Craig Bickhardt spent many years in Nashville writing songs for well-known artists such as Johnny Cash. Since his departure from Music City USA, Bickhardt has focused on writing songs for himself. At last month’s New Song Festival, The Observer’s Dominic Valentine talked with him on the art of song writing.
Teaching Song Writing
There are mechanics that can be taught. You can teach someone how to frame a chorus. You can teach them how long the average song is on the radio. You can teach them about metaphor, analogy, and symbolism, but you cannot teach the instinct. The instinct is the difference between a Bob Dylan and a guy who writes in obscurity. The instinct comes from another place. It is not apart of the mechanics. That is not to say you cannot take a raw idea and make it more accessible. You can. It is subtle stuff. Song writing is a process of discovery more than a course you take as is most things in life.
Neil Young is an instinctive songwriter. He is not one who labors over or dwells on his songs. He is spontaneous. Being able to write spontaneously cannot be taught. If you have the instinct for writing, and many people do because music is a part of what it means to be human, you can begin refining those abilities. Again Young is a good example. He has gotten much stronger over the years and more unique.
You can nurture raw talent. It is a process. Finding your voice so to speak. As you experiment and find successes, the natural abilities strengthen. You do not always know when you are writing a song that it is something that will touch the core in people. You discover that along the way. You are groping the dark. You make discoveries. You learn to recognize where the ability to write a song comes from or what you tapped into and you go back to that well as best you can. You do not draw the same water from the same well. You go to the proximity. You can understand what the experience was like when you wrote that song or where the emotion came from and incorporate that knowledge into your process. Over time the song writing instinct can be mined, but there must be ore there to begin.
Beginning to Write
The only common denominator I can attribute to starting a song is that there is a point of inspiration in the best ones. It can be musical or some type of lyrical inspiration that make you go, “oh that’s a great metaphor.” Or it can be an emotion like grief or something profound which propels you to be creative. If you sit down dry with no feeling, no creativity, no excitement, no enthusiasm and approach it as a job, which is done a lot, you have to be lucky to discover the inspiration. If you wait for it you may write less songs but usually you will have a fulcrum, something to balance the song on.
Writing in the Absence of Inspiration
There is a switch you turn on in your brain when you are a full-time songwriter. Other people have to turn it off because they have to do other things. When I am teaching or performing, I cannot be receptive to song ideas and song emotions all the time. I have to turn it on at some point. When I was writing full time, it just stayed on. I could be reading a book and something would knock me out. I would see a movie or something would happen to a friend and they would tell me a story that sparked my imagination. Whatever it is that stimulates your emotions becomes fuel. You learn to listen to your creative mind and give over to it. Again, like most things in life if you do them often enough they become easier to access.
There is a way of staying sharp and alert, in shape as a writer. Don Schlitz, wrote a song every day so he could learn how to finish songs. I have never been able to write a song every day but there is validity in that kind of disciplined approach
Starting Out
Coming out of the box now as a new songwriter you are limited. I have nothing but empathy for new writers. I understand that the support used to be there for writers and that is not present as before or at all. There seems to be a small window of opportunity for new songwriters. In the future, there will be more transitory artists where they only recorded three years or so. There is a definite lack of craft, but there is always an upside. More spontaneous magical songs devoid of craft will be created. They will have immediacy. What we used to have was the time to hone craft. That does not seem to be the case any more. If you want to grow or have things to say you have a difficult time. It is not impossible. You have to want it and do what is required. I am not so willing to do what is required any longer.
Being Spontaneous
Now, I usually take about three hours to complete a song. I record it and put it away. I will let them sit and then revisit them to see where they are and maybe rework them. I just want to see what happens because there were times when I was living in Nashville where I would write a song to death. Sometimes working on one for weeks just to make it perfect. A lot of times, I was successful. A lot of times I wrote the life out of a song. I would strive for the perfect line or melody and refined it too far. That is not a thing Dylan or Lennon would do. If you listen to their music, you find some real dogs and along side them are these gems that had to have been spontaneous. Had they stopped to think about them they would have written something different. Spontaneous songs are like a true moment. They are like mysticism. You cannot always know exactly what it is you are doing. You are groping in the dark and you find these shiny little things and you go, “oh, this is beautiful this goes in the song.”
The Power of Music
The mysticism of a song can get so deep into people. They can feel things and not even know why. It is a way of communicating with others and your own spirit. Music has been a refuge to me, a companion. You go to place when you write. Song writing provides me with something I cannot get from physical relationships. You go into a creative space and there is an experience from it. It is the best way of spending the moments of a day. It puts you into a place that you like to dwell. The experience of creativity, that place you go to, the meditation monastic qualities of it appeal to me as much as the communicative qualities. It is not a selfish thing; it is about experiencing moments in a moving way. In Nashville, it has become more about the external, material aspect of writing. The collaborating, the sitting in a room and hammering out a commercial product is more important than the internal meditation.
It is in the art mode of song writing where you grow. There is a limited amount of growth allowed in writing commercial music. If you get too far into that you can lose your balance.
Why Write Songs
Robert Frost put it an interesting way. He said that as a writer you are taking your experiences and arranging them like stepping-stones. You are casting them into your future as you are crossing a stream, as you are going some place. Your experiences in the past become the steeping stones. As you are writing, you have to write about them without any connection to you or your life personally. The writer must write about them in a universal way like pure experiences but drawn from their own. Writers must frame a universal idea or emotion in a way that every one recognizes. You interpret experience. When done right the ideal song touches people in different ways and applies to different circumstances.
The Future
Even though I have achieved success and been heard, I have had to develop a new approach. Today there is access to great digital recording gear. Songwriters do not need expensive studios. They do not need to get signed by a major label. There are people out there that will help them with whatever type of art they do. It is incumbent on the person to discover artistry as opposed to fitting a niche. You uncover what it is that you do best as opposed to saying “well this kind of music works best so I’ll imitate that.” There is a lot of imitation in Nashville, cookie cutter mentalities which is why most of it does not work or last. If you go out there on the Internet and pay attention to some of the music that gets blogged, you find that many artists that are completely different than anything that has happened before. That has inspired me to look for other stuff. Things that I may have brushed aside as being too eclectic, I look at carefully now. I have a pile of songs that is me or was me at a point of my development which carries forward and chronicles what I was doing artistically and commercially. As songwriter in today’s homogenized environment, I am steering towards a spontaneous approach.
