The Fear of Falling

I've been asked to write an article for the Australian poetry journal Five Bells, about songwritign and poetry. This is the full version of the article that I have written, which I thought I would put up here because I'm fairly certain it will be cut down significantly for the publication. I also realised I can provide some links of interest in blog form :D

The Fear of Falling

Despite a shared history and common origins, poetry and songwriting can sometimes appear to exist in very different cultural spaces within the world of contemporary art and creativity. There is no doubt that the practices of writing a poem and writing a song can often be one and the same, and can occur in similar ways and serve similar purposes. Perhaps the clearest distinction between a poem and a song, or a poet and a songwriter, is what they have come to represent to those who engage with them.

Henry Rollins, who once fronted the seminal hardcore band Black Flag, makes a clear distinction between his own creative pursuits and poetry. For years now he has toured the world as a spoken word artist, but in a performance at Hollywood’s Luna Park nightclub, he had this to say about the world of poetry:

"Reading stuff on stage, to me, is oh so lame. That’s why poetry readings, for me, can just go die. Have you ever seen poets? What a miserable fucking bunch for the most part. I mean, there’s a few shining stars here and there, but there are a lot of substitute teachers who teach at, like, Harvard College and Longbeach, they dress in 800 year old corduroys and drive fucked up Toyota Corollas, and they write really shitty stuff.

They only write poems for the other asshole poets in the room. ‘This is for you Stuart, OK? This is a revenge poem, for your accusatory poem last week at the Longbeach Alcoholics Anonymous Slam Night!’"


I couldn't find the corresponding video, but this is a great excerpt from the same DVD

And yet, to his fans, Rollins is the ultimate punk poet. He takes a lifetime of lessons and experiences and spews them out on stage with a rawness and simplicity that audiences can relate and respond to. Clearly the distinctions between songwriter, spoken word artist, and poet exist in his mind, but not in the minds of those who appreciate what he has to say.

From as early as I was able to read, poetry was everywhere. The bookshelves of the family home were overflowing with anthologies, and my parents’ studies were littered with ideas, drafts and manuscripts. My own shelves included some of the most important poems one is ever likely to read, children’s nursery rhymes. It is through these poems that a child first develops an appreciation for the power of rhythm and rhyme in the written and spoken word.


Of course, many nursery rhymes have a melody, which helps to ingrain the words into our young minds, and adds to the enjoyment of reading and reciting them. It’s possible that on the page they are poems, but said out loud they are songs. For the child the division might not yet be so important, but what is important is the underlying lesson that words can be arranged in ways that go beyond simply conveying information, and can live on in our memory long after they have first been read or heard.

I spent a great deal of my childhood at poetry meetings, where groups of predominantly middle-aged women writers would gather to read, compare and critique each other’s latest work. While my mothers were baring their souls and making poignant observations on the ever-changing world around them, I was in the next room playing Game Boy and eyeing off the last of the olives and artichokes.

For a long time after, that is what ‘grown-up’ poetry meant to me. It was the parents’ trade, a slightly dull indoor get-together while the real fun was happening outside. I would listen in from time to time, but I couldn’t connect with what was being said, and at times had little to no understanding of what they were talking about. This was long before I learned that quintessential lesson of art appreciation: we are free to take almost anything we want away from the art we engage with. Besides, I had almost finished Super Mario Land 2, and that guacamole wasn’t going to eat itself.

Poetry still played its part in my early years of writing. With much encouragement from the family, I produced a few poems of my own, mostly cutesy little observations that were so overwhelmingly endearing it was hard not to award me the school poetry prize. I recall beaming with pride after beating a few adults to take out first place in a small on-the-spot spoken word competition at age six, which was judged by none other than Dorothy Porter. The poem went something like this:

The moon was full
The owl was out
I could not hear my mother shout
And as the clowds went drifting by
I thought I heard a baby cry

Like I said, cutesy little observations. Actually, it was more than that. The poem was written shortly after my little brother was born, and was a reflection on the time spent in the hospital waiting room on the very early morning of his birth. My mother’s agony was drowned out by the television, and it was only when the reception cut out that I heard the baby’s first cries and thought to go and check on the progress. If anything, this poem might have shown that I had the ability to condense a whole lot of narrative into a few memorable words.

