2AM and I'm naked...

There's a light at each end of this tunnel, you shout
'Cause you're just as far in as you'll ever be out
And these mistakes you've made, you'll just make them again
If you only try turnin' around.

2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, its no longer
inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to.
And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd
'Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
And I know that you'll use them, however you want to.

This is truly an example of good songwriting. The artist is Anna Nalick, a new artist who has just released an album called "The Wreck of the Day". Find out about her on her site at www.annanalick.com. This is the type of single that, when you hear it on the radio for the first time, you know it must be sung by the person that wrote it. It is not the same as modern pop, which amounts to an opiate for the masses, though ironically it might be soon validated by the checkbooks of the masses. It looks like she's on her way to stardom, and it will be well-deserved, in my opinion. With this song, she shows a songwriting ability that few people - few songwriters - have.

It's hard to explain what makes a well-written song. Sometimes, a song is well-written because it very clearly tells a story or makes a point. But I think that just as often, story songs are the easiest of all types of songs to write. In some situations they require the least imagination, because they are merely recounting events. However, depending on the melody and meter of the music, they can require the most creativity when trying to form the events to the structure of the song. But what Anna does is something also done often by Sheryl Crow - she wraps sentences and phrases around the musical "phrases" in each verse of the song while still getting all the hanging words to rhyme. This needs definitions...

By "hanging words", I mean the words at the end of each line. She gets them all to rhyme, and not only in a simple AABBCCDD pattern; she gets them to do a cool AABCCB thing. The time signature is 3 quarter, which means it's based on threes, and so she makes every third and sixth line rhyme. But then she makes the two lines in between rhyme with each other. Cool.

By "musical phrases", I am referring to the way each verse is divided into lines. So, the verses in this song generally have six phrases. So, an easier way to write a song to this melody would have been to construct verses consisting of six short sentences, with a few exceptions. You would sing one short sentence per line, broken up by small pauses between them. Instead, Nalick's last verse that I pasted here ("2am...want to") has three sentences. The bridge part, which is the other paragraph that I posted from the song, is one long sentence. That's difficult, because you have to think of a way to word the sentences that lets you insert rhyming words at multiple points within the same sentence. This is also hard to explain, so if you don't quite get it, just email me.

The words are also personal, and sufficiently complex, to make me feel like I've heard about a significant experience (well, significant enough to write about) in the author's life. I just hope that I can obtain the same level of songwriting with my own efforts.