Hodgkinson - Song man: a melodic adventure, or, my single-minded approach to songwriting

It was the summer of 2005. I was in Brittany, France, with my wife, NJ. We had walked through a dark pine forest and down a gorse-dappled hill to reach a rock that jutted into a river. It had a plateau big enough to stretch out on, and you could dive from its edge into the deep water ten feet below. This part of the river was quiet and wide, with just a handful of small, empty boats along its banks and fields of corn and clover beyond them.

NJ crab-crawled down the side of the rock and glided into the river. I dived in with an inelegant splash and pushed through the waters depths, coming up to the surface to hear a dragonfly flapping past and to see NJ on the horizon, heading towards the middle of the river, her headscarf still dry.

This is perfect, said NJ after she came out of the river, drawing herself along the dry rock and its grassy patches. Our two young children were with her parents in a house about a mile away and, for the first time in a long while, all was calm. This is what I came here to do.

Me too, I said. Although I told myself that I was going to come up with some songs while we were in France and Im yet to write a word.

A year earlier, aged thirty-four, I had learned guitar for the first time. The great thing about the guitar is that even someone with very little musical skill, knowledge, talent, taste or intelligence can make music with it fairly quickly. As such, it seemed like the ideal instrument for me to write songs with.

Whats stopping you?

I looked around at the water below us, at a little house on the far bank of the river and could not think of an answer to her question. I could run through a few three- or four-chord songs on the guitar and execute some basic finger-picking patterns. But the best I had to offer the world in terms of original material was a song called Mystery Fox. The words to the first verse were:

Mystery Fox
Get out of your box
Its time for me
To chase you up that tree, o mystery fox

My lyrical technique consisted of thinking of the name of an animal then finding something to rhyme with it.

Learning to play guitar had improved my life significantly, but to write a song felt like a nobler goal. The song is at the heart of humanity. It is the only art form that most of the planet has shared in. A percentage of people in the world have painted a picture, and significantly fewer have made a film, but almost everyone has sung a song and quite a lot of people have written one. From church hymns to national anthems to number one hits, songs are an encapsulation of what it means to be alive. Songs expose and articulate facets of human experience from birth to death and all points in between, and they thrive on simplicity. There are few better songs than Be My Baby by The Ronettes, and that has a sentiment and a message that is as simple as it gets.

I had always told myself that, if only I had the time, I would surely write a few good songs. Now time stretched out like the river itself. I said that I needed inspiration. What could be more inspiring than this beautiful, silent place? It had been said many times, by many people, that I had a horrible voice and no sense of melody. That never stopped Bob Dylan.

Then there was the suspicion that songwriters were an elect few, a special breed touched with divine inspiration and a cavalcade of musical tricks and tools at their disposal. But the big news in the music industry that summer was the global success of MySpace, the website that allowed anyone, regardless of ability, financial situation or professional standing, to upload their songs onto their own site for the world to have access to. Some of the biggest bands in the country had got their first rung on the ladder through MySpace, while others knocked together songs and put them onto their computers in between going to school, going to work or picking up their pensions. The uncomfortable truth was that this simple, omnipresent art form, this three-minute creation made by everyone from children in their bedrooms to teenage rappers on street corners to millionaires in Hollywood mansions, was beyond me.

Anyone who has ever felt lonely can relate to Otis Redding as he sings Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay. Wichita Lineman by Jimmy Webb is filled with longing, mystery and melodic sophistication. Hearing a great song still affected me just as much as it did when, aged twelve and listening to the radio under the bed covers at night, I heard Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix for the first time. But I had no idea of how you go about creating these gems. I didnt know where melodies come from, or how you make words fit with music, or how you find the right style to express the mood you wish to convey. Anyone who has ever heard Mystery Fox will be able to verify that.

We sat in silence on that rock for twenty minutes. NJ lay motionless with her eyes closed and I watched the rivers ripples. I was thirty-five. It was far too late to take any professional songwriting ambitions seriously, and delusions of pop grandeur had died with my one and only attempt to be a singer, at a school talent competition. It was an avant-garde piece and I did a duet with a Hoover. The Hoover actually managed to get more votes than me.

But surely it was never too late to learn something new just for the hell of it, however much common sense and dignity might tell you otherwise. I remembered the excitement of friends in bands when we were in our early twenties, when boxes containing copies of their debut single would arrive from the record-pressing plant and they would stare at the slab of vinyl in their hands, marvelling at this sacred object. Those friends got older, their bands split up, they found jobs and had families, but that single would be rediscovered in attics, basements and charity shops, perhaps even cherished in a few record collections, and almost definitely have its ghost lifted onto the internet. It had a story of its own and it would, in one form or another, live on.

Ive got a new mission, I told NJ. Im going to learn how to write a song and record a single.

She remained motionless. After a while she said: Is that wise?