As part of the series “Songs from Scratch,” MPR’s Nikki Tundel meets with poet Stephen Burt to hear what his words sound like in the hands of the musicians. Segment contains audio clips from completed songs.
Burt is the author of two poetry volumes, "Popular Music" and "Parallel Play." He's the former chair of the English Department at Macalester College, and he starts teaching poetry in fall 2007 at Harvard University.
There's something magical about a great song, whether it's Stravinsky or Springsteen. But where do great songs come from? How do they go from words and melodies to something more? To find out, we gave three local bands -- The Owls, The Roe Family Singers, and Matt Wilson -- two weeks to take one set of lyrics and put it to music. “Songs From Scratch” follows all their scribbling, singing, strumming, and doubting to get a first-hand look at how a song unfolds.
The Roe Family Singers summon the darker side of Appalachia in their mournful melodies. Quillan Roe is the primary songwriter. He and his wife Kim share the singing spotlight. They're joined by a rotating cast of pickers, blowers and strummers.
The Owls first album, "Our Hopes and Dreams," won raves for its intricate melodies and unique harmonies. All four Owls members help write their songs, and each plays more than one instrument in the band.
Matt Wilson is the former frontman of Trip Shakespeare, a local band known for its dramatic, ornate songwriting. Wilson is starting a new collaboration with John Munson, a former Trip Shakespeare bandmate and bassist with Semisonic.
This is the fifth in a five-part series.
Click links below for other reports in series:
part 1: https://archive.mpr.org/stories/2007/08/13/songs-from-scratch-meet-the-lyricist
part 2: https://archive.mpr.org/stories/2007/08/14/songs-from-scratch-the-bands-get-their-first-look-at-the-lyrics
part 3: https://archive.mpr.org/stories/2007/08/15/songs-from-scratch-songwriting-begins-in-earnest
part 4: https://archive.mpr.org/stories/2007/08/16/songs-from-scratch-the-bands-record-their-afternoon-songs
Awarded:
2007 Minnesota AP Award, honorable mention in Series/Special - Radio Division, Class Three category
2008 MNSPJ Page One Award, second place in Radio - Mini-documentary/In-depth Series category
Transcripts
text | pdf |
NIKKI TUNDEL: Now, Stephen, before we dive in, I'm curious to know if you had a tune at all in mind when you were composing these lyrics.
[HUMMING]
STEPHEN BURT: But they're going to do something more interesting.
NIKKI TUNDEL: Well, I guess we're about to find out if that's true. You want to hear some finished songs?
STEPHEN BURT: Sure.
NIKKI TUNDEL: All right, then. So here is the song the Rowe Family Singers came up with using your lyrics.
[ROWE FAMILY SINGERS, "AFTERNOON SONG"] Take a blade of grass between your teeth
Check the sun it's alone and blue with nothing underneath
Take a walk to the bus stop wait a while
See the driver coming up on 1,000 miles
NIKKI TUNDEL: OK, Stephen, what do you think?
STEPHEN BURT: That is a style of presentation that makes all-- puts all the lyrics, all the singing on top and really doesn't allow anything about the music to obscure what the words are. And so it's very flattering to me that they've chosen to do the vocal line in that straightforward way and I'm flattered by it.
NIKKI TUNDEL: Now, when these guys got the lyrics, one of the band members said, it's sunny. Now, do you feel that you'd written sunny lyrics? Did they seem sunny to you?
STEPHEN BURT: It's not that sunny.
NIKKI TUNDEL: What are these lyrics about in your mind?
STEPHEN BURT: They're about looking around at a dense residential neighborhood. They're about looking at the past and the future and thinking how strange it is that time happens to us on many scales. Time happens to us minute by minute and day by day and year by year all at once.
And the minutes when you drive down the block and you get out of your car and you order a cup of coffee, those add up. And suddenly, it's 10 years on. I suppose they're about time passing. And of course, that's not sunny at all.
NIKKI TUNDEL: Does that message still come through or has it changed?
