What follows are meant to be tips on songwriting, and some idea of the fun involved in trying to make “a record”. When you sign off on it, so long after declaring a project was at hand to start with, you have something for posterity.
I remain a firm believer that you write songs with the instrument. So, learn new songs and play them, and see if you start plying a feel, of a unique “tune”. Expand it into a song with considerations like, what’s a verse, is there a pre-chorus, is there a chorus, and is there a break, or a bridge. But it all starts with a feel, on a rhythm instrument. Then try to figure what the song is about, and gradually, over several writings, eke out the lyrics you like.
After 10 songs were done for This Elite Band, the theme of songwriting seemed to change to being more about you than me. There was no conscious effort to do this, and maybe my job had something to do with it, or I’d used up personal themes of triumph over the bullshit in your head and unrequited love. But “The Modern Age” was my eleventh song, and whatever the modern age is, or was, or wants to be, these became “songs for” the modern age. The double entendre for me is, they are songs for the world to gander at, and see where they lie within it all, and the other meaning is that these are songs for my most grandiose project yet, which I mentioned at the end of the discussion at the end of This Elite Band, they are songs for the rock opera, The Modern Age.
If I’m being honest, Bruce, Buzz, and Raif were not real interested in this project at first, but all they had to do was show up, eat pizza and play music. I wrote up profoundly humorous pamphlets to stoke them up, that were ostensibly from something called the “Elite Band Advocacy Group”, imploring the members to do their best to make a credible recording for “posterity”. Not for me, you know. Posterity, which is everyone who ever is to come. And they did it.
Here’s where the songs came from.
In writing this tune, I had actually parts of what I considered would be two tunes, and they came together as this one. They were “The Modern Age”, and one called “Arrows in the Sand”. They were similar tempo movements in two different keys, and it dawned on me one night that maybe they were the same song, and that’s why they didn’t seem to expand. I was so happy that all of a sudden a song had come together, and not sure why it dawned on me. It’s one of my favorites.
My overriding attraction to this “modern age” thing is how many people are hounded by the pressures of the overwhelming nature of the world we live in. Human hardwiring is better off when things are simple, The more they expose themselves to each other’s weirdness, the deeper the catalogue for these apian species to imitate, or want to. Or feel the need to. You can turn up zombie real quick.
So it’s as if there is more than one person in the song, reflecting its origin. One observes the belittling nature of it all, saying it “won’t matter anyway”, the other striking a more, frank interpretation of the idiocy that abounds, chalking it all up to Arriving, then surviving, and then living, in, The Modern Age.
A few sources of the lyrics. I remember this war movie, where a column of the army was headed the wrong way in Europe somewhere, and they were following a road sign, deliberately changed by the enemy to lead them wrong. A general, Patton maybe, rolls up in his jeep with his compass, redirecting the forces properly, and saying, “Doesn’t anybody use a compass anymore?”
So, arrows in the sand. Are you following them? What if I just swoosh the arrow with my foot, then where are you? From ads to diet recommendations to the outcomes and circumstances of everyday living that maybe you’re noticing and maybe you’re not, arrows in the sand in the modern age, specially for you. And as we get more oblivious and mentally obtunded, we eventually barely know how to give a shit at all. So, who’s to save us from the pantomime, when we don’t even want to know the lines? Just a pill to chase the blues away, will set the stage for, surviving in the modern age. What, one in five of us takes an antidepressant?
So, there’s a sign ahead, for all of us in our own lives, to ignore or follow, as we deal with the modern age and the hustle and bustle, and get out of it what we can. As the time ticks, you know? In medical school, wanting so hard to write a song and thinking it started with lyrics, I’d written a long poem called “The Price That’s Paid”, real rhythmic, real wordy, and real unlikely to ever be a song. When it never turned into a tune, I finally lost it, but it ended with that line about “the price you paid”, for living in a world you couldn’t figure out.
There had originally been a second part to “Arrows in the Sand”, but I could never warm up to any lyrics for it, and dropped it, then re-added one round of it as the guitar solo. I really liked the laughing sound as the song travels out of the key of C to include a B flat chord, then re-modulates to G, the dominant of the C there. Going out of key can sometimes introduce that “crazy element” that songs can often use somewhere in the middle to liven it up.
Notice that the song is a march. I had no idea, and at the first studio session Buzz starts the song off with the march, and really the song needs even more of that beat. We kept that song on its first take, along with the second one on the album, “Is This the Real Thing”. That was Buzz, steady, good. One night, two keepers? Of course, they told me they were keepers, I had no idea. See, on that first night I was so glad that they came to work on the project, because essentially none of them wanted to. So from 7 pm until almost 1:30m a.m., we played all ten songs just so I could have a recording of them, because I wasn’t so sure they’d be back. From a practical standpoint, you might hope on the odd keeper from working on maybe three songs, playing a bunch of takes, listen to them all back a bunch of times, and then see in a series of weeks they stand up to workable “beds”. Eventually we did more organized work, usually weeks apart.
While we were recording the first record, this one was already written, along with the halves of the title track. It is a big personal favorite. I play it to my imaginary farmhouse audience all the time. Musically it was a one night wonder. And it couldn’t be simpler. Simple is better in songwriting, and so hard to do.
I have been fooled a lot, and I guess we all have, but if there is a solid theme for the world we live in, it’s that there’s a lot of bullshit out there masquerading as some sort of bona fide, honest to God something-or-other. But phony, or shallow, and here today and then gone away. So, can I believe what I’m seeing? If so, I stick around until we all see it run its course, and bring us all around to the “other way”.
The second verse explores romance, and how, maybe, the more I’ve gotten to know you, babe, the less it’s happening. Just a cross between a star of mine, and whatever was on your mind, when I caught you on a line.
In the last verse, the scientist in me cannot ignore how tenets of my curriculum in the 70s and 80s did not stand the test of time, and were not the real things I’d been taught they were (entropy, the miracle of meiosis, the rise of Chaos and string theory). But that’s science. We are forever gathering more data, and formulating more hypotheses to explain them. So, the lyrics. An instant all it takes to “shed some light on this insanity”. To uncover a better reality. But you do the best you can, and don’t worry if it sets you back just a step or two, when it all comes clear to you.
I remember this girl when I was in school, she lived in apartment across the parking lot from me, and I fell hard and….crowded her a little bit, and soon realized she thought I was one of those guys, and it was done. I vowed to never ever crowd a girl again. But she told me that one night she was snooping at my basement window where I was banging at the piano, and I’m pretty humble, and she was studying TV and was interning with a local station, and had this real husky voice. And all I needed to do was blow her off and she’d have loved me! But I had yet to learn that.
There was no climbing out of the tree. It would never be like it used to be. So, it ended up in a song, and I never heard from the girl again after that. But like in “Hey Baby”, and others, I had to say it at the end, “I’ll find my way back to the sun”. Hey, in unrequited love, there is a terrible darkness that sets in for a while, and as long as you’re not too nuts, the sun comes back out eventually, and there are so many fish in that sea, right? But this girl was smokin’, really. Absolutely adorable. I wonder what ever happened to her. She probably forgot me pretty quick.
At our second whole-band session our guitarist had figured it out musically, and I myself, the piano player, insisted on playing an acoustic guitar on the track, but he’d decided on this lead-in, and wanted everyone to wait and let him start it, and we recorded it in one time through, which never happens.
A point about Sadie, Raif’s wife. She “asked” me one night if she could sing harmonies on the record, a record I was still not sure anyone would do, and she can really play and sing. You first hear of her on the well-placed “oohs” on “Real Thing”, and she sings on this third tune also, and on the rest of the record.
I love this song. When our kids were little, and my wife, a nurse, was still working weekends, I had to decide on whether to take them to church or not on Sunday. I enjoyed going for the most part, and here in the country a lot of the teenagers sang along with the tunes and it did my heart good. But if we didn’t go I felt compelled to do something religious or otherwise nurturing, and occasionally I’d get out the bible and leaf through it, but it wasn’t a “holy roller” household, that’s for sure. I was thinking nurture.
Anyway, one Sunday I’d gotten it out and ended up in the section called “Proverbs”, and it was neat to me how, according to proverbs, there was a generally specific “result” for people who’d violate a proverb, like if you do this, then “that” happens, as opposed to some random and general “fee”. I don’t know why I found that so interesting, or if that was even what proverbs were all about. But it was an idea for a song, especially since by now I’d written several with that theme. How about a song regarding ”modern age” proverbs?
Well, at the time as I recall there was a tune in the key of “C”, about as simple as you can get. To me, songs are reliably better the simpler they are, and obviously at some point you’ve got to try to get fancy with chords and progressions, and verse/chorus dynamics, etc. Not this one. It was so simple and came together quickly, and now I’m reading proverbs. Bingo.
So if you follow the lyrics, they are all mildly reworked sayings you’ve heard. And I love to pick on anybody who appears to have been swallowed by The Modern Age, made a zombie, had their genuine character assaulted, and so forth, and that’s what the song accomplishes. “They put the message in your head, and you found it all easy to believe…” and so forth. A few of the “proverbs” in the song may not be obvious to you, but most are. “It was fun until the start, you said, when a fool sees what he sees, in the dark cloud hiding what’s up ahead, in a forest without trees.” See that?
The chorus is a take on the old saying that you are best off believing “half of what you see, and none of what you hear”, reworded. Then, a pick on the general hustle and bustle of this world we live in is the second verse, of people trying to “catch up to what’s behind you, some trick that would save you nine”. The bridge in the middle is the one about how a bird in hand is worth two in the bush, and how, unless you have something in your hand, how can you count on it?
The last verse involves a proverb of my own, the one where I want to point out to people that “life’s hard, not easy”. There is an essay called this in that book I wrote (Understanding Humans, AuthorHouse). You pay a price for ignorance in the modern age, and you pay a price for trying to cut corners and deny hard work that you’re better off doing. So don’t take too long to “learn to play”. Was it over, before it had begun, by taking the easy way? Well of course it was.
In life, the map’s the treasure. Doing things the “right” way or “the hard way”, the mysteries of the universe will be on display for you with this behavior.
If I’m being honest, the band didn’t get the message I was looking for on this song, and maybe I’m wrong about that. But it’s way more somber and down than I’d envisioned. It was supposed to be a song that bounced and rolled and almost laughed, and even horns could have been in it. Bap badda dadd a bop da dad a da, I don’t know if you can follow that. But they played it the way it went, and that’s that, but I think it drags a little.
Musically, the song was born of the relationship between the G major 7th, where the F# is added, and of course this is the note present in B minor, and really, you see these together in songs setting that comfortable, pleasant feel that the major seventh brings you, in things like Jazz and so forth. When the chorus comes along, you can just go between the C and the D and, so simply, have gone from the gentleness of the major 7th to the stark messaging of the chorus. Pretty simple.
Major sevenths also lend themselves, according to me, to invention of characters, like in Steely Dan music. In this case, the lyrics paint a picture of “a dude” who thinks he’s a dude but isn’t for some reason. A favorite theme of mine in general is people who think they’re fooling somebody and all they’re fooling is themselves, and essentially always to their own detriment. The fact that “a good man is hard to find” in fact did not dawn on me until the song was written and named. A hero of mine, Jackson Browne, said that, in songwriting, when serendipitous and coincidental things happen in songs, that’s when you know you’re on it.
Lyrically, it was pretty simple. “There’s such a thing as one in a million we all know, because they tell us so”, well, says who, right? When confronted with his relative realness and motivations, he just say, “Hey, wouldn’t you?” And yet we all need heroes and for them to perform admirably. The flash of light, in a sea of drab, and we hope that he’s doing it right for more than the minute so necessary to be a zillionaire all of a sudden, whereupon we lose touch with whatever got us there. And of course, the people got it in their mind, there’s that something they need and it’s so hard to find. Not that a good man is hard to find, but that “that something they need” is so hard to find. That something they need he, of course, a hero of some kind. Mainly, this is a shot a musicians, who make a good record and find a repeat very difficult.
In the second verse there is a mention of “the old man”, and we men can never forget the profound influence of such creatures in our lives. And “the village” it takes to raise us ain’t what it once was, probably. “Maybe he won’t know no more, don’t you see he’s heard it all before?” And surely, to fizzle out from high performance is “a long way to fall”, even if he doesn’t see it that way.
The last verse attempts to point out the relative difference of women. Women have improved largely in the past generation of two, and men have fallen. Their isms and roles and expectations are undermined, outlawed (many needed to be), their testosterone is dropping, their sperm counts are dropping, and with women being the default anyway in the human “condition”, I see the threat here to realness, to fun, to excitement and color of life, something men bring. So with a “lady friend now to carry the load, it’s just fine with him. Is she gonna sink or swim?” Yeah, she’s “givin’ it a try”, but let’s be real, men need to be men and women need to be women. We’re very different. And if she were to cry, in the face of something? Can you ask her what she’s crying for? I know this is sexist and all that, but, such a paradigm shift is a big deal to me that I see a lot in the modern age, and I suggest that “it’s not hard to expect a lot from what it might mean, when she makes the scene”. Hence, a modern age theme. And for sure, men had their chance to run things, and you make the call as to where it’s brought us.
Now, by the later 90s when these songs were coming together, I’d already done 15 years in the ER and seen people go to such lengths to hurt or destroy themselves, and by then I was preaching these songs to people. So, whenever I would hear their “misfortune”, I figured they’d created it themselves, and yet they couldn’t see it, or understand why these tears “keep finding their way to your face”. Alas, it’s the games we play. The simple things that we cannot say and will not say. The simple dreams we let slip away. And by the end of the song, you just want to say, to thine own self be true. Shine on! Your light is strong! If you will just shine it for you.
The guitar in the song was too much, right? Well, that’s what the guitar does in rock. It yells at you in the same key as the singer yells at you with, albeit in a much more dramatic fashion. In a rock opera, the main interplay is between the singer and the guitar wails.
On “Songs for The Modern Age”, this song was among the cleanest and best done, and a favorite of mine. Quite simply, it’s a song about a cheating heart, which is only tangentially a Modern Age theme. It was a song in the key of “D”, which is not a key I have much written in, though recently I have for some reason. But Jackson Browne did a song on his first album (Saturate Before Using) called “Looking Into You”, a song in D. I was so enamored with that tune as a teenager, and I always said that if I could only learn to play the piano enough to be able to play this song, it would all be worth it no matter how long it took, which it turns out was years. But I still play it every so often.
The chords are standard, and the song moves along rather quickly, and that was all there was to writing the music. A bridge in the middle. Simple.
Back then as I recall, I think it was Frank Gifford, the old QB and MNF commentator, someone caught on tape during a romance with a girl that was not named Kathy Lee, his wife, who was at the time especially a pretty big TV personality. That poor girl had to suffer such humiliation when it all went public, and such a neat and beautiful girl. She sure resented it. Sound like a song? Right.
So the song becomes about a cheating heart. One of my brothers pointed out to me that it is a song of mixed metaphors, which of course I had no idea was the case. Maybe love is some kind of mixed metaphor or something. Love is hard. Romance is harder. But lyrically, I really enjoy this tune.
Consider the opening: “A long way from tomorrow, lies a list of something borrowed from the light of a neon sky”. Romance is a tempting thing, and temptation and suggestion abound, especially in the modern age. But if your heart gets broken, many look for the relief in romance with another, like Frank did. And like a lot of men do and did, and it still takes two to tango.
So, laying awake in the middle of the night, the cheat ponders his position and strategizes, and hopes his real local girl doesn’t perceive this “sigh” when they again face another day of their duet together. But she knows, right? For the rest of the lyric, despite his dwellings and denials and rumination, the fact is that when your heart is elsewhere, your explanations all go with you. So, the peek of the mind’s eye, “over the wall to the other side, where the grass grows a better green”, and so forth. In the middle he even breaks existential, decrying the sad reality that, once a moment’s passed, it’s suddenly “the past”, and no shadows will be left, and no trace remains. And by the end, he even wants the world to know that, hey, it don’t matter where you’ve been once the hourglass has run out of sand, I mean, especially “if nobody’s listening , to the sound of two lovers kissing, in the dark of a nowhere land.” A nowhere land indeed. But a nowhere land that exists in the fantasy of a lot of people.
This “song of disclaimers” was born musically as an intended chug rhythm that guitarists enjoy so much, and it could be funkier. The essential rhythm is that of the “dotted quarter note”. Musically, a dot after a note says to play an additional half of whatever is dotted. When it’s the quarter note, it provides a “kick” that, no less, defines “rock” to me. Bump, bump-bump, dah de ladda bump, bump-bump. It’s hard to describe of course, but a choppy chug was the identifier for it according to me. So the song does this in a verse, and then for another movement does a straight rhythm, as if an answer to the choppy, aloof groove of the verses. Key of G, no weird chords really. Super simple.
Remember, people say poetic stuff all the time without meaning to. In this case, it was our bassist, Bruce. There was a long story I won’t tell here, but he was accused of something he didn’t do, and for which he was later exonerated. We were all relieved, and it wasn’t much of an infraction really, and it isn’t like the police were involved. But when he was exonerated, he’d come to the Café Elite (my basement), and was so exuberant and relieved, he just spewed out all these lines that literally I wrote them down, and paraphrased them into the lyrics of this tune. Originally I wanted to call the song “Curiously”, which increasingly wouldn’t work, but the bottom line was that he was accused of something that someone else did out of convenience for the accuser, and the song suggests this ulterior motivation that often underlies such soap operatic dysfortunes. So, despite the “don’t look at me” inferences, we were anyway. In the end, it was helpful for all to “listen carefully to those things, you see, that can’t possibly be.” Note the carefully placed commas.
We’ve never played the song in a live setting, but a rock band with any chops at all could really kill it. The version on the record is a good one, but please note the drumming. I am certain that my brother Buzz believed this was a throw-away take of the thing, and just went nuts with rolls and smacks, and I remember just belly laughing all the way through it, and I don’t know if anyone else even noticed. I got up and met him coming out of his booth, and told him how cool I thought it was and he completely blew it off. But it was really something, I thought, and I’m pretty sure that I then, as usual, again suggested he hang it up and sell all of his shit. It was my ritual. But the recorder is always running for this reason. The looser the players, the more likely they are to catch that butterfly they’re chasing.
A favorite theme of mine for Modern Agers is, whither men? Do you just want to outlaw and throw out all bawdy boy behavior? I mean, it’s often too messy and gross and bad for somebody, right? Well, some is for sure, but we’re outlawing a lot less girl behavior, that’s for sure. So, how about a song about men?
More than most songs, this intention drove what the song was musically. The idea was, men are simple, so how simple of a tune can you come up with? How about just three chords, the 1, the 4, and the 5, and we’ll just let them go in the same order, one after the next, for essentially the whole song. It hangs in the middle on a mixed/sustain chord, but still, bam bam bam, straight through. And in the key of B flat, a happy place for a piano player.
So picture a cave man, an enlightened one, and maybe he’s gone through a worm hole and ended up in the modern age. Outmoded and upstaged a little maybe, indignant and righteous, but sure of himself and his position and role. He implores that he and all he is will never be dispensed with, “long as they make us this way”, you know, anatomically. “I came around when the world was a real small place”. So he blows his horn some, and someone needs to. A simple and relevant question: Do they hear what I say?
“Fools in stupid screens”, are the people on their phones and computers, instead of traversing such complete realness that a real man is more accustomed to. And remember the song was written in 1998. “A castle looms, in a hill beyond” is a shot at politicians, on Capitol Hill maybe, but more that represented by “the man’, his employer. Most real men work for a living. You know, work. In the end he insists that he’ll “be back again when the world is a real small place”, and his services will always be needed. That “you’ll see it my way again, and feel like you’ve found your only friend. Standing big and strong, you could see me all along. But could you hear what I say? I won’t go away, long as they make us this way.”
Now know this: a real man has no use for the self-serving, narcissistic bullshit of girlymen and other impostors of men in the modern age. He is never needy, always carries his own weight, and wouldn’t want you to confuse energy for dramatics. That is, as long as he has a good hearted mom(!)
Buzz informed me that the song is a “dirge”, which he educated me is a very specific rhythm, and not just a set of random march/rolls. He was a very meticulous educated drummer, and went over the dirge for me. And it so fits the tune, even though I’m quite sure he didn’t know much of the lyrics, or what the song was really about. He got the feel, though. At the end, we all hit a “hum” and held it to the end of the dirge where the song ends.
Remember, these are songwriting lessons here.
After we’d recorded that first record at The Stork, Tom and Greg wanted to do a Christmas record and have all the people who’d recorded there do a tune. I did Frosty The Snowman, rather forgetably. But when they called I thought, hey, I’m a songwriter, I’ll write a carol. Good luck writing a carol. But I tried. I thought, how about a song in three-four time? A lot of carols are in three, and just watch me. I started with A minor and G major as a dah dah dah de dah dah dah dad …I don’t know, but it went nowhere and I did Frosty. But it seemed like there was a song there, so I persisted. I beat on that rhythm… for a year. Nothing. Then it dawned on me, maybe the song isn’t in three four time after all. When I went to four four, out plopped “Rescue Me”. It’s my favorite, maybe my best, and most certainly the best song on “Songs for The Modern Age”. I have a big regret that I didn’t make it song number one.
That’s a point about “albums” They are collections of songs that go together, and order is critical. Best songs first? Can’t say. But anyway, it ended up last, another key song location to consider.
Lyrically, it fell to another favorite theme, a personally relevant one for me: freaked out kid needs someone to say something he desperately needs to hear. Ever ponder on a bad thought? Some people do it worse than others. In silence, these can occupy some pretty desperate moments. I mean, how many suicides per year? Forty-five thousand or more? And in the ER, big ERs anyway, you’d never believe how many people are in this dire of a mental state. The “ideation”, the planning, the discovery of this madness by loved ones, and the role of substances and booze. Hard work. Can they be rescued, or could they have been by a key interaction a long time ago?
So, “when hours have faded to moments again”, the despair of loneliness and misdirection, and obsession, and “the answers that lie in the lowest of lows, in battles lost, that nobody knows”. Sad. Then day breaks. We see it so much, too, in everything from the lost souls joining ISIS to the mass killings followed by suicide that ruin our lives every so often. Freud referred to the trick of behavior of “turning against the self” as if it’s a foreign entity, or identity rather. Part of the trick is “looking out as if something to see, in the darkness itself, a something to be, something that’s so far away, from me”. So sad. And all they needed was a key input, someone to rescue them, from themselves. Is it that simple? Was for me.
By the way, that was guitarist Tom Beyer whosejust wow-wow guitar part identifies this song, and really seems to provide that sane alter ego to the ruminating, obsessed, lost desperation of a mind struggling.
So, Songs for The Modern Age. It took us three years to finish this record, and almost everyone liked the first album, This Elite Band, better, and made it a point to tell me so. But during that three years, I think I listened to the whole thing every day. Weird right? But I have to say it was a little discouraging, even though I like it worlds better than the first one. So as a result, I would not write songs for several years after that, and focused on the book that was done from 2001 to 2005. For some reason, after Buzz died on us in 2008, I started writing songs again, and in later 2015 we’d had keepable versions to be finished for the next album of songs, Images.