Everything I write these days is either pure fiction, or based on what I hear or observe. Inevitably, there are probably little bits of me which find their way into my writing, but purely personal songs are something I wrote as a teenager, not now.
I am constantly listening and looking out for key lines that I can use in a song, and it is often the case that I have a dozen or more songs in the course of construction at any one time. It helps keep the writing process alive, and it means I can usually filter material I collect into something I am currently working on, rather than save it for the future.
For me there is no set rule about what comes first: words or music. I enjoy writing words to music as much as I like setting music to lyrics.
I have never forgotten a concept which songwriter Tony Hatch used, to produce something quite unusual and unique. His song ‘Don’t Sleep In The Subway’, which he wrote for Petula Clark, was constructed by joining together three quite separate pieces of music, and the result was a refreshingly different pop song which, undoubtedly in part because of the way it was constructed, couldn’t be compared to anything that went before it, or followed after.
It’s a very effective method for producing something out of the ordinary, and one which I have used a number of times. One example is ‘Silent Screams’ (on my home page) which primarily consists of two verses and two choruses, with verse and chorus having been written several years apart, and the intro added at a different time too, with none of the parts originally intended for the same song.
If there is a pattern to my songs, it is probably that I love lots of chord changes within a song, as well as a wide variety of chords, because it is this just as much as a strong melody line, which provides so much colour in a song. It’s not unusual for me to use two or three chords within a single bar, much to the bemusement of my producer!