For years after that I would continue to write poems, usually when instructed to, and continued to submit my work to various competitions. Poetry was a way in which one could become recognised, appreciated, and valued by parents, peers and teachers. To me writing was a means of establishing self-worth, more than engaging in self-expression, and truth be told, there was no one writer of poetry whom I truly admired, idolised, wanted to be like, or to write like.

Music would change all of that for me. As I underwent the transition from mild-mannered over-achieving child to inexplicably angry teenager, music presented me with a whole new way of exploring who I was, and how I felt. Music had always been there, much the same as poetry, but it wasn’t until age twelve that lyrics really began to speak to me, and for me. I discovered alternative rock, and discovered friends who liked alternative rock, and from that starting point we would delve into all sorts of exciting new genres to satisfy our hunger.

The lyrics of the Smashing Pumpkins, penned by Billy Corgan, had a huge effect on me. Here was a man who felt rage, sadness, joy, and love, and was able to express it all in ways that I had never heard before. His songs were deeply personal, but his lyrical prowess made it seem that he was singing about my own life. Like many before him, this is a power that Billy himself has sometimes shied away from acknowledging, perhaps weary of the fanatical devotion his songwriting has earned him over the years.

His better known songs often struck a chord with a dejected American youth whose delinquency had been exacerbated by their small-town and suburban upbringings, and these sentiments resounded with audiences around the world. No better example of this can be found than the Smashing Pumpkins’ hit song 1979, from their critically acclaimed concept double-album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.



Listening to The Smashing Pumpkins also made me realise that musicians were at an advantage when it came to conveying the meaning and message of their lyrics. In poetry, words are your only instrument, and your only means to convey the moods, tones, story, and message to your audience. In a song, decent lyrics have the support of other voices, be they distorted guitars, quirky synthesizers, or thunderous drums. The lyrics are just one part of an experience in which a song is able to tap into our primal appreciation for all types of different sounds.

Maybe the best poets, then, are those who have an orchestra of words at their disposal, those who can conduct their literary symphony with such skill that no aural soundtrack is required. In saying that, I do not to wish to malign those writers who experiment with musical accompaniment, but I have to wonder if that is the point at which the poet perhaps unwittingly becomes a songwriter, especially when we consider the proliferation of musical genres such as rap, hardcore punk, and screamo, where the vocalist’s delivery style could hardly be described as ‘singing’.

One band using rap to get their message across was Rage Against the Machine, whose front man Zach de la Rocha utilised a hip-hop style to spit lyrics that attacked the government, the police, the church, and big corporations, while his band rocked out riffs that walked an aggressive line between funk, rock and heavy metal.

Here were some real reasons to be angry, a place to channel the post-pubescent rage that burned inside me. Songs like Guerilla Radio, from their 1999 album The Battle of Los Angeles, encouraged and embodied the idea of militant revolution through music, and idea that would be carried on by many heavier artists after them, such as System of a Down. Here too was a vocal style that seemed a little easier to master for an amateur with an untrained voice.



Hip-hop has had such a strong influence on the global community over the last few decades that it could hardly be said to be a sub-culture. Pioneering artists expressed themselves with a rhythmic style of expression known as rapping, that placed strong emphasis on the clever use of rhyming patterns, and also encouraged ‘freestyling’, in which rap performers improvise lyrics on the fly. This was an urbanised, ethnicised take on the beat poetry and spoken word styles that had been developing in America since the 1950s, and it’s not uncommon to hear the best rappers referred to as poets of the streets.

