Subject: Throwaway songs

Never throwaway your throwaway songs.

For some reason, they turn out to be some of my better songs when I go back to them. Or I use them to complete another song, or combine two or three throwaway songs to make a whole song.

I always write down these little partial songs in my little song book and/or record them quickly.

When I'm stuck I just go to my little song book for inspiration or I just rip off one of older songs that I never recorded.

Do any of you do this, too? And, is it possible to steal from yourself?

I've had the idea now for quite some time that I'd like to take a week and finish a complete song each day - spending no more than two hours to do so. I'd set aside the mastering and focus solely on writing and arrangement. I'd consider these "throwaway" because two hours wouldn't leave time for serious reflection or experimentation.

In my life studies drawing courses we spent several weeks on five, ten, and fifteen minute sessions. Its tough to capture any degree of detail in that time and it forces one to focus on composition. I learned a lot from those sessions and I've always been curious if a similar exercise in songwriting would have similar benefits. I just haven't had the time lately to give it a try.

Hm. Maybe there's another MacJams challenge in that idea...

cool thread.

I have 7 tapes (90 minutes each) of partial songs/ideas/etc. I've gone back a few times and finished them up, but not as much as I'd like to. I just tranfered them digitally and listening to them again awakens the creative juices. I keep them because I heard Brian Wilson say that one day a songwriter just runs out of songs. Brian Wilson is a floor below Phil Spector in the musical nuthouse, but the idea is scary enough for me to keep every idea I come up with in case I dry up one day.

agreed, i use lyrics and snippets of things all the time. a lot of the time, i will go back to something and find that I don't hate it anymore and am able to finish it. just posted a song "pianos play" a couple of weeks ago that I almost threw out awhile back.

chikoppi, there is a guy named Paleo who did a song a day for a year on GB. he also toured the entire year and recorded it in peoples bathrooms and such while crashing at their houses. It's a 365 song album, that's available for free. check it out at:
http://www.paleo.ws

By that standard, everything I write is throwaway!

JH reportedly wrote 'The Wind Cries Mary' in 20 minutes.

I once wrote 11 songs in 2 weeks, some of them I still sing today.

I've had terrible results with recording ideas as they happen and revisiting...I usually just don't go back to them....my old notebooks are another matter....so much more concise (when I can read the writing)

Absolutely! I have lots of little song starts, many of which never go anywhere.

I rely on them when the Muses are away on vacation.

I also go back to older songs to get fresh ideas for lyrics, instrumentation, effects, and so forth.

http://www.macjams.com/song/45167 is a great example of that. I started it in January and finished it just now seven months later.

Absolutely! Do it all the time. Have notebooks of stuff from years ago and I will go back and use part of it or change it or redo the melody or sometimes just steal the title. I have even stolen a verse from an old song and put it in a new song where somehow or other it fits perfectly. What I mourn for is all those snippets and throwaways that were improvised on the spur of the moment that didn't get written down and are now lost. I can remember jam sessions where I wrote whole songs on the fly that were lost. Lesson learned but still not practiced all the time. Record your jam sessions or those late night songwriting periods. You may not remember how the song goes in the morning.

good advice. i have like 7-8 partial GB projects on my hard drive that I can't bring myself to throw away. in fact, I dug one up a couple of days and am working on it now for my next post

We should start an experiment based on the Immersion Composition Society. The info is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_Composition_Society

Basically we would set aside a day for nothing but song-writing. The goal is to write and record 20 new songs in one day (we're talking rough demos here). Chaos ensues but because of these time constraints some really creative and interesting work would pour out of your soul. Maybe we could do an online variation of this?

-Adam

I do it all the time. I hate throwing songs away. Rightly or wrongly, I always think there's something of value there. Of course, sometimes I'm wrong, and I do have to just delete. But it hurts, man, it hurts...

oh man this sounds like a great challenge after the covers one. Maybe not 20 songs, but more like 5-10? I wouldnt have time to do them all in one day, but maybe we could have a weekend for it? Anyone who enters posts 5-10 songs in 2 days.

this does sound like fun! i agree with ridd, though. 20 songs and my perfectionist head would explode. :)

i almost threw this one away:

http://www.macjams.com/song/45219

Whatever happened to the five minute song challenges?

That's where you spend exactly five minutes creating the song.

There is not time to listen to it - you simply slam together loops and hope for the best. I believe some of the participants explicitly did not even listen while creating their songs.

UPDATE

Here's the forum thread:

http://www.macjams.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=4;showtopic=68830

I have several spiral bound notebooks full of songs and snippets of songs I've written over the years. They're up on the shelf, and that's generally where they stay. But every once in a while I'll look through them and see where I can go using something I've found there.

What I really need to do is force myself to sit down and go through all of them and find the little gems that I'd forgotten about over the years. Who knows, I might actually have some great stuff in there that I don't know about.

But one thing is for sure, I'll never throw them away. They are priceless parts of who I was and who I am. One of these days, after I'm gone, my kids will look through them and maybe get to know the part of me I didn't always share with them, warts and all.

Ed

I agree that 20 songs is a little much and that I probably wouldn't be able to devout a whole day to this project either (as much as I would like to though). Maybe we could start the clock on a Saturday morning around 12:01 am and stop the clock on Sunday at 11:59 pm. Any songs time-stamped after that would be disqualified.

The goal of this little project would be to make some really creative stuff that we (as individual songwriters) could then use to build tunes from or flesh out at a later date.

**Sorry to hijack this thread!!**

-Adam

I watched a Neil Young DVD where he basically did this. He called up his musicians and had them set aside 7 - 10 days. He rolled into Nashville with half a song, in 10 days they had finished a CD and performed a couple of shows and collected live footage for the DVD. Sobasically a CD and DVD in 10 days. Its called Prarie Wind.

http://www.nyprairiewind.com

There is some video linked to the page where they are sorting out harmonies for the painter and then i shows them recording it. Sam film producer did the video of the Talking Heads called "Stop Making Sense"

Cool! Didn't know Neil Young did this. I'll have to check it out!

-Adam