Do you know how many songs were released on Spotify last year? 937 trillion. Yes, that’s right, 937 trillion songs. Absolutely amazing isn’t it. Actually, that’s a total lie — I’ve no idea how many came out, and at this point in the 21st century, why should I care? For something as sacred as song, it is disturbing to see how devalued an art form it has become, and how many people try their hand at it. You might think this is a good thing, that creativity should be encouraged, and the more the better. Well I hate to tell you this, but you are wrong, and you are a part of the problem. The production of music today reminds me of that boring popular saying that everyone attributes to Einstein without really knowing whether he said it or not: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’ It is simply a kind of cultural insanity that so many songs are made today. Most of them are mediocre, or much worse, and they simply shouldn’t exist — we don’t need them.
But what I want to tell you about are the kind of songs that we do need. Or, and what amounts to the same thing, I want to describe to you the kind of songs that I need. I am not unqualified — after all, I have written literally tens of thousands of songs; the vast majority, cheap, insincere, trite, untrue, over-the-top, mawkish, maudlin, useless, weak, wrong, odd, weird, crap, boring, stiff, silly, crude, unclear, depressing, stupid, unfinished, limp, impotent, aggressive, embarrassing, childish, ineffective, ponderous, bitter, bad, terrible, worse. But in all those thousands, I have managed to write a handful that I believe to be utterly perfect. They redeem all the rest; they deserve to exist, and make me feel as though I do too. I still believe that songs like this are holy, and that they can do good in the world. Let me try and describe what it is about them that is good.
First of all, only I could have written them. They have a quality to them that could only be the product of my brain, my spirit, my soul. They are idiosyncratic, they are unique, they are truly individual. As I’ve grown older, my tastes and interests have refined, and I know for a fact that I am the only English songwriter living whose main obsessions are: devotional poetry of the 17th century, agricultural history and the enclosure of the commons, the language and imagery of the King James Bible, birds, field shapes, and word etymology. As I mature, increasingly, all I am interested in is becoming more and more myself through my songs. It is only through showing things as they really are, through showing nature as she really is, that art has any value. So if we desire to make art, and presume to share it with the world, we should count it as the highest responsibility that it reflects our own nature. If we don’t do this, we end up with art that is disposable, we end up with songs that anyone could have written, songs that are simply not true. To record and release a song like that is to lie to your listener.
Another quality of the songs that we need to hear is that they should be necessary songs. This may sound somewhat tautological. But it is simply that, the songwriter needed to write the song. They had an independent psychic need to write it, and that is why you are hearing it. Of course, there are always secondary influences that go into the making of a work of art, but the prime reason must come from within. For great work to occur, there must be an ‘I must…’ that requires no further explanation.
That is how it has been for me in my songwriting life; my adult years have been a process of working out, ‘what are the songs that I must sing?’ This long, tortuous process found one temporary resolution in my first album as Traitor, Nostalgia for a Wound. Each song on that record was a necessary song for me, and I could explain in just a few words why I had to write it. There was the one that expressed what it feels like to be plagued by bad memories (‘God Is Memory’); there was the one that said goodbye to my old life (‘Jubilee’); the one that expressed gratitude to someone I loved (‘Hosanna’). I won’t bore you with the rest, but the point is they all absolutely had to be written. My life would have felt incomplete without them, if for example, I had tried to become world kickboxing champion instead of spending long days at home, writing chord progressions, figuring out lyrics, playing around with melodies.
The only songs I want are those which it would cause me pain not to write. If I didn’t bring them into existence, I would suffer an eternal ache. These are the songs I need in my life, and no others.
We also need to hear songs that are transformative. We need songs that are the record, the evidence, of a necessary change that the writer has undergone. These are the songs which are purest, which last the longest, and for which we are most grateful. They are part of a natural process of growth which is the essence of life. I always remember something Thom Yorke said in an interview years ago. He was talking about a period of writer’s block he had, and that the worst thing about it was that he just felt stuck in life, because ‘he used his songs to move on’. That is when a songwriter has true authority, when their songs form an integral part of how they grow.
If there is no transformation for the writer, then there can be no transformation for the listener, and a life without transformation is a kind of living death. The prime motivation for me to carry on making songs is that I know the process will change me for the better, and that I might discover things inside of myself that were previously hidden. This is what has happened in the past. If I have any strength, if I have any courage, if I have any self-belief, it is because I have found these qualities through song. It is not the whole story of my life, but it is a significant part of it. I know that my songs have the power to change others, because making them changed me. To practice the art of songwriting in the most authentic way is to practice a kind of emotional alchemy.
Lastly, and perhaps most strangely, the kind of songs that we need to hear might be silent. The first way in which they could be silent is in a kind of creative silence. By this I mean, there is a song that you want to write, you know very specifically what it must be about, but you don’t yet feel able to write it in the correct way, to do it justice. This kind of silence has to do with the aforementioned necessity of the song. You know that you need to write it, but because it is an important song, you also know that you need to wait. The big things in life are like this; sometimes, it can take years before you know how you really feel about something, and what the proper response should be. I have experienced this in my own songwriting life. Not to go into too much personal detail, but for many years I knew I had to write a song about my relationship with my sister. And the silence here was a relative silence only, in that I was attempting to write the song, and even finishing some of these attempts, but I wasn’t satisfied. I knew they weren’t right — they weren’t true. In fact, what enabled me to write the true song on this subject, the one that will effectively break the long silence (it will be on my next album), was sitting down and looking at all the attempts I had made, and analysing in writing why I wasn’t satisfied. This process of being explicit about failure helped me write a song that I consider to be a success. So this kind of silence, though it may be long, is a temporary, holding silence. It is a kind of religious, almost monkish vow of silence which it would be blasphemous to break. The song that emerges from it, at long last, can only be good.
The second way in which the song could be silent is that it simply shouldn’t exist. I don’t mean this in a cruel way — though I sometimes don’t appreciate the results, I do respect others’ freedom of expression. What I mean, and what I count as my first responsibility as an artist, is that we should try to be honest with ourselves: is this song good enough, must it exist, am I doing a service to others by encouraging them to listen to it? If we don’t ask these questions, then there will be more noise in the world than need be. And a true, beautiful song is anything but mere noise. I will leave you with a thought from a great artist and philosopher of our time, Ronan Keating: perhaps ‘you say it best, when you say nothing at all’.
