SV: The most obvious one, obviously, is "Book of Dreams."
ST: That was your intention while writing it?
SV: When I wrote it, it was just an interesting idea. And I thought, let's do this with the chorus. I had been listening to a lot of XTC at that point. Production. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking, this will make everyone happy. Which, of course, it didn't, and it doesn't. [Laughs]
ST: What was it that you did to the song to make people happy?
SV: You repeat the chorus a lot of times. You make it bright. You put the hooks on it. You decorate it with riffs and hooks. But even so I think my idea of what a pop song is is different than a record company's. Because they weren't sure at first what the single was going to be. I was thinking "It's obvious!" I don't think they heard it.
I think it's a good song but most people seem to feel it's very obscure. And, again, it's one of those things where people say, "What did you mean by 'Book of Dreams'?" I said, "Well, 'in my book of dreams' is a phrase, like 'in my wildest dreams, in my imagination.'" That's the way I meant it. I didn't mean it as in my journal where I put my dreams that I dream at night. People think of it very literally.
ST: That's how I took it, that you were referring to an actual collection of dreams. I took it as a reference to Kerouac's Book of Dreams, which is a very faithful record of his actual dreams.
SV: Someone gave me that. I read some of it. I've never really been into Kerouac, though my brother is. You know, "Tired of Sleeping" is about night dreams. "Book of Dreams" is about day dreams and the future.
ST: The thing about Kerouac's book is that it's so revealing to write down, uncensored, your actual dreams. And he wrote in the introduction, "what shame I'd feel to see such naked revelations so stated." Which seems very similar to the process of writing songs, and expressing those interior ideas without the conscious mind getting in the way.
SV: Right. See, that's the hard part, when you start to have a little jury of critics: journalists, record company executives, boyfriends, family members, fans. When you start to have those people speaking up and going, "Hey, that won't work!" You have to work through that. Cause if you're really a songwriter in your blood, your instincts will take over. And once you're on the right track, there's no stopping you, really. Regardless of how famous you are and how much money you have. I think if you're really a songwriter, once you start, your instincts will really guide you. But you've got to get rid of the critics.
ST: How do you do that?
SV: Hide. [Laughs] You withdraw for a while.
Reading other people's stuff helps me.
ST: Songs?
SV: No, just other people's writing. Annie Diller's writing, for me. She writes essays. She wrote a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. It's mostly her observations on life and nature and herself and art and fiction and she's just great, she's got this great mind. So you read her and you start to feel that you can do anything. You start to feel lit up by her vision. And so you can kind of catch it from her, or from other people. It's catching. It's contagious. You can catch the spirit again. But you have to be careful about that, to go towards those things that will help you and not make you judgmental towards yourself, or critical.
ST: So when you're writing, are you able to suspend that critical voice or does it still enter into it?
SV: Sometimes it still enters into it. But I find recently that if I'm writing about something that really interests me that the subject itself just draws me in and I'm not thinking about what the newspaper is going to say. So that helps.
ST: When you're writing, do you actively guide the meaning of the song or do you follow it?
SV: I try to do more following. I find if I try to lead it, then you get something that is stiff or contrived. Whereas if you go back to the original thing that provoked you to write the song, there's some answer in there. It's outside of yourself. It's in the situation that you're writing about. That's where the answer is if you get into trouble. I find that I feel more that I'm following something that is already there. There's a way of arranging the information so that it will make sense and be beautiful. And so it will be all in harmony and everything will feel right. And it's a question of wiggling it around until it falls into place.
A song, when it is really well done, feels balanced and it feels right. It's a question of manipulating it a little bit here and there, a little bit every day, for months, until it falls down, falls into the music. That's the way it feels to me.
You have to write about something real in the world. You can't just say, "Oh, I'll write about this." It has to be based on something actual.
ST: In your own life?
SV: Yeah.
ST: When you mentioned the way songs will fall into place, I thought of your song "Men In A War" --
SV: That was hard [Laughs] to write.
ST: I can imagine. It revolves around the idea of a phantom limb, that one would still feel a leg or an arm even after it is cut off, which isn't the easiest idea to get into a song. And the song is so perfectly balanced.
SV: That was a weird one, because I was not paying attention. I was driving somewhere in a car and it appeared almost like a telegram in my mind. Men in a war. And that's basically a medical fact. I thought, "I'd better write this down, because it's such a strange idea." And I thought, "Well, what are you after? What are you trying to say?" I wanted to bring the comparison of violence to your body. Whether it happens through a war, or whether it happens through sexual violence. The woman in the song is experiencing sexual violence. Some people don't get that, and they think she's getting an abortion. To me, there's a parallel between the two experiences. To me, that was valid enough reason to write the song.
But it was very hard. People listen to it, and it's not a clear anti-war song. It's not "We must end the war." Some people listen to it and they don't know how to feel. Except that when you sing it live, it really has a strong impact. And everybody just seems to start getting up and jumping around. Not dancing with joy, but just moving. The rhythm of it and the intensity of it just seems to hit.
ST: When I heard it, I didn't even think of war as much as how we have to deal with reality, that we still feel things even after they're gone.
SV: Yeah. When you receive a bulletin like that: "Men in a war who have lost a limb...", you start to think, "What am I trying to say and what is the reason for it?" And it's not so important that you state it in a song but that you know what it is. Because that's what forms the secret heart of your song.
People, when they listen, want to know what you're singing about. And if you know what it is, they'll know what it is. Not even that you have to say it, but if you know what it is, then they'll know. Because it will be there in the structure.
That one I don't know if I pulled off. That one took a long time for all the pieces to fall into place, and I still wasn't sure. I think if it were a perfect song, I probably would have edited out some more and done something else.
ST: It's a challenging idea to get into a song, and that seems like a signature of your work, that you will get some pretty ambitious concepts into a song, things most people wouldn't try.
SV: I try. Those things are interesting to me. If I'm going to write a song, I might as well try to write something that hasn't been heard before.
Although my ideal, and I have to say lately, I've been listening to Elvis Costello, all of his songs over the last ten years, and the great thing about what he does is that he still writes about love, thwarted ambition, jealousy, all these basic things in life that aren't particularly ambitious. Everybody writes about love. But at the same time he'll do it in a way that it's his and it's distinctive. He's not afraid to use long words, he's not afraid to use his vocabulary. He's not afraid to say, "I want you," and say it over and over again for five minutes. And it's still unmistakably Elvis Costello.
As a songwriter, I need to be able to say those things that are a part of everyday life: I need you, I want you. War must end. How you get to say them without sounding like a jerk or sounding simplistic, that's my next challenge. Because everyone says, "Oh, she's so intellectual." But I am trying to communicate. How do you say it but say it in such a way that it seems as if they haven't heard it before?
ST: It seems that you answer that question in your work by your use of images. You use pictures that show us something that allows us to feel for ourselves, rather than be told something.
SV: That's what I find beautiful. I found that to be one of Dylan's strengths. Not that he said war must end, which he did, but when he said, "A hard rain's gonna fall," and used the images of "white ladder covered with water" and "white man walking a white dog." All of these images have mystery in them and they say racism must end and all men must be brothers. But they don't come out and say it. They have it within the images, which we recognize from our own lives. And that to me is where his strength was. Not that he was a great politician, but that he was a great poet and he used those images to reveal those basic messages. Because it's not about messages. If it was just about printing messages, you could write a pamphlet or a bulletin on index cards and pass them out. So it's obviously not just messages that we're trying to give. It's got to work on some other level.
End of part 2
Continue with part three of four
Submitted by Steven Zwanger
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