With songwriting, I try not to force anything. There are portions of song lyrics that take weeks to come. If a verse or chorus never comes, I figure there’s some unconscious reason for it, and I move on to something else.
Likewise, there are songs that come very quickly, over a day or so, or even an hour or so. Those feel like they’re just floating out there in the zeitgeist, and I’m the lucky one who gets them.
In both cases, it’s not that I don’t care about the songs. It’s just that, for me, taking lyrics too seriously affects the final work in a way that diminishes it, makes it less listenable, less worth your and my time. In short, to my mind, for my songs to be good, I can’t try too hard.
Which brings me to “The World is Enough,” the second Single of the Month from Branches Breaking from the Weight for October.
When it came time to write the verse lyrics for this one, I used a common method that’s worked for me many times in the past. I picked up the notebook where I jot down random lyrics that come to me or that I hear out in the world. Whenever I hear or come up with words that strike me as funny or interesting, I write them down on this sheet, and then when it’s time to write lyrics, there it is. I suspect many other songwriters do the same.
On this day, the top of my random lyric sheet read:
Everything that happens every thousand years is happening more frequently.
It was something a friend of mine’s husband had said about recent weather events. The friend repeated it to me, and I immediately wrote it down.
The next lyric on the sheet read:
Mold on a melon led to penicillin.
I heard this on a DVD I watched, thought it sounded interesting, and wrote it down.
The next line:
Cucumbers are all over the Bible.
My wife said this. I thought it sounded funny, so I wrote it down.
So, it was time to write the lyrics for “The World is Enough” over Bret and Kevin’s hunk, and here are the first three lines on my lyric sheet. I hit record, picked up the sheet, and sang what was in front of me.
And it kind of worked. Three unrelated ideas, and their unrelated-ness gave them this weird kind of kinship. A little massage here, an extra word there, an ad-libbed final line or two, and the first verse was finished.
What emerges for me from this verse is a character going through a set of what he sees as random facts, like one might come across on the internet, and from those facts, he struggles to come up with some kind of big-picture answer. It’s pretty much impossible to come up with such an answer from such disparate statements, which plays toward my belief that more information isn’t necessarily a path to greater understanding. In fact, more information is at least as likely to confuse you as enlighten you. I’ve intuited over the years to keep life as simple as possible. Life will complicate itself on its own. It doesn’t need help.
This sentiment became a kind of running theme for the song, best highlighted by the song’s title. In our information-laden age, the mind wants to create constructs on top of constructs on top of constructs. We of course want and need new information, but we also need to develop an innate method for intuiting when there’s too much information. If you’re worried about world conundrums to the point of high anxiety or depression, then you’ve just worried yourself to the point that you aren’t really much help with these problems. We all do this to some extent, which is why it’s important to find a way to keep the over-thinking demons at bay. The world will offer up enough problems on its own without your help—the world is, in fact, enough—and when those problems come, you’ll be needed to help alleviate them. Be ready when they come by not trying too hard to force answers where there aren’t any yet.
That’s pretty much the gist of “The World is Enough.” Not quite “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but not doomsday either.
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Always like to see where your stuff comes from