Edson in the Middle
An Introduction to String Theory
Several years ago I taught songwriting at a summer music camp for grownups in Puget Sound, Washington. One of the benefits, other than spending a week in August in lovely Puget Sound as opposed to soupy Nashville, was that we teachers could also take classes during our free period.
I decided to take the one in Brazilian-style guitar… mostly because songs sung in Portuguese had become the only songs I could enjoy unreservedly since I’d started making my living thinking way too hard about the lyrics of songs written in English.
Edson Oliveira was the instructor’s name. (Which is a way cooler name than any of the 1343 names on this newsletter’s current subscriber list. I’ve checked.) He was a lovely fella and an excellent teacher and I learned lots of cool new chords and interesting grooves… none of which I have never used professionally and most of which are now long forgotten.
The one memorable thing I did learn from him is something he taught me more by happenstance. All week I had noticed how before he played a song, he would pause, sway almost imperceptibly and murmur to himself for a moment or two. Then, without a count-off (no one, two, three… or rather no Portuguese um, dois, três) the song simply began.
I kept trying to figure out what he was up to. I didn’t dare interrupt once the song was in motion. And it seemed like it might be some specific personal or cultural affect that would have been rude or even insensitive of me to inquire about.
But by day five in the Northwest woods, Edson and I had become teacher pals and my Southern manners had receded to the point where I just asked straight up, “What’s the deal with that mumbling thing you’re doing there, man?”
“I’m finding my tempo.” He smiled, like that was the complete answer.
“What?”
“I sing just a small bit from in the middle of the song til it feels just right and when I know that’s the tempo, I begin. If I start with the start, it could turn out to be too fast or too slow once the song gets going which is no good. I want it to feel settled in from the very first note.”
And so right there, I learned more about how to write songs from him than I had imparted to any of my eager students that entire week by playing the role of the battle-hardened pro from Nashville who could cure all their songwriting ills.
As all songwriters know all too well, the most common (and completely reasonable but nevertheless useless) question that people who don’t write songs ask of those of us who do is “What do you start with, the words or the music?”
And the answer I tend to give, because I think I’m clever, is, “Yes.”
But clearly the real answer is, “Actually. We start in the middle.”
Even if the first thing we come up with is the first few words and/or the first few notes, just like Edson before he sings “The Girl From Ipanema” what we are really always starting with is “all of it.”
Thom Schuyler had taught me something similar several years earlier, the first time he and I wrote together. I suggested a few lines for our opening verse and he said, “That’s cool and all but I think those might mess up our second verse.” And I was like, “How does he know? We don’t have a second verse yet. Or a chorus. Or a first verse even.” But I didn’t say that. Because I knew at least enough to know that he knew things I didn’t know and to be cool with that so that I might learn something. And I did learn something.
You’re always writing the whole song all at once.
But maybe it’s something I discovered when I was six and trying to figure out how to draw people’s faces. Where do you start? The hair and work down? The neck up? I tended to pick the right eye and work outward from there. I’d realized that the eyes were the point of a face. The “hook” as it were. Get those right and the rest will come. Still, I had to be very aware of where on the page I put that first eye or I’d run out of paper before I made it to the hair or the left ear.
And I’ve always thought songs are more like drawings than stories anyway. But now I’m thinking maybe they are more like pieces of string. Sure there is a start and a finish. But the way we write them, and especially the way we experience them, that string is almost never pulled tight end to end. If a song is a string it’s usually more like a knotted up pile resting there in the palm of your hand. Songs rarely start at the start and end at the end. Songs just… exist for three minutes. They are there… then they go away. You go in and you live in them and then you leave them… or they leave you.
That’s what Edson knew.
The middle is where the song lives. The middle is where the audience always enters the song. It’s where, if the writers and performers do their jobs well, we stop merely listening and we find ourselves tangled up (sorry) in the song.
“In Medias Res” is what they called it in Latin. “In the middle of things.” It’s where Homer’s Odyssey begins… in the middle of Odysseus’ adventure, hanging out (a prisoner, technically) with Calypso. The real why of why it was written that way is far above my pay grade, for sure. But one thing I think it suggests is that the beginning of a story is only interesting once you believe the middle is worth investing in. Instead of “once upon a timing” and hoping you trust that the next 900 pages are worth it, you go BAM straight to the good stuff. And then the “what got you there” is actually more interesting and more worth knowing.
So is there a lesson here about how to write songs? Probably. But I think it’s more a lesson about how to approach any moment of creation. Whatever that creation is… a song, a conversation, a friendship.
I think of it every time I sit down with a new co-writer for the first time. When I make a new Song Friend, that is. I don’t know really who this person is or really why they are here. I definitely don’t know what song we will make that day. And since I don’t know that, I’d prefer to know even less than that. Where are you from? It might make for polite small talk but it’s unnecessary information. Are you famous or about to be? Booo. So gauche! Are you good at writing songs? Even that one is immaterial. The only real question is "are WE good at writing songs?” More specifically “are we good at writing whatever song we’re writing today?” So let’s get to straight to the good part. And if the good part turns out to be really good, then, maybe someday (or maybe even somewhere in the middle of making that very song) we’ll talk about the moments in our lives that led us to this moment that this song is being made and why we’re making it like this.
So that’s where the relationship begins. Where every relationship begins, really. You pause. You murmur to yourself. And when it feels right, you begin… even though you’re already somewhere in the middle of it.
jay
And here’s this week’s playlist!
I learned something similar from Pat Pattison at Berklee. I don't recall which paper it was, but it was that the verse you write and think of as the first verse usually doesn't belong at the start of the song. As you said often a good start to a story (mostly my songs are stories) is the middle, or even the end.
More heart than head as usual . Very cool.