Patterns

Greta Gerwig, songwriting, and information overload

Laura Marling, an English singer-songwriter, is the person who convinced me to start a Substack. Not personally, it was just around the time of her most recent album release that she started sharing articles on here…at the time, a platform I had never heard of before…and I thought to myself “wait…I’m allowed to do that?”. So I dove into it. The album she was in the process of releasing at the time was called “Patterns in Repeat”, and it’s lovely. So I thought as an ode to the person who inspired me to write on here to begin with…I’d spend a brief time talking about patterns today.

When I write songs, I almost exclusively compose my lyrics in rhyme. Not always the same rhyme scheme and the pattern of rhyme could even change in different parts of the song but I’m ALWAYS thinking about rhyme when I write. If I have the perfect line during a verse, I’m very hesitant to change it for the sake of it being difficult to rhyme, and I’d much rather force a word in that maybe doesn’t even make as much sense with what I’m trying to convey…as long as it means the phrases rhyme with each other. It’s just pleasant. The ear likes to hear rhyme. It’s a comforting feeling to us, and it’s just as comforting to play and sing.

That said, one of my favorite artists right now is another songwriter from overseas, this time Ireland, a songwriter named Fionn Regan. (there are going to be a lot of artist name drops in this article. I suggest you check all of them out!) He’s been at it for quite some time now but I only discovered him several years ago through his song being sampled in a Bon Iver track. Anyway, there are many things I really enjoy about his writing but one of the things I’m most drawn to is the fact that he often doesn’t rhyme in his songs. He might throw in a few here and there, and there are some tunes that have consistent rhymes, but many have no scheme at all. But the lack of rhyming almost brings more attention to the poetry, and the timbre of the consonants he chooses to combine through his word choice. It’s very interesting, and jarring enough to notice there is no rhyme, but not so much to where you feel turned off as a listener. It just feels natural.

This is something not only was I uncertain if I could achieve, but hadn’t even really thought about trying to achieve at all. But going through a bit of a dry spell with my creativity and writing things that I really liked, I decided to give myself a few assignments to force myself into thinking a certain way. One of these assignments was to write a song without the presence of a rhyme scheme. So, I had a song that I had only just started, tentatively called “Fluorescent”....

A quick aside: I’m excited at the potential for this song. I only have the first two lines figured out but I know it’s going to be something:

Lets play pretend
And be something we’re not

Simple I know…but I know it’s somewhere deep in my subconscious that’s telling me I need to write about the identity shift I go through every time I clock into my day job. It’s been on my mind a lot lately…how much time I spend being a completely different person, representing different things and embodying totally different goals, agendas and responsibilities than what my actual self does. It’s a song I deeply feel like I need to get out and I’m very excited about it. That is all…continue on…