Verbasize Me, Daddy

Writing lyrics sucks. I have attempted on and off for fifteen years to write good, meaningful lyrics that fit snugly in a memorable vocal melody, and most days I don't think I've ever been successful. For some annoying reason, I'm still compelled to do it.

The easy thing to do was swear off lyric-writing for a while, which allowed me to release more music in two years than I had in the previous ten. The music part has always come easier. As long as I feel like I'm progressing a bit sonically, I can feel good about what I put out, even sometimes enjoying it upon relistening. But if I feel like I've burdened the world with another trite observation or, worse, some self-centered, hungover whining about unrequited love¹, I'm more likely to trash a song, regardless of how I felt about the musical content.

While I'm proud of the full droning muffler output so far, it was only a matter of time until the guilt about avoiding songwriting set in. When I returned to the notebook, the lyrics were as terrible as I'd expected—uninspired, tediously political. Failing so drastically led to a series of desperate and embarrassing Google searches, mostly requests for songwriters I like to simply explain their process, please. It turns out most of them play those cards rather close to the chest, though I did try a few suggestions: dumping anything remotely engaging into my Notes app at all times of the day, talking into a voice recorder while driving, attempting music before lyrics and vice-versa—all to no avail.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I did find one technique that produced a couple songs. See here:

A couple things about that clip:

• Wow is that music bad.
• Those lyrics would probably be annoying were I to hear them even in a decent sounding song.
• I wish he was less pleased with himself.

But to offer the benefit of the doubt, I hold the belief that rolling cameras on a creative process nearly guarantees failure, and I'm pretty sure no song exists on a Bowie record featuring a mumbled "dead men don't talk" chorus over discordant guitar loops and free jazz piano.² It wasn't enough to dissuade me.

I started looking around for a similar program and found a faithful recreation of Bowie's Verbasizer, but I didn't like using it. I think the columns are supposed to be reminiscent of Burroughs' cut-up technique (Bowie name drops him in this video), but all the tabbing was slowing me down. I preferred one large text input, and perhaps the ability to retain particular phrases if something was already working.

My first attempt was a fairly simple Ruby script run from the terminal that took a string and randomized the individual words, but it was lacking features I didn't know how to implement, specifically the phrase retention bit. Still, it helped produce the lyrics on the most recent droning muffler ep, operation. When creating this website, I thought I'd implement a full version as a coding exercise, or at the very least, so I can use it in the future. Maybe some of my songwriter friends out there will give it a try as well.

In my limited use so far, I've found this technique will rarely produce anything close to a useable lyric. It's more about taking raw materials and shaping them into something coherent. It points you occasionally towards a decent metaphor or a concept worth pursuing. There's also something about this process that has alleviated all the paralyzing self-judgment. It's almost as though someone else is dumping these words in front of me, asking me to edit them into a finished piece. I don't have to be so instantly irate at my ineptitude, because, well, I didn't write this shit. I just have to fix it.

Anyway, I'll probably keep pulling from this well until it goes dry. This hasn't necessarily made lyric-writing easier, but I despise the output less which is all I can really hope for. Even if it's only good for a few more songs, I had fun getting this up and running.