A short while ago I had a phase of listening incessantly to Bon Iver. I'd always loved his stuff but this was a period of watching and reading all his interviews, reading his wiki-ography several times through, finding unreleased tracks, listening to his other projects (e.g. Volcano Choir). In effect I was (and still am!) obsessed.

One of the things I learnt and that I find fascinating is his approach to lyrics. Many lyricists think about what they write and then write it. The process is: think, write, edit, repeat.

But Justin Vernon takes a different approach. He writes a melody and then sings the melody using whatever words come to his head. Words that 'feel' right when sung with the melody are written down, the others are discarded. After all the words are written he reads them through to see what they mean, if anything. Oftentimes, he claims, the words that have been written relate to something important to him, something he wanted to express. They are not random jumbles of nonsense, as one might expect. Some small tweaks may be made to the words after they have been written. So the process is: write, think, edit, repeat. But note that the 'think' part of the process is not so important – the words have been written by this stage and the only purpose of the 'thinking' phase is to let him know what part of his life the words relate to.

Why does he do this? He claims that by removing the initial thinking phase, he expresses something 'deep' within him, that he may not have been able to do if he used conscious thought as a way of writing his lyrics. Many philosophers and artists view conscious thought as an inherently distorting mechanism; they prefer intuition or instinct as a more accurate way of bridging the gap between what one wants to express and what one does in fact express. So I guess Justin Vernon's approach fits into that framework. But I'm sure there will be people who are more cynical and think that without prior thought, the words produced are going to be just nonsense.

Anyways, I'd be curious to know what you, dear reader, think and to hear about any other interesting approaches to lyric-writing you may have come across. In the meantime I think I'm going to try and decipher his line: “you fucked it friend it's on it's head, it struck the street” - very curious as to what what inspired that!

Vedantha

14/12/2012 - Bon Iver and lyric-writing