Following in the footsteps of RATM, many other bands emerged in the late 90s to push the fusion of hip-hop and metal almost to breaking point. Bands like the Deftones, Crazy Town, Head (P.E), Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park began to flood the airwaves, and before long these bands earned themselves a whole new category and label, that of ‘nu-metal’.

It was a commercial phenomenon that record labels exploited and squeezed every last dollar out of, and like many other disaffected teenage males I got completely swept up in it. A lot of my early songs were rants about systems of oppression that I barely understood, such as this one, which I wrote and performed with my old band Dropjive in my final year of high school.

Escapism

dreaming of freedom from an oppressive fate
then you’re struck and re-awakened to reality’s state
of affairs, and who knows and who cares where you are?
so you run to the edge of the dark but what’s there?

you seek avoidance of the situations
eradication of the complications in life
you create your own strife
and now you realise you’re never set free
taking our needles
we inject rejection
engineered infection
to escape

if you’ve been suffering then you ain’t trying
and what you thought was stepping out
was just complying
no solution, all you wanted was escape
from a life made so easy
it was too hard to take

taking our needles
we inject rejection
engineered infection
to escape

shout it out, shout it out loud

Songs like this became the staple for Dropjive. Fist-pumping anthems were our forté, and when you’re on to a winning formula you tend to stick with it to keep the crowds coming back for more. This would prove limiting for me, and as I continued to grow and learn about life through my experiences as a freshman university student, I returned to poetry once more as a means of expressing feelings and telling stories that I felt had no place in the Dropjive repertoire.

Songwriting and poetry were still very separate practices in my mind, but their roles in my life had been swapped. Music had become a medium in which I wrote more for the audience than for myself, hoping for an enthusiastic cheer or an encouraging slap on the back at the end of the show. Poetry now presented itself as a place to be private, personal, and artistic.

By posting my poems on the internet, I was able to assume an alter-ego, hiding my true identity behind a username and avatar as I submitted my experimental new work to the ever-expanding art community website deviantART.com. Long before the blogger-boom, devianART encouraged amateurs and professionals alike to contribute anything and everything to the World Wide Web so that it could be viewed and critiqued by fellow artists.

The poetry I wrote during my first attempt at university was inspired by the world of sex, drugs, romance and violence that had opened itself up to me in just one year of adulthood. I enjoyed the anonymity of online publishing because I felt there was nothing I couldn’t say. I wrote sincerely and honestly, without the fear that someone I know would access it and learn of my deepest feelings and darkest experiences. Reading poems like ‘Drama Queen’ below, it’s sometimes hard to remember the individual moments that inspired the words, but I look at this period of my life and creative output as being a major turning point.

Drama Queen

five miles up the coast
my body washed ashore
new friend to the local children
they dressed me in a seaweed sunday best
and called me father
children of ritual consumption
lost to fragile fantasies
the youngest wrote in the sand
i live for sunny days
i dream of sunny days
i died this sunny day
they kicked sand in my face and fled
my howls concealed their departure

i walked from the tide
spewing salt and blood
the tear was black as it fell
you caught it with your tongue
licked your lips and baked
i lay next you
always watching your eyes
that spied his interest
i live for sunny days
i kill for sunny days
i died this sunny day
your motion was swift and deep
my motionless body laid to rest
they made a raft and put us to sea
a hand on your neck for safe keeping

Bands come and go, and Dropjive would ultimately come to an end due to a lack of direction and a lack of interest, both internally and externally. Music was still extremely important to me and central to who I was, and it was hard to imagine a life without a band. Gathering up what was left of the old band and bringing on board some new musicians, I began a new project called Me vs. You. The hardcore and emo revival was only just beginning and we wanted in on the action. It was time to pull all those personal issues off the page and throw them into the music.



