Sincerity in Songwriting

I had an ice cream bar from Trader Joe’s at about 10pm last Sunday night (Mocha Java or something…it was OK but the strawberry flavored one is fantastic!) and because I’m an idiot—and because it had coffee—I was unable to sleep. This happens about 3x a year when I have caffeine way later than I should (I so infrequently have caffeinated beverages and snacks that it really affects me). I’m aware this makes me sound like an old man. I was getting comfortable and thinking in bed when something unexpected happened. I got the impetus to write. As a songwriter, I often sit down to work on songs or try and bust out a new one but it so seldom feels as essential as it did tonight.

I got up and moved to the other room and sat on the couch. I lit a candle and opened the windows because it was stormy outside and I love the atmosphere created by the storm (how unbearably artistic of me!) and just wrote for about a half-hour until my mind started to lose its focus. I only had two rules for this free-write:

1.It had to fall under 4-line stanzas in iambic tetrameter.

2. It had to be completely honest. This means that I had to be able to trace each word back to something that was felt and by looking back on each line, I had to be able to recall why…This means that I wasn’t try to bulls*** myself, which I have been guilty of in the past.

I’ve never been the most personal songwriter, preferring a bird’s eye view, but recently I’ve tried to really put more of myself into my songs. It’s led me back to a question that has given me some unsettling revelations: How important is sincerity in songwriting?

Now, I hope that you’re reading this and saying: Brian, you knucklehead, sincerity is one of the most important things in a song but I’m not so sure I agree with that much at this point.

I’ll use an example and you may not agree with me because it’s all subjective anyways. One of the biggest things that bugs me about Coldplay is Chris Martin’s apparent lack of sincerity. I listen to most of their songs and feel like he’s full of crap. I’ll qualify this by saying that I’m a pretty big Coldplay fan and I’ve said in previous blogs that their new album is one of the best of the year but I feel that his songwriting is like connecting the dots. This means that he writes like he feels he should be writing, and his rhymes and are often forced and predictable. It comes off as unsophisticated, impersonal and to me very insincere. Coldplay, however, are a fantastic band and I think it’s because of this la-de-da songwriting that they’re successful because they write about very simple emotions with accessible melodies that appeal widely…and they do it wonderfully. They’re an everyday man’s band and sound nothing like Bruce Springsteen (go figure!). I guess it’s what they’re going for and it’s all fine and good and what do I know?

It’s weird for me because I look at other artists that I love (and those I loathe) who are both sincere and insincere and I feel like it works sometimes and not other times and it gets confusing. I’m sure a large part of it is a personal connection the listener has with a particular artist because of one’s own personal experiences but I can listen to a song such as “The Temptation of Adam” by Josh Ritter (click to listen) and though I know the song is entirely fictional, I believe every word of it, and I ache for the narrator.

On the flip side, I look at a song like “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol, which was my connect-the-dots song of the year in 2007 and it’s just so basic and devoid of personality or sincerity that I can’t understand why it was the hit it was. I can just picture Gary Lightbody (lead singer of Snow Patrol) sitting down to write the chorus to this hit song and after penning “If I lay here”, he shrugged his arms and wrote: “If I just lay here/Would you lie with me/And just forget the world?” and was like: That’ll do. I like Snow Patrol too and it boggles my mind because their most recent single “Shut Your Eyes” is more of the same and I really enjoy it…It has to be the group chant or hand claps or something.

It brings me back to square one…which is also the first track of Coldplay’s X&Y album, which sucked because it was most guilty of the crimes I listed earlier. I think perhaps my students in the History of Rock class I taught in the winter were correct in assessing that lyrics don’t matter as much as the music. I’m glad I did what I did tonight with my writing and it was 100% me, but I don’t know how it will ever translate to others. I guess it’s what makes music the intriguing endeavor that it is…No one’s written a universally appealing (i.e. perfect) song and there’s not even such a thing as a perfect or imperfect song in the first place, so I’ll just keep running in my hamster wheel…

I’m not discouraged or depressed with it. It’s just an interesting condition that I’ve been battling with over the last half-year or so. I’d love to hear more about what others think about this and I know I’ll get at least a couple of comments about it.