03.18.2008
DIVINE WRITE: SONGWRITERS AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS
DONG ABAY, ELY BUENDIA, VIN DANCEL, OWEL ALVERO, AND ALDUS SANTOS TAKE TURNS IN A SLIPPERY SHOW-AND-TELL: HOW ARE THESE DAMN SONGS MADE?
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There is nothing more elusive than the artistic process. Often, being asked to speak of one’s craft is like being asked to describe the sun, the stars, or the wind: you’d be right, but you’d be terribly mistaken as well. It is also not dissimilar to annotating a movie for the blind—the slipperiness, the state of being water, the groping in the opaque dark. While master practitioners of a particular art-form may be supreme technicians, they could not always be expected to articulate on technique in the most objective manner. In this short essay, I, along with fellow songwriters Ely Buendia, Dong Abay, Vin Dancel, and Owel Alvero, attempt to grasp the ungraspable: the songwriting process. If you are aiming to recreate magic moments such as “Ang Huling El Bimbo,” “Esem,” “Hiram,” or even the relatively obscure tracks “Bato” and “Patihulog (Girl in Church),” this would not really serve as a manual; it may provide some leads, though, no matter how incidental.
“My songwriting process is based on spontaneity. […] When a song comes to life, it will breathe on its own. I don’t really set the time and place for writing. I just go with the flow: handy-dandy notebook for lyrics, a battered acoustic guitar for random chord progressions. I just play; I really don’t think I’m thinking at all,” Dong Abay shares. The main-man for the defunct bardic Nineties folk-cum-punk outfit Yano is speaking of the age-old image of the songwriter as vessel, a recipient of ideas from his conscious and subconscious. The vessel is perhaps the most modest metaphor for a creator: as though skill does not have anything to do with it; as though, as vessel, one only needs to prop oneself, arms wide, wide open, and anticipate the pouring of inspiration like rain. Post-inertia, Abay concentrates on song arrangement, which is, really, a manner of musical sculpture, sharing, “Every song is modified every time I perform it to myself. I am my songs’ meanest critic. I absolutely keep an ear for detail, because I know that this is my job: to create art that, at most, will satisfy my musical taste. Change a single lyric here, add a line there, omit this, repeat that; I play it over and over and over.” Meanwhile, there is the enigmatic Ely Buendia, who, unlike Abay, admits to some measure of ritualism. “Trapped inside a car in the middle of EDSA during rush hour is still the best time and place for me to write a song. I have the memory of an amoeba, but, when it comes to recording demos, my head is still faster than a quadruple core processor,” the Pupil frontman deromanticizes his milieu in an (ironically) romantic fashion. Some of Buendia’s other views, meanwhile, are evocative of Victorian-era patronage art—raket in contemporary Filipino slang—as with his claim that he is driven, in reality, by “Money. And I mean that in the most un-cynical way. I’m a ho; always been, always will be.” Knowing the erstwhile Eraserhead’s penchant for tongue-in-cheek, however, one automatically does a double-take.
The vessel imagery of a creator is a passive, almost religious one. It is as if artistic conception merely involves waiting, and, after some time, receiving: Virgin Mary and the Angel Gabriel and the waking dream that wasn’t. A more aggressive model, on the other hand, would be to think of one’s implements—guitar, pen, paper—as pieces in the armory, as implements of battle. After all, to think of artistic creation as a mere “process” would be tantamount to thinking of childbirth as scatological: like shitting stuff out, only the shit is a tiny human. For Owel Alvero, chief songwriter of emerging indie-rock outfit Ang Bandang Shirley, there is calculation in creation. “I identify the sound [that] I want the song to take on, if I have a new riff or a lyric snippet. Then I listen to the music that I have that I think is similar to the sound that I’m going for. It’s a double-function thing: to identify if I’m subconsciously copying something, and to find things that I can ‘adapt’ (not ‘copy’)—usually weird quirks in songs that I’d want to highlight. Then it’s just a simple repetition of the riff and the listening, until the song completes itself. This takes a long time,” Alvero offers. Peryodiko’s Vin Dancel similarly exhibits a poised preparedness in his craft, saying “Whenever I feel a song trying to come out, I grab Piglet (my electro-acoustic), a pen, paper, yosi, tubig, ta’s du’n ako sa balcony sa likod ng bahay—mag-iisip ako ng initial na word o linya para lang simulan ‘yung idea. Tumutuloy-tuloy na ‘pag pinalad, then either I record it on a tape recorder or [I] go up to the studio para ‘di ko makalimutan [‘yung] melody.” The former Twisted Halo singer’s attack, in this regard, is comparable to a sniper: patient, equipped, and mentally primed for the kill. Alvero, meanwhile, is a belligerent head-on-collision waiting to happen—in the aftermath, he has kills despite the bruises, but, more importantly: a finished Shirley song.
