Boy, it sure is getting hard to come up with song ideas. It was quite easy in the beginning because I did all the doom and gloom and pain and whatnot. That stuff easily evokes a response in the listener, but I think it gives a bad image of me and God. But I can’t write happy stuff. It just isn’t very powerful, at least in my opinion. I mean, sure it’s nice to write a song that’s all happy and stuff… but… well… it’s fluffy. I suppose not if you do it right, but I can’t think of any happy songs that I like. In a good song there is most certainly a place for happiness, but it can’t be the entire song. You have to build up to it.
Take for example my last song. I think that one is a good example of what I’m trying to accomplish. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only good song I’ve written so far (I guess I do like rain too though). It’s not unhappy, yet it’s not fluffy. It’s not depressing, but it does have a sort of tired feel to it. It doesn’t end badly or sadly, it ends on a happy note. It conveys a good message overall I think.
So that’s all great and good, but now I’m stuck. I can’t come up with any other ideas of the same caliber as ‘I’ll Be Home Tonight’. I don’t know why. I want to have that overall uplifting and not dark, yet also a bit sad… haunting-ish. It’s really hard.
There’s also the stuff that starts out unhappy and dark but ends well. I’m trying to stay away from that stuff a little more, because I don’t want any part of the song to be explicitly dark.
I suppose I use the word ‘dark’ a lot. It is a bit ambiguous, isn’t it. I guess I just assume that you have a picture in your mind of what I mean, and although I’m sure you have some sort of picutre, maybe it isn’t mine. So I’ll tell you what I think it is. I think dark means pointing down generally. I think it’s stuff that dwells on unhappy things. Things like pain, death, suffering, depression, lostness, and things of the sort. But it doesn’t just dwell on those things, because you can dwell on those in a more uplifting way. Dark is when you are just talking purely about death, pain, suffering, depression, lostness. You can take dark stuff and use it towards light, but that is… it takes… skill. I’m not saying I have the necessary skill, but I do have about half of it. I stumbled upon the I’ll be home tonight idea was pure luck… or divine internvention. Probably the latter.
(if you can never remember which one latter or former means, Former means First, and Latter means Later [or second]. Just a random tip)
The line actually comes from a Breaking Benjamin song called "Here We Are". I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be home tonight is supposed to mean in the song, but it struck me when I heard it as a perfect line to build a song off of, so I did. So. I’m trying to write a new song, but it might take a while. Oh well.