ALIBI BOY AND “THE PROCESS”
Sometimes songs get written in a room, just a guitar, a voice, and hopefully, a brain and a heart. Alibi Boy began in a room but it wasn’t completed that way.
In essence, a song is comprised of a melody and a lyric. Nothing else. A great riff is a great riff but it’s not a song. It’s an arrangement. Even the chord pattern is not strictly a song. Plenty of cover artists, massive or modest, re- jig the chords to famous songs. But that’s not songwriting. That, too, is arrangement.
Postcard Comets songs exist elementally, as all songs do, as a melody and a lyric. The arrangement, I would argue, is a large part of what makes our tracks sound like us. Arrangements contribute atmosphere, groove and ultimately emotional response. But an arrangement can’t do its job if the melody and the lyric can’t establish the mood in the first place.
This is where we get back to Alibi Boy and the process of composition. I had completed the melody and lyric, or so I thought, and I began to work on a recording. All was going well until it came time to record the vocal. It was at that point that I realized that the melody, the sequence of notes the vocalist uses to sing the lyric, was not as evocative as the lyric itself. All of this is interconnected, of course; the arrangement complemented the lyric but the melody did not seem as resonant as either the words or the musical setting. I had a problem.
Of course, I blame Buck. No, he had nothing to do with the writing of the song nor did he criticize it. He did, however, play a guitar part that focused cruel, justifiable scrutiny on some mundane elements in the melody. If the guitar part could support the perspective of the lyric so well, why couldn’t the melody?
So, late in the game, with drums, bass, organ and guitar already tracked and stacked, I rewrote the melody. I won’t bore you with the particulars but the new tune emphasized the intimacy of the lyric and took the overall tone of the piece from accusatory shouting about a character’s flaws to a more imploring, close-to-the-ear advice. From hysterical to heartfelt, if you will, a deepening of the shadows.
Now, I’m not telling you this to hype the merits of the track. You decide that for yourself. But I hope to impart to those reading this the lesson I took from the process: it’s never too late to rewrite, to enhance, and to make your own contribution better in the service of the song.
Even if what you’re re-crafting is a key element of the song itself.
David Partridge
POSTCARD COMETS
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4 comments ↓
And a willingness to change what needs to be changed is a fundamental part of good songwriting, I think. Great song…and it still reminds me of Steely Dan.
-J
Thanks, Jo.
Buck and I were discussing your Steely Dan point last night. Although he’s not the Dan fan that I am, his view is that being compared to that band is never a bad thing!
Steely Dan arrangements are often keyboard based and the guitar parts are featured as opposed to traditional through-line rock or folk parts. That’s, give or take, also the case here.
Good ear and thanks for the compliment!
David
I gotta go with Jo. Real jazzy. It is reminiscent of KId Charlamain. I’ll give you an A for technical effort on the writing too. Lyrics, melody and rhythm sometimes dictate a songs direction as the song takes on life, it itself becomes the director.
And that rock jazz fusion is a good direction for you to go.
I think when I am recording if it comes out exactly like I thought it would and I don’t have to change something I am doing something wrong. Who is to dictate at what point of the entire process the muse will strike? And this is the worthy journey that keeps us writing and like the light at the end of a tunnel. The hard part is learning to play it live after it’s done..loll
Good points.
Are artistes ever going to satisfied with their work? Probably not– where’s the fun in that?
The “jazz” thing is funny. Buck doesn’t have a jazzy bone in his body and I listen to jazz but feel completely under-qualified to acknowledge anything I do as approaching it.
But Buck has a state of playing that he refers to as “staying open”. If I understand it right it means not being restricted by a narrow sense of genre, convention or the catalogue of licks that instrumentalists can fall back on.
I suspect that this is the very thing to which you’re referring. I do know that the original chords to Alibi Boy seemed pretty straightforward when I wrote it but they had a lot more flavour after Buck had added his chord-based track. There’s no acoustic guitar on this track and that’s why. I felt like I was watering down the bisque.
Thanks for the perspective. And by the way, I love Kid Charlemagne. “I think the people down the hall know who you are.”
David
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