I hope you’ve enjoyed my thread on the joys of bad song writing. I’ve introduced the bad song exercise, as a solo, co-write, or group exercise; and the Gallery of Horrors pages for your Songwriter Toolkit.
I always like to teach things I’ve tried, and try things I’ve taught. (There’s an example of a rhetorical device called chiasmus, which is another exercise!)
So I thought I’d share one piece of creative work with you, that came out of a self-challenge that came to me for my own writing as I wrestled with the idea of bad song writing. I like to push my writing forward by setting myself challenges, then trying to write them. I sometimes make the challenges fiendishly difficult: failing is fun, when what you set out to do was outlandishly unlikely in the first place.
I love songs about songs (I call them “meta-songs”), particularly songs where a song itself is personified in some way—even the very song being sung. As I was polishing up my bad song exercise, I thought about what it would be like to be a bad song. Would the bad song know it was bad? Would it think it was good? As I played around with the concept, I switched the point of view. How about a good song trapped inside a bad song? How would that song feel about its bad-song “environs” not to mention the lout that cooked up the mess in the first place? I had my concept.
What made this song challenging to write was that I experienced myself moving back and forth in writing it, from trying to be “good”—clever, rhymed, well-formed—to trying to be the kind of bad you are when you don’t know you’re bad. Of course, writing bad is easy—but that kind of easy turned out to be pretty hard!
Here—lyric only for now—for your dining and dancing pleasure, is my current draft of “A Good Song Crying From a Song Gone Bad.”
A Good Song Crying From a Song Gone Bad
©2013 Mark Simos/Devachan Music (BMI). All Rights Reserved.
Written 2/7/13
Help!—I’m a good song trapped inside this bad song
Written by this idiot who’s strumming this guitar
Making lines go by with weird rhythms that last way too long
He can’t find the words
And he can’t find the words
And he’s gonna make you pay for that
Tell me: How ya gonna get the last ten seconds of your life back?
Have you ever thought of that?
I thought I would be happy, but now I find I’m sad
I could have been so good, it makes me so damn mad
A good song crying from a song gone bad
He caught me unawares as he was walking down the street
Must have been the drumbeat of his two tired flapping feet
A title for a hit song that could make someone’s career
Landing in the lap
Of a fool who needs a nap
And a cure for his tin ear
So where do we go from here?
Tell me: How ya gonna get the last two minutes of your life back?
How can something so bumpy fall so flat?
I’m getting kind of grumpy, I lost the chance I had
I could have been so good, it makes me so damn mad
A good song crying from a song gone bad
Someday I’ll fly away from all these bad lines
That surround me just like prison bars trap a con
And like a beautiful girl stepping out of a bikini
Careless of her tan lines
I’ll leave these awful metaphors behind
And ride off to the dawn
Wearing my white hat
(He added that part about the hat
Someday I’ll make him pay for that)
Tell me: How ya gonna get the last five minutes of your life back?
I wanted to be holy, now I’m just unholy crap
I thought I would be happy, but now I find I’m sad
I could have been so good, it makes me so damn mad
And if this bad song makes other bad songs
I’m gonna be a dad
A good song crying from a song gone bad
A good song crying from a song gone bad
The Songwriter's Compass 