writing the legend of Frank Fanara

-- for the past few months on random sundays, me and my roommate have been doing some songwriting. for those of you who might be curious, i quasi-count this activity as a writing exercise (i semi- or fully count it according to how well i keep up with my independent writing). writing lyrics is a whole different animal. i'm not great at it, and i'm not sure i ever will be -- but that's ok, i'm not a musician and i won't have to do it if i don't want to i guess. still, its pretty interesting. its obviously not like writing prose, but it isn't like writing poetry either.

emily and i have started a new song, "the legend of Frank Fanara," and so far, i have one, single, solitary line:
"its three in the morning, i'm walking; i walk when i don't know what else to do."

.............and that's it. that's all i got. but the guitar part is fantastic, and it deserves to be finished, to be made into a real live song.

now i've written my share of poetry. granted, i've done it with mixed results, but i'm familiar with the form -- i've written sonnets, haiku, cinquain, sestinas, etc., and some of them were even good. and you'd think that writing song lyrics is really only just a variation of that process. and then you'd try it, and you'd realize that you were wrong. "but lyrics are just poetry set to music" you say. well, allow me to retort: no.

poetry has only words, phonetic music, the knotwork of meaning, the challenge of subtlety...it is only words, and you can use as many or as few as you feel are necessary. you are decidedly less burdened with poetry as opposed to lyrics -- poetry, of course, has to be beautiful, or profound, some quality of it has to escape definition, has to transcend, has to make sense and do better than make sense. this isn't to say that lyrics don't do that or that lyric-writing is a debased form of poetry, a failure of words that relies on a melody. not at all. but you are more limited in how you achieve those poetic goals. the fact that words are all you have to work with when writing poetry actually relieves the load of considerations you encounter when attempting to write lyrics. in composing lyrics, you are bound by the other half of the song -- the musical half -- and that is a limiting factor. another limiting factor is that you don't have the same vocabulary of words available to you as you do with poetry -- its important to remember that a singer has to be able to sing these words, that they have to not have so many syllables, and that they have sounds in them that sound 'right' when they are sung. for instance, the word 'Starnbergersee' works fine in a poem. but unless you're german, and even then, you probably wouldn't ever want to have to sing it or hear it sung.

so once they are finished, lyrics are often considered as poetry, or as having some poetic quality -- but when you peel the curtain back, you'll find a completely different wizard at work.

the best lyricists, in my opinion, are Gordon Sumner, aka Sting and Ani DiFranco -- whose songs exemplify what lyrics can be at their best. i love music, but i don't herald other musicians' lyric-writing abilities the way i do theirs. i am told Bob Dylan has written a good lyric or two, but tend to avoid him for reasons i won't go into now, and thus can't say one way or another if i think he is any good. sometimes Leonard Cohen is a good lyricist -- sometimes he's an amazing lyricist, but sometimes he is terrible.

there is something about lyrics that requires that you fit something profound into them -- a profound thought or use of language -- and you have to do it in a nutshell. the rythm of the lines has to be cooperative with the music, the theme has to be tightly gathered, easy to follow -- there is no room for meandering. and you have to wrap it up in about fives stanzas. it doesn't have to be complex, but it should be compelling, it should capture something. its a tough gig. its a bit like a puzzle, piecing words into phrases, and phrases into turns of phrases; making sure they match the measures of the music. a song is its own little universe, its parts need to add up to its perfect whole; my favorite lyrics are kind of self-referential, they maintain and refer back to their established patterns, or stories or themes. its hard, to tie something up that neatly.

and despite all of this great advice i'm giving, i still haven't been able to do it yet -- i still haven't finished a song, and failing thus far to write Frank Fanara's legend isn't inspiring any confidence. i mean i've tried everything i could think of to come after that first line, and nothing works, i've got a million dead ends.



one day i will be singing it in a bar, and people will come up to us and ask who Frank Fanara was, and we'll tell them all we know about him, and his tragic death, and Frank Fanara will be remembered in Buffalo, though not as the real Frank Fanara...

but between now and then, i've got a lot of work.
maybe i'll go for a walk. at this point, i don't know
what else to do.

wish me luck