February 26, 2024
How to Write a Song Influenced by Postrock/Postmetal Sensitivities
This ought to have simply been a “here’s how I write my music” post, but I decided to shift the focus a bit. So this became a “how to write a song” post. And since my music is influenced by postrock/postmetal sensitivities, the weight will naturally be on that.
Perhaps you are not interested in music composition. Maybe you don’t feel that learning how to write a song (of any genre) is useful to you. Or perhaps you play music but not postrock/postemetal. Is there something still interesting in this post for you?
I’d say yes, this post is still something you should read.
The reason? Because creativity is holistic. By learning how other artists work – even if they talk about something you aren’t directly interested in – you acquire useful experiences. Essentially, you can understand a little bit better how creativity works.
And of course, if you are a musician – especially a postrock/postmetal one – then this creativity insight is even more direct.
As a clarification before we begin, this post is not technical in nature. There are, I’m sure, many guides on the internet on which chords to use, or which riffs to focus on to make postrock/postmetal songs. I’m sure there are even more suggestions on what equipment to use. My focus is on creativity.
How to Write a Postrock/Postmetal Song: On Creativity and Experience
You want to write a hit that sells? This post isn’t for you. There are plenty of strategies that can help you – among them: as simple as possible, as predictable as possible, and add plenty of “baby” to the lyrics – but I’m interested in art.
So, what is art? What is music?
Music is an artistic expression that conveys affect – an emotion, a thought, a state of mind – using sounds. Taking this as a starting point, it should become obvious that before you learn how to write a song, you must learn how to experience.
In all honesty, this is something everyone does entirely subconsciously. Every minute of our existence is another experience. Of course, remembering this experience – and its aspects that matter – is the key here.
Just as you can’t write anything worth a dime – from flash fiction to a whole novel – without “feeling it” first, you can’t compose a song without feeling something about your experience. The key, then, is to “translate” these experiences into something others can relate to.
The Role of Music in “Translating” Experiences
Translating in this context basically means to take a chunk of experience and present it a certain way to an intended audience. This audience can be one or two people, or just you. Truly, the fewer the better from an artistic perspective – because you don’t subconsciously try to please others.
With this in mind, music has an advantage when it comes to translating experiences: It isn’t preoccupied with plot. Everything is “outsourced” to the audience; they are the ones who must imagine how it all plays out.
Of course lyrics play a part, but have you noticed how instrumental songs – and much of postrock/postmetal music is instrumental – can be evocative enough to help you imagine entire worlds?
Music can steer emotions. From the choice of scale to instrumentation and from controlling the pace to patterns of repetition, music can help us feel things that “aren’t there”. That’s what symbolism ultimately means.
How to Write a Song – any Song: Technicalities Don’t Matter
Once again, let’s remember the matchless Bill Hicks: Play from your fucking heart. That’s the only dividing line in art: There is no “good” art and “bad” art in any sense-making way of defining them, except art that is a product of someone’s heart and “art” that materialized for other reasons.
Or, as David Foster Wallace aptly puts it in the video below, “What the really great artists do is that they’re entirely themselves… They have their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
On the other hand, it’s also important to underline something: The process isn’t linear.
In other words, sometimes we begin having one idea, one form of experience, then the work takes over and steers you in a different direction. Sometimes there might not even be any clear knowledge what it is we’re expressing, and it only comes later. That’s perfectly fine.
The Planet of Abandoned Dreams
Let’s use my latest postrock/postmetal album as an example – remember, this post began not as a “How to write a song” but as “How I write my songs”. The first couple of songs for my latest album, The Planet of Abandoned Dreams (which are not the actual songs #1 and #2) were little more than just unconscious experimentations.
Somewhere at that point – I have no clear understanding how or why and that’s part of the process – I realized that this album would be about space. A concept emerged – on its own volition, so to speak. It was then that I realized how I needed to proceed.
Thoughts and emotions about what space conveyed became riffs, sounds, hues, and even effects. You’ll notice this album contains quite a bit of synth voices – more than my usual work and more than what you’d expect to find in a postrock/postmetal album. All this became a way for me to express how “space” felt.
Click to display the embedded Bandcamp player
What Postrock/Postmetal Music Feels Like?
More than other genres (and certainly more than anything more mainstream), postrock and postmetal are about “how it feels” much more than about “what it is”. If this sounds familiar, I’ve talked about it a lot in the context of writing fiction.
Postrock and postmetal are about textures, sounds, symbolic representations (say, through repetition), and – as I mentioned above – far less about “plot” (remember, most postrock and postmetal is instrumental) or any easily recognizable structure. The distinction usual in mainstream genres – verse, chorus, bridge – is far more ambiguous here.
Keeping in mind that metal in general is about disruption, and you have in postrock/postmetal a “genre” uniquely suitable to express the in-between. Overall, if you’re a postrock/postmetal musician and you want a single piece of advice from this post, let it be this: Do things the way you feel like, and don’t pay attention to what (you think) is expected.
To Write a Song, Realize You Write about Being
There is a certain paradox involved in the process of imagination and creativity: At the same time we’re working with a unique chunk of experience, one we feel is accessible only by us and which we need to express to others, yet also with the realization that all stories are ultimately common.
This relatability in art is what makes the whole thing “work” – to the extent art is supposed to. Sure, there are plenty of artistic expressions that are opaque and hardly decipherable by anyone other than (maybe) their own creators. Yet generally, art acts as cohesive glue.
Art brings together experiences that, for one reason or another (perhaps we can blame the prosaic nature of our perception), appear unknown, separate, foreign.
Art is about emphasizing precisely these bridges, that might give the impression they separate when they actually unite the shores of ours experiences.
Not one of my charisms – though I love singing, and hope to get back to a lot more of it when being next to other breathers isn’t necessarily fatal.
So I’ll think about a song as, say, a 100-word drabble: a story in miniature.
With few words, eliciting emotion has to allow the receiver to connect to their own database of ideas and, in this case, sounds.
Just as with a novel, the writer loses control of a song the minute it is available to other people – reception goes to the audience, regardless of the author’s intention.
And I say that as someone almost incapable of remembering lyrics (though I do a bit better if there’s an instrument guiding me, and the darn things are both memorable and rhyme). I can’t tell you how many versions are capable of coexisting in my brain, and how much I love printed words!
We owe so much to those who CAN, and DO make the effort to release the individual bubble of a song/musical piece from the bubble wand that produces it.
Most people can’t do what you do – keep it happening.
Losing control of your work is, as you said, a regular occurrence with songs because of their brevity and – provided they have some depth, which is far from given – their inherent affective ambiguity.
The funny thing is, to me this is essential with fiction as well – with the footnote that when I write I’m my intended audience, which certainly facilitates the process.