Writing songs is easy. Songwriting is difficult. Eventually, I learned that I can’t sit down when I have time, or schedule time to write a song. The song comes out when it wants. It might poke its reluctant head from wherever it was hiding, and you might be able to coax it out, little-by-little. But, if you try to force it, or hit it with a stick from behind, it stops like a stubborn mule, and everything you write from that point is tripe.
One of my favorite songwriters is John Prine. I love his knack for lyricism, his timing and his wry ability to drop the punchline BEFORE the joke and make you laugh. One moment, he’s rhyming sing-song, “I don’t wanna see ya” with ” Onomatopoeia”, the next, he’s painting a grim tableau, that you can’t help but feel like Sam Stones pain. “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes Jesus Christ died for nothin’ I suppose.” My favorites, from each end of the spectrum are “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiin” and “The Missing Years”. My favorite line mixes food tears and wine in a Cat-in-the-Hat story about Jesus.
“The years went by like sweet little days
With babies crying pork chops and beaujolais”
Den Bern is another writer with the gift. Even though he is from Iowa, my home state, the first time I heard him was on NPR’s “All Song’s Considered”, he was funny, witty, and irreverant, and these are a few of my very favorite things. They played some of his songs, and “Jerusalem” and “Marilyn” caught my ear.
“Marilyn Monroe didn’t marry Henry Miller
But if she did he’d have taken her to Paris
And if she did she’d have smoked a lot of opium
And if she did she’d have dyed her hair blue
And if she did she might be alive”
It is so cool that Dan is getting some national exposure. He wrote a lot of the songs for the new John C. Reilly movie, “Walk Hard : The Dewey Cox Story”. I can’t wait to see it. Dan also wrote a song for the new the Jonathan Demme documentary about Jimmy Carter; “The Man From Plains”. Dan Bern is engaging and evocative on record, but live, he is truly cathartic.
I think I have the gift too. I just don’t think it always wants to come out. Then again, maybe the gift is in getting the words to slide out of the chute, not the words themselves.
