Sojourn Worship Songwriting Community pt. 5

Only three writers came to the October workshop, down from six the previous month. Whenever you start a new venture, it is common to begin with a "buzz" and then settle into a smaller pigeon-hole for awhile, until you can build up a good base. Still, I had hoped for a bigger crowd. Maybe some new faces.

Actually, we ended up with four people because Sojourn's teaching pastor/ elder Daniel Montgomery happened by, and with a ginormous smile and much gusto plopped into a chair and said, "Oh, this is my favorite group!" He listened with enthusiasm to each song, and came up with some great comments and questions. It's encouraging to writers when their pastor takes an interest in what they're doing. So many pastors that I've met, mostly through my work in gospel radio, view music as a second-class citizen or even a necessary evil -- something to take up some time in a worship service before the real ministry begins. Daniel views music as integral, however, and is in love with original music that is birthed out of community.

The other two writers that month were Jeremy Quillo and Lorie King. Jeremy played two songs he'd just finished. Those of you who own the latest Sojourn worship CD, "These Things I Remember," know that he wrote about half the songs on that disc. Since that time, he hadn't written anything -- said he'd been kind of blocked. These new songs showed that he hadn't lost a step, though.

One was a modern hymn called "The Fatal Wood." It had a Celtic groove and featured verses set in what's called "common meter". Blew us all away. He's told me since then that he has raised the music a whole step and altered some of it rhythmically, so I will be interested to hear it again. He said it had been a long time since he's been so excited about one of his compositions. I was excited too. Jeremy sets the benchmark for the rest of us time and again.

Common meter, by the way, is so named because it's the most common form of hymn meter in the English language. It features alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. The "iamb" is a metric foot that consists of two syllables on a stress pattern that reads "da-DAH." Think, for instance, of how you say the word "today." "Tetrameter" means four metric feet -- in this case, four iambs. So basically there are eight syllables.
"Trimeter" means three metric feet -- in this case, six syllables. So the odd lines have eight syllables, the evens, six. You can see this, for example in Amazing Grace:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me ....

More specifically, hear the stresses:

aMAZing GRACE, how SWEET the SOUND ....

Lorie had come up with some lyrics, no melody. Had some good words to it -- very perspicacious, as her songs tend to be. Many of her lines can be sermons in themselves. I played a melody that I thought would fit -- a waltz-time tune, a boat-like, sea shanty kind of thing on guitar, with a harmonica interlude. I don't think it was at all what she wanted for the song, but that's one of the purposes of collaboration -- you pitch things and see if you get a hit. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't.

It's tricky for a new writer, even for an experienced writer, to come up with both words and melody. There is no single way of doing it. Sometimes I get an idea for a song that includes both at the same time. I start writing down the words, singing as I go. Other times, I'll fool around with my guitar, come up with some cool chord changes, and think, "I should write some lyrics to this." Still other times, I write the lyrics first. Everyone needs to discover, through trial and error, what works best for them.

Jeremy suggested some things for Lorie's song -- Jeremy, like me, has a background in poetry. Unlike me, he has a long history of writing songs for corporate worship. His opinions have gravitas. He's a very humble person -- in fact, he told me a couple weeks ago that he sees his role in our group as being more of an advisor. He doesn't want to pitch too many of his own songs, because he sees we have a lot of beginning/ developing writers. He told me that he feels he's gotten enough attention through his writing, and now he wants to help others step up to the plate.

Back to the October meeting: I played an original of mine called "Forgive Us." Part of the lyrics -- a pre-chorus, go:

You lit up the nightfall to show us the way,
We'd grown to love darkness so we raised the stakes ...
And hammered them into Your skin.

Lorie had already heard this song and applied her judicious editing skills to it. Daniel and Jeremy had some questions, particularly wanting to know what I meant by "raised the stakes," beyond the fact of the soldiers piercing Jesus' with stakes on the cross. It was obviously also a metaphor -- a line with both the literal, and a symbolic, meaning. Or was it just wordplay on my part, kind of a pun?

The question stumped me. This goes back to my limited experience with worship music as compared to, I don't know, what I would maybe just call "singer-songwriter" style. Singer-songwriters sometimes write in a stream-of-consciousness technique. Sometimes it is more purposeful, symmetrical, but still in a way that gives their subconsciousness control to put forth images, words, symbols that the conscious writer may not fully understand. Does everything need to be understood? Does anyone really understand everything the David Mead's, Patty Griffin's and Bob Dylan's of the world write?

Don't get me wrong -- it's not gibberish. You can draw meaning. The writer, if he felt the need, could explore his feelings and tell you what he meant. Or at least what he was feeling as he composed the lines. I write a lot of songs about bad or painful situations that I could have been in, or could be in now, based on my experiences, if not for the grace of God. A lot of those songs have come about in the aftermath of my divorce -- a couple I can think of, "Sheila" and "If I Didn't Know Better," come from the standpoint of a guy who has jumped into a bad relationship to "save himself" from the aftermath of a painful loss, knows it, but is "hooked" (no -- I don't know any real "Sheila's"). Another, "You're Making A Mistake," was written from the standpoint of a guy on the road to recovery who is trying to get a girl to take him in, to believe that he's a good, steady catch who now has his act together. These aren't situations that I have allowed myself to fall into, but again, without God's grace, instruction, and power, I would have.

But there are other songs that I have written -- who knows where they came from or what each line means? I don't care to examine them, necessarily. I know they stirred certain emotions in me -- perhaps they'd stir different emotions in someone else. Maybe some time in the future I'll look back at them and think, "Oh, this is obvious to me now: I was writing about "Person X" or about emotions that I was dealing with, or whatever. By then it will be easy to see -- perhaps now it would be painful, annoying, or difficult to comprehend. The subconscious mind is always ahead of the conscious mind.

Worship writing is different. You're coming up with something to be sung in a corporate environment. The lyrics need to have a certain obvious-ness to them. Otherwise they're just personal prayers -- not something that will edify others and turn their gazes and voices God-ward.

So what did I mean by "raised the stakes"? I guess my subconscious was remembering the parable of the tenants -- how the vineyard owner sent servants to collect his due from the tenants. The tenants beat one, killed one, stoned one. So then the owner said, "I'll send my very own son. They wouldn't dare disobey him." Only they did. They raised the stakes, turned up the notch, got down to brass tacks -- they killed the son.

Of course, in our workshop, I didn't think of this. It hadn't dawned on me why I'd written that line other than that there was a double meaning, it was clever, and it moved me. So I probably sounded like an idiot when I offered my feeble attempt at an explanation, but live-and-learn.

I am learning to be more direct, more purposeful. I still love lines that aren't necessarily obvious at first. They're like little treats. Have you ever had that experience, where you love a song, it's catchy, you sing it and listen to it many times, and then one day, for some reason, you "get" a certain line in a way that has previously eluded you? You think, "Aha! I didn't realize they were alluding to that." A treat. But there is a difference between having a little "treat" in the context of a worship song with an obvious message or petition, and having an entire song, or a line on which an entire song hinges, that is obtuse.

In November, we moved out of HCF for the first time and switched the workshop from a Sunday to a Saturday. I didn't know if we'd get more people, less, or what. I didn't know if the dynamic would change.

It did.

TO BE CONTINUED ...