Within the realm of creation, however, is the realm of tradition (i.e., existing material). Almost always, after all, artists are likely to be inspired by earlier practitioners in their chosen genre (sometimes, even by their contemporaries). As T.S. Eliot pondered on poetry in Tradition and the Individual Talent, “[…] if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, tradition should positively be discouraged.” This is an Ideal—capital I—that every creator pines for: to not be bound and gagged formally and “traditionally,” to always assume a triumphant stance of having broken New Ground. Buendia incidentally asks, perhaps in reference to this, “Was it Eliot or Picasso who said ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal’?” He answers his own query with a counter-formula, “To paraphrase, ‘Bad songwriters rip, good songwriters hack.’” Eliot casts his opinion on the matter in stone: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Is avoiding this sort of artistic seepage possible? Can one really confine himself in some artistic quarantine? Abay maintains, “They say that there is no such thing as an original idea. One just reinvents, but the outcome has to be different. In music, originality for me is when you don’t listen to others. You just listen to yourself.”
Singer-songwriters are generally thought of as message-bearers; as simple, non-orchestral, voice-and-guitar people. A whole slew of artists including Neil Young, Van Morrison, Gary Granada, and Joey Ayala has, time and again, proven the potency of a “naked” song. Topicality and narration are usually expected but—and this is key—not requisite. Not unusually, though, when one reads a piece on a new act, the songwriter is propped on the lectern and invariably asked, “What comes first: the lyrics or the music?” The usual answer is typically evasive: sometimes it’s one, sometimes it’s the other, and sometimes it’s a marriage of both. “May idea, tapos dapat may medium para mailabas ‘yung idea. Otherwise, sayang,” Dancel, Peryodiko head honcho, offers. For Abay, meanwhile, serendipity is factored in: “I can hear the orchestrated song inside my head before it’s even recorded. Oido also comes [into] play, especially when I sing my songs truthfully. It will manifest especially if I am working with good musicians and an excellent sound producer who knows what I want.” He adds further, “I just write when I feel like it. I am inspired to write by what I observe and sometimes I find a particularly disturbing idea that’s worth writing about.” For yours truly, it is seldom the case where all elements are realized simultaneously. A great lyric that carries a certain theme or emotion deserves my full attention; only after this am I able to search for a great form with which to express the lyric through. Conversely, a great melodic or chordal idea should be “massaged” well prior to marrying it with any emotional or conceptual content. In the case of The Purplechickens’ “A Break in a Prayer”—the first single from the 2003 debut Here’s Plan B—the broken D-minors and the syncopated choruses came before the lyrical narrative. I pondered on what the music felt like, and I later concluded that it sort of reeked of “guilt taking form.” Lyrically, then, it made sense for me to write it from the perspective of a remorse-ridden character, i.e., the obsessed stalker-femme who beheads her object of affection so she could later keep his head—yes, his head—as a souvenir (depicted immensely well by director Biboy Royong in the accompanying video).
Whichever the case, as with any other craft, one should make it his or her own, and continually strive to top oneself each time. “The day I write a ‘typical’ Ely Buendia song is the day I retire,” Buendia asserts.