STEPHEN BURT: It's still there if anyone feels like paying attention primarily to the words. It's altered and it can be altered beyond recognition by what the music does to the words. That's the nature of songwriting.
NIKKI TUNDEL: Let's listen to another interpretation of your lyrics, OK? So here's Matt Wilson's rendition of Afternoon Song.
[MATT WILSON, "AFTERNOON SONG"]
(SINGING) Take a blade of grass between your teeth
Check the sun all alone and blue nothing underneath
We're almost done
So we walk up town, wait a while
Bus comes driving from 1,000 miles
50/50 it'll go on away
NIKKI TUNDEL: So what's your reaction to that one?
STEPHEN BURT: It's melancholy and it's insistent at the same time. He chose to write a song where the words don't always pop out at you. Especially when you look at the way that he's put this song together with the catchiest part of it not being the singing of the words anyway. The catchiest part of it being that great piano riff.
NIKKI TUNDEL: I guess you could say Matt took a few more liberties with the lyrics. You probably know the lyrics very intimately and he changed a number of words and did a lot of rearranging. What did that say to you? What did you hear when you noticed that things had been changed?
STEPHEN BURT: It said to me that he's a songwriter who took the words we gave him and wrote the song he wanted to write, which is what I was hoping would happen.
NIKKI TUNDEL: What's it feel like?
STEPHEN BURT: What's it feel like to have somebody take your words and cut them up and rearrange them and put a lot of overlay on them and wrap a piano riff around them?
NIKKI TUNDEL: Yeah, that.
STEPHEN BURT: When you write lyrics and you hand them over to someone you're saying, please make a song out of this that people will want to walk around humming. And that's what Matt Wilson did.
NIKKI TUNDEL: OK, let's listen to the final piece. This one is by the Owls.
[THE OWLS, "AFTERNOON SONG"] Take a blade of grass between your teeth
Check the sun it's all alone and blue with nothing underneath
50/50 that it's going to be going your way
Two to one the evening comes at you with nothing to say
Take one, take two, and then take 10
We'll make construction paper chair
Take five, take six from 11 and then
NIKKI TUNDEL: Thoughts on this one?
STEPHEN BURT: Texturally and in terms of what the vocal melody is and the pace and the instrumentation, it is pretty close to what I had in mind except that it's prettier and much more musically interesting and better. If they had cut it up just as drastically as Matt Wilson had done, I might be listening to both of those songs and then to the kind of old timey Bluegrass one and saying, what happened to what I had in mind?
But because the Owls have done something that's so pretty and so close to what I have in mind it maybe makes it easier for me to hear another successful catchy song and say, well, that's the remix. That's the Matt Wilson remix. And here is, as it were, the original.
NIKKI TUNDEL: Now, when you were writing the lyrics, one of the things I remember you saying was that you were afraid of being too wordy. And I know something you worked on was to not do that. But I'll tell you that when the Owls got these lyrics, one of their first responses was, it's a lot of words for a song. Does that surprise you at all?
STEPHEN BURT: No, it's a lot of words for a song. I hope they don't feel that the end product is so wordy that the singer can't sing. It seems to me that both of their singers are doing a wonderful job with that. And I should Thank them for their wrestling into submission the spiky wordiness that was left in the lyrics I gave them.
NIKKI TUNDEL: When you started this project, you hoped the final results would bring a song that was memorable, something you'd find yourself humming. Could you see yourself humming any of these songs?
STEPHEN BURT: Yes. All three have very catchy, hummable components and I'm really flattered by the use that all three of these artists have made.
SPEAKER: And that was poet Stephen Burt in a conversation with Minnesota Public Radio's Nikki Tundel. They were talking about the music created for songs from scratch series.
[ROWE FAMILY SINGERS, "AFTERNOON SONG"] Take one, take two, and then take 10
[MATT WILSON, "AFTERNOON SONG"] Take five, take six from 11 and then
[THE OWLS, "AFTERNOON SONG"] 50/50 it'll go our way