Digging through the archive: where a song begins
I've been digging through my old music files recently, trying to put together an archive of the music I've written for theatre. Some of it goes back much further than the family musicals I've been working on in recent years. The earliest material I've found so far is from 2010.
One thing that has struck me as I've gone back through it is just how collaborative all of this has been. A song might eventually have my name attached to it as composer, but that's rarely where the song actually begins.
In 2010, Nagoya Players staged A Christmas Carol with Heart, directed by John Lenihan. I remember sitting in John's living room while he talked about his idea for Dickens's story. This wasn't going to be Victorian London. He wanted to set it in Texas.
That immediately sent my mind somewhere else.
First, Wim Wenders, Ry Cooder and Paris, Texas. That extraordinary, desolate sound world. Then, rather more abruptly, Woody Harrelson and Natural Born Killers. Different associations, certainly, but somehow they were all rattling around in there.
You don't really stop to analyse why your thoughts move in that way. Tom Waits, a songwriter and performer I've long admired, has compared songwriting to digging up potatoes. Some songs, he says, “come out of the ground just like a potato.”
I like that image. Sometimes that's exactly what it feels like. You hack at the ground. You keep going until you hit something solid. It might be misshapen and covered in dirt, but you've found something. Now you have to work out what to do with it.
Other times, songs seem almost to fall out of the sky into your hands. You're standing in a supermarket and a screaming kid in a rattling pram suddenly pumps out a rhythm that feels so important that you have to whip out your phone and sing something into it, right there, just to get the idea down NOW.
I don't think I knew exactly what I was digging for in John's living room. But as he talked, the associations started coming.
John had recently been to Texas, and he began pulling out photographs he'd taken on the trip. Some of those photographs eventually found their way into the video I made for ‘This Town.’
What I remember most clearly, though, is him talking about what he had seen: a kind of inexorable rural decline. Towns that seemed to have had the life slowly drawn out of them. Buildings and streets that suggested something had once been there and was disappearing.
That conversation—and those photographs—gave me somewhere to go.
The result was “This Town.”
Listening to the recording again now is also a reminder of where I was technically in 2010. I was very new to recording songs on a computer. I didn't really know what I was doing yet. But I do remember working extremely hard to get the sounds to feel right to me at the time.
And perhaps that's another reason I'm enjoying going back through these files. I can hear things now that I would record differently. Of course I can. Sixteen years have passed. But I can also hear the decisions I was making, and more importantly, I can remember why I was making them.
The music didn't begin with me sitting alone at a computer deciding to write a song about a dying town.
It began in somebody's living room: a director talking about Dickens and Texas, photographs spread out in front of us, and one person's ideas setting off a chain of associations in somebody else's head.