The band began with some very specific guidelines. We would write songs where melody was paramount, rather than resorting to screaming and growling to communicate our emotions. We would also write songs that dealt with negative experiences, but concluded with a positive outlook. In doing this we hoped to offer people a new alternative to the predominantly bleak and morbid outlook expressed by many hardcore, emo, and screamo bands that were beginning to command attention. I also hoped this would convey to our audiences my new-found belief that no bad experience could keep you down forever, and that no challenges in life were insurmountable.

The amusing side effect of this new approach was that many listeners assumed we were a Christian band. Bands like Underoath and Anberlin were leading a charge of surprisingly excellent Christian groups from the States who were not afraid to embrace genres once considered by middle America to be the devil’s music. For many of our listeners, it seemed like a good fit. We were asked to play churches and Christian music festivals, and we always said yes because, hey, a gig’s a gig, right? We were even invited to play Hillsong’s Big Exo Day, only to be uninvited due to our failure to provide a letter from a minister to verify our faith. Perhaps it was lyrics for songs like ‘Bueller’ that had people convinced we were spreading God’s word.

Bueller

this is my call to the world
this is my affirmation
in my mind I’m sure, not insecure
a new day’s clarity

did you hear that sound?
you’re writing this down
as I whisper in your ear

your eyes aren’t used to daylight
and the dawn has left you blind
though it burns your skin
let the light in
And learn to live again

did you hear that sound?
you’re writing this down
as I whisper in your ear
i heard you’re looking for a reason
i’ll do my best to make it clear

and if your new day’s clarity can’t be found
my advice to you is to write this down

The whole band was immediately dissatisfied with the first EP release, ‘A Novice with a Nailbomb’, and it took us around two years to come up with another lot of songs that we felt were worthy of recording. In fact, for as long as I’ve been writing songs, the journey from initial idea to completed song has always been a long one.

I’m not sure how or why it has worked out this way, but for me, music has always come before lyrics when writing a song. I will usually wait for the band to have an entire song completed before even attempting to add my melodies and words. Many songwriters might see this as a backwards way of doing things; after all, shouldn’t the music be complementing what is said in the lyrics?

Despite this, I’ve always found it easier to make my contribution to each song in response to what has been created by the musicians. I feel this allows me to explore the mood of the notes, chords, and rhythms being played, and write words that articulate what the music can not. If the music feels like an empowering tale of friendship and camaraderie, then that’s what I’ll write. If the music wants to yell at an unfaithful ex-girlfriend, then my lyrics will do just that.

As we approached our second studio recording, the band and I took on a more pop-orientated approach to our songwriting. We wanted catchy choruses that people could sing along to at shows. We wanted at least a couple of songs that were radio-friendly enough to make it on to the Triple J airwaves. We wanted this album to be our ticket to bigger tours, better venues, and lots of new fans. I wanted to retain the personality and honesty of my older lyrics, but give them just enough pop aesthetic to stick in people’s heads regardless of what they were about.

We called the second release ‘The Fear of Falling’, a phrase taken from the final song of the EP that I felt captured the essence of what we were trying to achieve. We were confronting our fears, individually and as a band, and offering our listeners a chance to do the same. To assist, we prescribed a good dose of friendship, self-confidence, and love, and approached the subject matter with a sense of understanding and empathy. The music retained our signature balance of heavy guitars and drumming with melodic vocals, right up until the last track, where we decided it was time for our first ballad.

Writing this ballad, I felt completely naked and exposed. Softer instrumentation meant a stronger focus on the vocal performance, and on the substance of my lyrics. Keeping in mind our slightly more commercial leaning in recent songs, I needed to write something that would set hearts a flutter, offer some real insight into my mindset, and include the kind of resonating one-liners that can be scrawled in school diaries or broadcast on Myspace and Facebook profiles by our predominantly Gen-Y fans. What I came up with was a duet, a conversation between a young man and woman who have never met, but are singing to the person they imagine each other might be.

