Where does a song come from?
Beethoven said his ideas came unbidden — out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, at dawn — and that he could almost seize them with his hands. Tom Waits talks about songs as creatures flying about his head: catch the tail of one and pull it down and it’s yours, though what you’re holding is a wild thing, not a song, and the craft is in the tending. Even Einstein — who said ‘I see my life in terms of music’ — described his ideas as genius bubbles floating by, catchable by anyone who has done the unglamorous work of becoming a receiver.
Anybody can write a song.
But the unglamourous work is the practice. When asked how you write an amazing song, Ed Sheeran said you need to write seventy crap ones. Not seven — seventy.
So you can’t just go for the walk and wait for the sky to provide; you build your tower first, brick by patient brick, and then you go for the walk, trusting the tower stands tall enough to catch what floats by. Anyone who has had the good fortune to receive a decent song will know the strange feeling of it — the mystery, the odd sense of transmission, the gratitude — and the obligation folded up inside it too: to polish the raw creature into something song-shaped and singable.
But what is a spark, when you catch one and hold it up to the light? In my experience it’s rarely one thing. It’s two — a curiosity in the head and a feeling in the body, an idea that itches and a ground that aches, a mood and some words that catch — two things striking like flint and steel. I’ve had clever ideas that sat on the page like wet leaves, and I’ve had big feelings that swirled around for weeks and never settled into anything. But when the two arrive together… boom.
I present two of my songs as case studies of the two sparks that lit them. One I wandered into blind and only understood afterwards. The other I set out to catch deliberately, motivated by a feeling that Rocketman gave rise to, and chasing a question about the strangest, and so often unused, pathway in the woods.
You’ll meet some maps along the way. If they look like the scribblings of a mad cartographer, don’t worry — The Songs will teach you to read them, and you don’t need them to follow the stories.
And when you’ve heard both tales, carry one question onward with you into Go Wandering: what two things of yours have never been put together?