My Unfinished Lyricism

For as long as I have been playing music, I've explored the connections between notes and chords. One by one, melodies found their places on my guitar. I recorded all of them on my phone, and started a decent anthology, which continued to build as I gradually learned the piano. 

Writing lyrics only happened when I was forced to. I toyed with combining vocal melodies with my instrumentals, but I never put words to anything. I assumed it wasn't going to be that hard. 

But it was actually like entering a whole new dimension of creativity. I usually have so much to say. But I was at a loss for words. I struggled to find the perfect combination: brevity, flow, and subject matter. 

The pressure to write lyrics to all of these Super 8 instrumentals in such a short amount of time was, looking back, the best situation to put myself in. I was forced to put most words that came to my head down on paper, to just let the writing really happen. I noticed that I cared more about how the words sounded than anything. The musical element changed how I normally think while writing plain poetry. 

Later I played around with the idea of not rhyming at all. Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke practically says whatever he wants in his music and manipulates his voice to fit with the song -- no matter what. 

I realized that writing lyric-heavy music is easier to me. Spoken-word-esque songs like both interlude tracks on To Pimp A Butterfly (For Free? & For Sale?) are what come easily to me. I find rhymes out of nowhere and make them the primary focus of the song, set to background music that's less important to me. 

As with every creative sub-field I interest myself in, I will find a way to twist it, stretch it, and make it my own. Every good artist is original with their takes on form: Thom Yorke with his vivid, jittery, image-driven vocals differs vastly from Sun Kil Moon's sentences that drone over his guitar strum.

As of right now, there are no lyrics that scream Mitchell Watson. I think I'm still finding my way through the maze of lyricism, creating a mental map of all its inner-workings. This process takes a long while, but the only way to build such a strong sense of self is to experiment. 

Contemporary Film Score Composers & Conscious Music

This post will discuss the relationship between audio and visuals.

In film, I've always considered the music (and the absence of it) the driving force. Still, there are exceptions, and this may not even ring true with others. I've accepted that I'm musically-driven, so the score/soundtrack are really what drive the films I watch. Regardless, when we look at any classic achievement in film, we can clearly confirm that the music is important to the movie.

There are multiple ways that music can be implemented in a film. The first difference we must recognize is that of conscious music and unconscious music. In a film, the music can either be:
-A background score that doesn't interfere with the characters (unconscious).
or:
-Music that is literally playing from a source inside the story of the movie; the characters can therefore hear it (conscious).

The other big difference is between soundtrack and score:
Soundtrack: Music that is pre-recorded for non-film purposes; primarily for the song itself
Score: Music that is meant to accompany a film; made for the visuals

One more thing I'd like to point out:
Music should always come first. In making film, one will find it much easier to edit TO music, not find music to fit perfectly later....

I watched David Lynch's Blue Velvet this weekend. And he -- now finally a member of my list of favorite filmmakers -- uses in-film music brilliantly. The main songs in the film (Blue Velvet & In Dreams) strangely coalesce with the actual score of the film. There's one scene where two characters sit in a car and have a strikingly normal conversation -- but there is extremely poignant church music in the background. I don't know why, but it works.

The over-emotional score in Blue Velvet makes the listener question its presence in the film.

I want to make the music in my movies evoke surrealism. This method, used by David Lynch in BV and by Paul Thomas Anderson (to probably the biggest extreme) in Magnolia, expands film in a direction that's extremely under-used.