6 Degrees of 98 Degrees

It’s been another year
And I still can’t escape the things that I fear
The years go faster now
There was a purpose but I lost it somehow

Through all the worst of times
I had the best intentions
Only to fall again
But through these friends of mine
I found the strength to bare it
So this is one for them

Well I’m still waiting here
Don’t know your face but I can tell you are near
And I am just like you
Sometimes this emptiness feels better with two

Through all the best of times
We had the best intentions
Oh and we fall again
And we don’t draw a line
We’d rather give it all than
Save the best for the end

So don’t you forget
Remember that the best is yet to come
We’ve made our promises
And there’s not telling who we might become

Through all the best of times
I had the best intentions
I won’t slow down
And oh dear friends of mine
The fear of falling is what keeps us on the ground

Oh and we fall again

Now, more than a year since the release of ‘The Fear of Falling’, I am stuck in the middle of my first major case of writers block. As a band we are writing more music, new songs that we hope to turn into our first full-length album. We are done with pop, and we are done with trying to create the type of music that is expected of bands within our scene. Personally, I want to blur the line between my songwriting and poetry that have become much clearer to me in recent times.

Songs have always been the medium through which I tackle a subject head on, saying exactly how I feel in an up-front, dressed down way that can be easily understood by an audience. Poetry has been the space for me to take an approach that is more artistic, for lack of a better word. Through poetry I have immersed myself in the beauty of words, and their ability to conceal and disguise meaning in a way that demands deeper engagement from the reader. This is exactly the approach I want to take with my lyrics now that the band aims to deliver a more progressive sound that will extend upon the foundations we have established in our previous recordings in unexpected ways.

Old habits are hard to break, however, and I find myself at a crossroads where I know what I want to write but find it difficult to move forward and commit to my ideas to paper. When writing songs, I’ve largely been a slave to rhythm and rhyme, always bringing a phrase, verse or chorus to its most basic and logical conclusion. Breaking rules that have been so firmly implanted in the musical portion of my brain isn’t just hard, it actually feels dangerous. There is also the worry that our usual audiences may not appreciate my attempts to progress lyrically. The fear of falling is still strong in me.

Thankfully, I have enjoyed a few small breakthroughs. I feel I’m getting closer to finding a balance between my love of rhythm and rhyme and my need to push my lyrics into new territory. One song in particular seems to be grabbing the attention of listeners old and new, and ridiculous title aside; I feel this could be indicative of the future of my songwriting pursuits.

When I Take of My Shirt, I Look Like a Cyborg

excuse me, boy
but you look a lot like London
and the stars in your eyes have become anchors
hey there girl
they say Paris is in your demeanor
but the way you do your hair is so Hollywood

it’s a crime to want to be this way
when hurry back is all that you can say
I’m starving and I can’t wait
and all these hours just exacerbate

say it hurts and mean it
suffer for your art
wrong your rights and mean it
be careless from the start

hollow trees hide the thieves
and hold them prisoner
while the birds rob the banks
and get all of the girls

a chemical cacophony of criminal minds
and what did you find?
you can suck the poison out and I’ll suck the lime
in greedier times

daggers fly at terminal velocity
still never getting anywhere
and we will see an end to the atrocity I swear

speak up, so we can hear you
get back, don’t you come near me
wake up, it’s another morning
shut up, the misery is boring

he’s got a jacket like a general
she’s got a dress like a jewel
stuffed with a mouthful of emeralds
nothing to losehollow trees hide the thieves

and hold them prisoner
while the birds rob the banks
and get all of the girls

Now I find myself listening back to the artists who have affected me most over the years. I’m starting to believe that the best songs are those whose lyrics can be read on the page and appreciated as poetry. Despite my current problem of putting pen to paper, I’m overflowing with ideas. I want to turn things upside down, and let the band create a musical response to my lyrical ideas. The distinctions that existed in my mind are beginning to disappear as I reflect on my journey as a writer of both poetry and lyrics, and the optimist in me continues to believe that the best is yet to come. I’m ready to overcome my fear.