Lyrics to Melody
One of the surprise, extra prizes from the Talent is Timeless competition was a free place on the Bird on a Wire songwriting course, run by Findlay Napier and Boo Hewerdine. It’s a 8-week evening class, jam-packed full of songwriting ideas, exercises and collaborations. I really enjoyed it (also thanks to my talented class-mates) and I learned a lot. You can find out more about the course here: https://www.birdonawire.info
Early on in the course, we focused on lyric-writing, within the framework of ‘common metre’ (which you’ll find explained on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_metre, but basically, think of ‘Mary had a little lamb…’ as an example). Each of us was asked to come up with 3 verses in that structure that communicated a simple story; and that story had to have something to do with ‘ink’. We were also encouraged to use a repeating last line.
The main point of the task, I think, was to teach us the discipline of writing within a structure that lends itself to the tricky business of putting words to music. And that was the next challenge. We swapped our lyrics with one another, and then had to come up with a melody… and we were also allowed to add lyrics to produce a chorus or bridge, if we wanted to.
I was lucky to receive the beautiful words of my classmate Sarah Rimmer. The theme of ‘ink’ suggested to her a song about a love letter, but she also added a very clever twist in the last verse. The lyric, as I first received it, looked like this:
Your letter hides inside my pocket,
Like a secret sin,
Write your words in inky waves,
To seep into my skin
Time bleeds slow you’re far from me,
My patience wearing thin,
I will hold your letter close,
To seep into my skin
Now you’re here in flesh and blood,
The paper cuts begin,
Oh ink stained love run back to me,
To seep into my skin
By the next class, I had come up with a melody and added chorus. I had twisted the chords and melody in the last verse (to reflect the twist in the words) — I simply switched the order of the chords in each line, which suggested an interesting melodic shift. Fin and Boo suggested repeating the chorus and adding an extra verse, partly to allow the initial melody to become more familiar before the twist.
Here’s how the song turned out (I think the audio is better on the SoundCloud recording, but I know not everyone uses it, so I have included a YouTube version too. Both versions are live demos):
YouTube: https://youtu.be/qy2Qt6B33iM
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-57337486/seep-into-my-skin
Here’s how the lyrics ended up:
Lyrics
Inside my coat, your letter hides
It’s like a secret sin,
Whose words caress in blue-black waves,
That seep into my skin
In fading light, I search your words
For clues concealed within
The more I read, the more they seem
To seep into my skin
To seep into my skin
To seep into my skin
So sweet beneath the surface it….. begins
Time bleeds slow you’re far from me,
My patience wearing thin,
So I will hold this letter close,
To seep into my skin
To seep into my skin
To seep into my skin
So sweet beneath the surface it begins
Now you’re here in flesh and blood,
The paper cuts begin,
My ink stained love run back to me,
To seep into my skin
(c) Sarah Rimmer and Fergus McNeill, 2021.