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Friday
Aug072009

The Joy of Songwriting

The Joy of Songwriting

by Kilissa Cissoko

Ah ha!! This morning I realized that writing a song is very much like cooking! Perhaps I thought of it because in the car on the way home from dropping my son at daycamp I heard on NPR a review of a movie about Julia Childs. When I got home I set to work sketching out a new song and it came to me that I’m engaged in “The Joy of Songwriting”!

So, that’s the premise—here’s the connection. A delicious meal evolves through a set series of lovingly tended stages. My songs emerge through a comparable process. I hope the results are delicious!

  • prep – includes planning and shopping!  (listening, studying, reading about music, absorbing!!)
  • deciding on the cuisine… flavors, styles  (style, genre)
  • selecting a dish (song topic, hook, etc)
  • chopping, washing, getting ingredients together  (sorting through the ideas)
  • heating the pan (turning on the amp, the computer, tuning the guitar!)
  • sautéing the onions, garlic (getting warmed up, trying out ideas)
  • searing, stir-frying (getting the outer edges fixed, reigning in the ideas, finding the boundaries)
  • steaming, simmering (deepening into the ideas, digging into the spirit of the emerging song)
  • tasting (running through the song so far, recording rough demos, playbacks)
  • adding spice (putting in details, lyrical, melodic, harmonic, instrumental)
  • curing the sauce (rehearsing, refining)
  • getting the side dishes ready – (different sections of the song are like the salad, the rice)
  • baking, roasting (letting it sit and mellow for a while)
  • setting the table (organizing a recording, or performance)
  • gathering the guests (getting together musicians, audience)
  • enjoying the meal (performing, enjoying)
  • …and… lest we forget… the cleanup!  (winding cables, making backups!!!)

So, when you are cooking and sitting down to eat, imagine that you just wrote a song! And I hope to be serving up songs to suit the appetite!

 

Kilissa Cissoko is a songwriter of longstanding on the Buffalo indie music scene.

www.kilissa.com.

www.myspace.com/kilissacissoko

©2009 Kilissa Cissoko

 

Reader Comments (2)

Hi Kilissa, enjoyed the post. Sounds like you are having a wonderful time! Additional thoughts: creating & performing a song is often only half of the equation -- after a song is "born" it then needs to be "parented," i.e., copyrighted, shopped around to sell, getting files of it into listener's or media ears, etc. It's a whole lot more fun creating than parenting, but the creation part makes the parenting part worth it.

November 13 | Registered CommenterMary Guthrie

Yes a lot of these considerations are needed, but when it comes down to it, a song is not technically assembled as this suggests. A song is created and developed from deep inner emotions and feelings, it often flows out of us like our breath. Well at least the great ones do :)

February 4 | Unregistered CommenterEcca

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