, because we tend to write using big block chords, that original guitar or piano part can take up a tonne of space in your arrangement, leaving less room for your finer, lyric-led, storytelling brush strokes.

I guess it could be argued that this approach harks back to a more European classical model of writing; that rock music and Blues-based forms are more about direct emotion, rhythmic interest and a recognisable vocal style, and there may be some truth in this, but I Heard It Through the Grapevine or Tears of a Clown are certainly highly figurative arrangements. Paul McCartney’s Yesterday even has a built-in seven bar* cycle through its A-section**. Most songs have an even number of bars making up a verse or chorus, so an odd number suggests that something is not quite right; something is amiss. It’s a lovely compositional touch.

Finally, I’m going to leave you with a rough draft of an idea, constructed (mostly) from samples taken from my phone. What could it be about ? Where is it taking place ? What story is it telling you ? Where could the arrangement go next ?

In the end, that’s what makes all of this less scary: that we’re just using creative tools to heighten the connection to a thing that we all share: an imagination unbounded, and a need to tell our stories in the best way that we can. And listening; really listening, to other people’s stories is still the best education we can get.

*seven sets of a count of four.

**a sort-of verse equivalent in this structural form.