Well hello. Welcome back. Although I’m saying that and in all statistical likelihood you’ve never been here before. Anyway, as this is your first time here, let me explain. I write songs, record them as well as I can, and then write an accompanying blog post to document what I was thinking when I wrote the song, and any little notes of interest I can think of along the way. Anyway, today’s song is this one. You can listen to it if you want to. Then read the lyrics, then read my thoughts about it if you’re so inclined.
Lyrics
Guitar man pens his lonely songs, to keep him company
Songs he sings to nobody – a crowd he’ll never see
He chooses chords to match the words
And nobody pays heed
But guitar man has got everything he needs
So if you hear this song and if you want to sing along
It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong
And if they tune makes you feel down
He’ll find a higher key
Guitar man is as lonely as can be
A song that mentions no one’s name, but maybe it’s for you
Maybe all the words are lies, but maybe they ring true
A chorus, bridge, a second verse – it might just change your mind
Or maybe they’re just there because the rhyme
So if you hear his song and if you want to sing along
It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong
And if you find that it’s too high
He’ll change the melody
Guitar man is as lonely as can be
Guitar man is as lonely as can be
Thoughts
Well hopefully this song is self explanatory. Bored of the vicissitudes of spending hours on producing songs and sweating over lyrics, this song arrived almost fully-formed one afternoon as I was working on my fingerpicking technique. Very very occasionally I will do a Simon and Garfunkel number in a pub (my fingerpicking is not the greatest) and I really, really love that style of music – it’s just something that comes naturally to me.
But! On this day, I found the chord change kind of… happening in front of my eyes. Sometimes, you can just let your fingers explore the fretboard and you find things you weren’t expecting. Mostly this song is fairly straightforward stuff, but towards the end of the chorus you’ll hear a reasonably unusual change which is (I think) A minor, to G# to D/F#. The descending bass note is a line cliche, but ordinarily you wouldn’t get a G# natural in there, and I think it adds a nice little bit of colour. There’s also an A minor in the verse with a high F – and these are the kinds of thing you happen across when you’re fingerpicking – meaning you get nice little countermelodies and bass lines going as you play.
Lyrically, I think you probably get it: it’s about songwriting itself. What it means to write songs – especially when you know that hardly anyone will ever hear them. All these things that I do are vehicle for self expression. Some songs are deeply personal… some are throwaways… some are extended jokes… but they all reflect some kind of mood or thought at the time they are written.
As a change of pace from the usual kind of song I write, I enjoyed this a great deal – and I hope you get something out of it too.
And if you don’t? Well you can fuck off. You’re not paying for this.