Cowboy Confessional

I was at a songwriter’s event in Berkeley (and what the Sam Hell an ex-cowboy is doing in Berkeley, California is another question altogether) when a competition judge warned the participants “You’ll stand a better chance if your song has a bridge.”

Being cut of rough cloth, I thought this notion absurd and an insult to songwriters who have avoided bridges like they would avoid cheap whiskey (which describes mainly me, though bridgeless folk like Tom Waits come to mind too). 

A bridge is just another tool, and by itself does not make a song better or worse.  But it is a tool to change the audiences expectations and add variety.  Like a drummer who knows when to drop a beat in order to get the audience to anticipate a changing verse, a bridge establishes a change in the song, and breaks up musical monotony.

But necessary?  No more necessary that tits on a nun.

Take one extreme example, James McMurty’s Choctaw Bingo.  Search all you like, you will never find a bridge in the entire song which rivals a Wagner opera in length.  McMurty uses other devises to keep energy and audience attention, including interludes between stanzas that foreshadow lyrical reentry, and lyrics that rivet attention.

Bridges have their use, and should not be discounted.  But almost every pop-tune has a bridge and nobody remembers pop-tunes a year after they hit the top ten (well, aside from the Beatles … but that’s a whole different side of beef on which to chew).  Writing a good song requires writing the words and music that convey the emotion you want people to feel, and even the longest bridge won’t cross a chasm between your concealed emotion and a bored audience.

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Songs are short stories set to music. Aside from the rubbish once known as disco, most songs have a very compact story.

• * The average novel starts at 80,000 words
• * A novella is around 30,000
• * Short fiction starts at 1,000
• * Most three stanza, one chorus songs … 200

A songwriter must struggle with almost every word to paint the most vivid picture possible, in the shortest space available. Without care, lyrics and the story being sung are lifeless. And people don’t buy lifeless songs (well, if you ignore anything recorded recently by Karen Carpenter).

Let me illustrate with a single line I once stole from Tom Waits. The line was describing someone drinking. If the line had been written:

He’s drinking whiskey every night

You would have a mental picture of a man who doesn’t have much of a life, but is otherwise harmless and unharmed. Had it been written:

He’s sippin’ whiskey every night

You envision a fellow, perhaps a southern gent, happily indulging in a five o’clock ritual at the tennis club. Had it been:

He’s slurpin’ whiskey every night

Well, that could be anybody down at the corner sports bar … at ten in the morning.

What Waits wrote painted a very different portrait by selecting one specific word. The original line was:

He’s spillin’ whiskey every night

This one word, that omitted anything resembling drinking except in the past tense (i.e., he’s already bombed beyond quick recovery) sold the stanza. It painted a story of a man who every night gets drunk to the point of losing physical control and emotional responsibility. And all because of one word.

Longer phrases apply as well. When James McMurtry wrote about the Lights of Cheyenne, he described them as broken glass on the road into town. But that phrasing does not bring the song to life as it is not descriptive. McMurtry wrote instead:

Like windshield glass on the shoulder at night

This puts the listener outside of Cheyenne city limits, on a lone highway in the dead of dark.

Now that’s a short story!

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James McMurtry is evidence that the line between madness and genius if very thin … thankfully.

Like a sonic lovechild born from Ray Wylie Hubbard and Tom Waits, McMurtry writes songs that are beautifully ugly in a down-home sort of way.  Waits can sing depressingly about alcoholic love affairs while McMurtry sings boisterously of alcoholic carnal affairs with his cousins (”And them skinny little halters, And they’re second cousins to me, Man I don’t care I wanna get between them, With a great big ol’ hard-on”).  That should drive some Republicans crazy.

More important though is that like Waits and Hubbard, McMurtry’s lyrics paint vivid mental pictures.  One cannot prevent images erupting in the mind’s eye when encountering words like “Aunt Clara kept her Bible Right next to the phone in case she needed a quote” or “deadly as a Texan on ice.” 

(Anyone who has not been on a public highway in north Texas during their freakish winter ice storms knows not the definition of terror)

It is the shared trait of Waits, Hubbard and McMurtry that makes songs special.  Like reading good fiction, the listener is escorted momentarily to another reality because the words create an alternate place and time, populated with people you might not want to know, but who are like people you already know (maybe even like yourself — I know I had a cousin who … never mind).  Contrast even the worst prose penned by any of these gentlemen against the spiritually empty lyrics found in popular music, and one instantly understands why these three develop enduring, almost cult like followings.  Unlike yesterday’s pop stars, Waits, Hubbard, and McMurtry will always have an audience.

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