Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light
I have always liked that description. Last night I was fiddling with a tune on my guitar. I wrote it a couple of years ago and that is just how it felt. Sitting at the edge of the light, taking in the grace notes, tracing the lines where the melody is strongest for the lyric to sit. Its hard to describe how it works and indeed many songwriters do it much better than me. I guess a couple of masters are Springsteen and Lennon, Bowie is another, I challenge anyone to try singing along to something like 'Life on Mars', it sounds simple but actually there is a lot more going on there than you think - and that's just to name three contemporary writers, the list is huge and endless. A couple of my own favourites are Karine Polwart (who lives near my Dad) and Lori McKenna (and not just because my mum was a McKenna. I recently wrote an article on writing a particular song, to try and analyse what was going on and I plan to do much more recording when Dan goes off to University this weekend (hoooo - I shall miss him, so) but I have spent my spare time in the summer writing or polishing tunes and gathering scraps of lyrics in readiness. In isolation they don't mean anything, like, 'The boy from Barcelona plays a broken-heart-stringed mandolin,' but I am hoping that eventually they will come together as a narrative. And now the choice of song this morning is a huge task, how to demonstrate this - I guess every lyric writer should take this advice:
