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• Mike McDonald (previously of Jr. Gone Wild, now of the Mike McDonald Band) shares some of the songwriting wisdom he's collected as one of Canada's indie music icons. •
On Writer's Block and Getting "Unstuck"...
The McDonald Papers (Vol. 1, #33)

Hi there...

Perhaps I shouldn't impose this upon you all, but judging from response from the past some of you will be interested. I learned something else about this songwriting thing. I mean, I think I always knew it... it was an instinctual thing, but every now and then the words to describe things finally do show up, and I experienced this last week.

This has to deal with what to do when you're stuck. That is to say when you are going good with your lyrics, that first verse and the chorus seem great, and you're one and a half lines into the second verse when you drive straight into a brick wall, totally screwing up your fancy new front end. At times like that I ask myself "how do I get unstuck?" The usual tricks work some of the time. Just leaving it alone for awhile and getting your brain thinking about something else occasionally works; I've had great success with the "thinking room" method... thats when you go to the bathroom when you're stuck; the hardest and longest way that I've found to become unstuck is to meditiate on it to the exclusion of the rest of the world, but that takes hours and totally wipes me out.

It occurred to me after years and years of trial and error that "How do I get unstuck?" may be the wrong question. So, what would be a different, valid, perspective? I ran a level three diagnostic, and when the results came in I was able to formulate a different question to ask when stuck. "Why am I stuck?" I discovered that I always get stuck when I lose track of what the song is about.

If I get stuck, now I check to see if I'm still "with it" in terms of what the song wants to be about. Sometimes I'm being too general with a topic...not enough concrete detail to get a sense of what it's about. In those cases I assume then that I must segregate the various components of the subject matter and sort out the relevant and irrelevant details. Sometimes I find , using this new method, that I dwell too much on irrelevant things. For a guy like me, those are vital bits of information (or intelligence, for all you spy afficianados out there) that are extremely useful when building a song.

I was watching a history of rock n roll show, and there was a clip with Holland/Dozier/Holland (if you don't know, they wrote all the good songs at Motown that Smokey Robinson didn't write), and one of the Holland brothers (watching this was like being in church to me...I actually was on the edge of my seat and quite excited...my wife thought I was insane) was telling the world how there's no way anyone will catch ALL the lyrics of a song when they first hear it, but they should be able to know what the song is about by hearing only one line. Any line in the song should do that, is what he was saying. I thought "Christ! Thats fucking hard!" and folks, it sure is. But Holland/Dozier/Holland have forgotten more about universally popular songwriting than all of us combined will ever know, and I'm content to defer to them on issues as vitally important, and no doubt extremely dry as this.

Anyone not interested is likely bored to death by now, or has likely skipped the piece entirely, so I'll get off it.

(Mike McDonald has kindly given us permission to reprint from his McDonald Papers which he sends out by email. This is an excerpt from his weekly email newsletter. Please visit his site, sign up for the McDonald Papers and/or preorder his new album if you can.)

Mike McDonald Email WWW

Other Resources Related To This Feature
The Mike McDonald Band Home Page
Artist: Mike McDonald Band

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