If you are familiar with popular music and songwriting in the last 50 years, you should know the name Jimmy Webb. If not, shame on you. 🙂 For the unaware, Jimmy Webb is a Grammy winning songwriter, composer and lyricist. He wrote such songs as “Witchta Lineman”, “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, “Galveston”, “The Worst That We Could Happpen”, “Didn’t We”, “All We Know”, “MacArthur Park” and many others for the likes of Glen Campbell, Joe Cocker, The Fifth Dimension, Richard Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and Art Garfunkel. Webb is the only person to win a Grammy in each of these three areas: lyrics, music, and orchestration.
In 1998, Webb published his book on songwriting entitled Tunesmith (Hyperion). Weighing in at 448 pages, it is a lengthy read, but is very well worth the time invested to read it. In it, Webb devotes equal space to the music and lyric aspects of songwriting. He discusses chord progressions, chord substitutions, how to write a good melody, rhythmic emphasis and more. He also talks about lyrics in terms of what to say and how to say it. He takes us through the drafting process of a new song idea called “Problem Child”. Webb takes us through the revision process, and helps the reader along through the process.
(an aside….This is an important note: early on in my writing I was afraid of revision partly because it meant that I had to re-confront what I had created. The writing process is such anguish that I didn’t want to go through that again. It’s only recently that I found that your craft is better for it; and that’s the point Webb is making here. You, as a writer, have to go that place and find out for yourself. )
In Tunesmith, Webb breaks down the entire songwriting process: how to prepare, how to gather ideas, how do put them down, how to string them into coherent ideas, how to revise a song, and how to put a song out for public consumption. He deals equally with musical construction and lyrical construction. Webb talks about chord choices, why chords are called what they are, they function in terms of key and relationship to each other, and what their color is. This calls to mind one of the most important skills of the composer/songwriter/arranger: how to “see” harmony as color. A “substitute” chord is a harmonic sonority which can “substitute” for another by virtue of the fact that it might share a member. For example a melody might have C-note, so any chord containing a C would work such as a C chord (C-E-G) or Dm7 (D-F-A-C), or A-flat (Ab-C-Eb) or FMaj7 (F-A-C-E). Each one of these chords has a radically different timbre (tone color, pronounced tam-ber, NOT like timber), so depending on what you want to say with your melody, one of these chords would color that in very different ways. Webb explains this in greater detail more succinctly than any other book I’ve seen.
He also discusses lyrics (text) in the same way. Words are also “acoustic artifacts” as one of my committee members on my MA thesis said once. Words have sounds, and they occur in time. There are two challenges with words in songs that Webb refers to that boil down to these. A) What are you trying to say? B) How are you trying to say it? On one hand, there is something to artful simplicity. Can a songwriter turn a phrase so simply perfect that it connect with that one person out there who’s been trying to say that to his girlfriend for the past 2 months but can’t find the words. ? On the other hand, beautiful songs have been written in all genres that are rich in metaphor and indirect symbolism. This is the beautiful of words: meaning. One phrase can mean more than one thing, depending on its context. (See “Problem Child” above). Webb also talks about rhythm and diction in lyrics; aptly describing what happens if you take a lyric and move it one beat forward or backward against the music. Rhythmic emphasis can completely change the tone, color, shading, and meaning of a word, especially when set against music.
Songs are a lens that people see the world through. Many people connect to God and each other through songs. Or…Sometimes you just wanna drive down the road at 80 miles an hour with the top down and “Born To Run” cranked to 11. That’s OK…whatever you want…there is a song for it. Many people associate major events in their lives with a song. Throughout the course of the past 40 years, Jimmy Webb has given us a generous handful of those classic tunes. After reading Tunesmith, even if you’re not a songwriter at all, you’ll have new appreciation for songs. Then you’ll want to go back and dig into some Carole King, Billy Joel, Jimmy Webb, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, Sarah McLachlan, Burt Bacharach (or dozens of the other great “tunesmiths”), and rediscover the song in your own heart.
