Here’s a long-post. Expect it to be emo. A few months ago – it feels like a lifetime though – I wrote about my need to find a songwriter to collaborate with. I was really worried that this new venture of mine would not work out. I was not worried that it would cost me money. I knew that it would cost a lot. I was worried that I would get my feelings hurt, and feel worse about my creative abilities than I was feeling already. I was worried that the person with whom I had chosen to connect would reveal themselves as a simply awful human.

Something good happened

That didn’t happen. None of that happened. This person, my collaborator on the other side of the world, in his entirely separate world from mine, turned out to be one of the most likeable and admirable artists (and people) I have ever “met”. His role, in industry terms, is “co-writer”.

In doing this co-writing, he has been generous to a fault, with his time, his consideration, his talent, his willingness to be open, honest and vulnerable. We talk about all sorts of things – art, literature, history, music, poetry, lyrics, artists, more music, even more music…Every conversation (because it is a conversation, not an exchange of business messages) shows me something new, and inspires me to write another song, new lyrics.

Think you know how to rhyme? You ain’t seen nothing yet…

It has pushed me back to the foundations of storytelling and poetry. At this level, you need to know what you must do, and how to do it. This is the thing with lyrics – it’s poetry that has to fit into a melody and a beat – and it’s, frankly, a bitch to get right. That’s the bottom line. He is a professional. He is dragging me, moaning and groaning, up toward his level. He once said this about what it takes to write lyrics:

“Study the language, expand your vocabulary, and manipulate the syllables. I deconstruct words, tones, flows, and put them back together to make square pegs fit into round holes… it’s all about flow and content. Make sure what you’re talking about is relevant to your life – not some gangster’s from Compton. It’s not talking shit if you can back it up – that’s the golden rule.”

(With “Compton”, he’s referring the lyrics of the groundbreaking Gangsta Rap/Hip Hop hit, “Straight Outta Compton”. What he means is don’t write about what you don’t know, or pretend to be what you’re not.)

So, how it goes…

I go back to the books, back to the rhyming dictionaries, and the poets I know, find inspiration (digging around in the subconscious – yuck), sit down, do the composing and arranging, and write the lyrics, as far as I can. Then he takes what I’ve written, and (while sweating blood) transforms it into something that is so much better, and means so much more, that I can hardly believe that I had anything to do with the end result.

I try very hard to do better with every song. I listen to, and analyze, the music that he has written and produced, and every time, I get a cold wake-up-call from the sheer dexterity and sophistication that these songs demonstrate, and, as a result, how hard they hit. I am lifetimes away from this level of expertise.

This is good fortune, Dear Readers. You can read this and think that it must be torture. But it’s not. This is good in every respect. Good medicine. I could have said that I don’t deserve it (or some kind of denial) but this time, I told myself – No. this is it. Every second of this, however long it lasts, I will absorb, take in, learn from, enjoy. Because it will all end when the budget runs out.

A songwriting/co-writing partner

When you have a someone who writes or produces music, poetry, or a book with you, it’s like two painters working on a painting at the same time. It is complicated, and it gets very personal. Imagine how complicated it is when you are a group writing a story together, like Fran and the women of Rebusfontein. You really, really (oh, yes!) get to know the workings of the other person’s mind, because everything that they are comes out in the choices they make during the creative process. You cannot separate the artist from the person.

He belongs to the world, the outside world that is as alien to me as Mars is. I am merely an observer of this existence, watching mesmerized from my echo chamber for one. He sometimes forgets that he is dealing with an incompetent amateur whose head doesn’t always work right.

“Look – We made this.”

The result: An album. After every master has been produced, we can both step back and say, “Look, we made this.” The songs are nothing like the ones I have made till now, or written, or even thought of creating. They make me so ridiculously proud that I feel as though I have fallen in love with my own songs. Even my own art and graphics have got better since this – the designs have to be as good as the songs.

What does he get out of this? Apart from the financial and rights aspects, apparently, he gets the same out of it as I am getting out of it.

Music partners

It made me think about other artistic partners, people who worked together for many years and whose work became one thing, synonymous with both names. Now I kind of get why they exist in the first place. Of course, in these partnerships, both partners have the same level of expertise – not like in my unbalanced scenario.

Songwriting partners

There are famous singer-songwriters, and their lyricists/songwriters and composers; Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff; Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis…I can go on and on.

I have read a lot about the partnership between Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Quite a bit about the process came out in Elton’s autobiography, Me. But Bernie has had a lower profile, seeing as he is not the singer on stage. He has not given many interviews, but published a memoir, Scattershot, in 2023, that provides some insights. In an interview about the book, he said something that resonated with me because I feel the same way:

“The thing about writing songs for me — I’ve never felt I was very good about writing anything that dealt with happiness because I don’t think happiness is very interesting. It’s wonderful to exist in, and be around, and create on a family or social level, but to write about it? It always reminds me of the beginning of Blue Velvet, when the camera pans across all these idyllic backyards with green grass and sprinklers going off and then it pans beneath the earth where you see the dirt and the worms. That’s what’s interesting to me.”

Bernie Taupin, quoted in Bernie Taupin is Still Standing, by Jim Farber, in Vulture Magazine, Sept. 7, 2023, retrieved May 4, 2024. Photo of Bernie Taupin by Philip Montgomery

Writers and illustrators

Then you have many famous writer-and-illustrator duos: Terry Pratchett and Paul Kidby; Lewis Carroll and Sir John Tenniel; Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake; A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard; P.L. Travers and Mary Shepard; Tony DiTerlizzi (illustrator) and Holly Black, of The Spiderwick Chronicles; The Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell (illustrator), etc.

Of course there are numerous renowned writing duos, including ones that I think work particularly well, like Terry Pratchett (before his death, obviously) and Neil Gaiman, and Lee Child and Andrew Child.

Film making partners

And also, famous film directors and their favourite actors, cinematographers, and composers – too many to list. A couple of these multi-media pairings that immediately come to mind are Ridley Scott (of Alien) and H.R. Giger.

Film maker and auteur Wes Anderson with his Baroque Pop visual style, and his favourite leading men Owen Wilson and Bill Murray. Tim Burton, nightmarish fantasies and all, and Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter who fit right in. Martin Scorsese, who frequently casts Robert De Niro as his lead. Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish film maker and my favourite director, and his raddled-looking leading man, Matti Pellonpää (d. 1995) who, together, created uniquely depressing social commentaries. And provocative, avant-garde Lars von Trier, with frequent leading lady Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Conclusion:
1+1 = ∞

I have come to the conclusion that doing this kind of thing can be extraordinarily productive. So long as you set out right from scratch to be open to new ideas, and make mistakes, and be honest, and expect the same from the other person.

In this scenario, 1 plus 1 does not equal 2, nor does what you make have more in total value than the sum of its parts. It’s that 1 plus 1 equals everything, and anything is possible: 1+1=∞ ^(infinity)

At this point, I don’t even care any more about whether these songs get streamed, or sold, licensed, synced or whatever. It’s enough that making them with him has enriched my life, and for the first time, I feel as though I am not alone in my head when it comes to song writing. He understands.
“How lucky can one girl get?” to misquote John Prine’s song.

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