LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! First Lines of Songs
LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! is a series of pieces looking at what fiction writers can borrow, craftily, from other sources. I will mostly look at television, movies, and comics, though the occasional literary work may squeak its way in, as will a song or two. LET’S STEAL FROM THIS! finds useful inspiration in unlikely places.
Something different this week. 1. I’m going to give you the “what to steal” formula up front; and 2. when I say “steal” I mean it a little more directly this time. But that’s okay, because this week we’re talking about music and music should always be free!
(I’m kidding. Always buy your music, even if you think the band has enough money already — this is an honest-to-god argument made by alleged humans — and know this: If you’re using a streaming service but also not buying any albums, you are helping to kill the very art form you claim is important to you.)
Here’s the drill:
- What to steal: Song lyrics, but just first lines.
- What to do with it: Make something out of it. Use it to start a story or to jump-start a scene. Make a title out of it. (Which is better than just using a song title for the title of your story/book/movie/TV show/puppet show.) Or let the line come out of a character’s mouth and see what happens. Use it for an ending line.
- Are we really stealing? Not really. We’re using the line as direct inspiration to help start, turn, or finish something. This is first-draft stuff. However, in the interest of avoiding theft and the wrath of the music-publishing industry — and in fairness to your fellow artists — do NOT use someone else’s line, intact, in your own finished work.
- Know this: If you want to paraphrase the first line of a Rolling Stones song, you can do that. (“I saw her today at the wedding reception. She had a glass of wine in her hand.”) But publish their original line as yours, and someone will try and bill you for it. Stanford Law School has a great site for this stuff here. Also, using someone else’s line, unless you’re paying for it and unless you’re using it in a clearly metafictional way (e.g. Aimee Mann lyrics as dialogue in Magnolia), is just lazy.
Here’s what happened: My wife made me change the alarm on my phone. It used to be Beulah’s “Score from Augusta,” because the mariachi-style horn at the beginning was guaranteed to wake me up. Except when it didn’t, or when it woke EVERYONE up. So I switched to John Roderick’s “Not Moving to Portland,” and my marriage was saved. (Plus my wife loves stupid genius jerk John Roderick.) Then my iPhone broke and I had to get a new one. It was 1AM that night and I was setting my alarm when I realized I hadn’t yet synced the new phone to my computer — the computer where “Not Moving to Portland” lives. (This is a great story, right?) So I looked for another song on my phone with an acoustic guitar intro, and that was Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again.”
How many times have I heard that song in my life? Fleetwood Mac was 12-year-old me’s first favorite band. Yet in all the years I’ve known “Never Going Back Again,” I’d never once thought about the lyrics. And I shouldn’t feel bad: there’s not much to them. But waking up to it means I hit Snooze just after the first line’s been sung — putting my response time at an impressive 15 seconds — and now every morning I hear:
She broke down and let me in
One line, separated from the next by several bars of Lindsey Buckingham’s finger picking. Three mornings in, it hit me: That’s a hell of a first line. There’s a lot in there. Depending on how you read it, there’s a whole relationship’s backstory referenced in just the first three words — if she has to break down to do something, it’s because she’s resolved not to do it. And this implies he’s been terrible to her, so our minds start working: What did he do? How did it play out the last time he was here? If you read the line rather than hearing it sung by a man, your brain starts to open up: Maybe it’s two women. Or a child who’s been locked out by his mother. In any case, why? What happens next?
(Or, because it’s a song by a rock band in the 70s, it could be that she’s relenting and having sex with him. Either/or!)
You should steal that first line from “Never Going Back Again.” Elmore Leonard would be jealous of that line, packed and efficient as it is. It’d also make a great last line to a story/chapter/novel. Don’t even look at the rest of the lyrics to the song — the point is to just start with that disconnected image, that situation, not to lift someone else’s story or sequence.
My previous wake-up song, “Not Moving to Portland*,” starts with this:
Start walking me through your basement apartment/Came without an upstairs key
Again: that’s a thing of beauty. I’ve talked before here about drawing inspiration from poetry, and while I don’t think most song lyrics are poetry, I’m pretty sure John Roderick’s are. Here again, we see the song form, which demands concision and compression, resulting in a LOT of situation loaded into 12 words. That’s certainly not always the case, but when it happens, it’s magical.
The first line to my original wake-up song, “Score From Augusta,” is this:
Ah, the room wallpaper, the pages of your letters, which you once said wrestle with the bodies that wash like unchained rivers against your shore
Me, I’d skip that one. I love the song itself, but that line doesn’t suggest a character or situation. But maybe you see that and it sparks something. That’s why we don’t all listen to one album.
When you find a first line that speaks to you, try to imagine the events surrounding or leading up to that line, or where a scene can go from there. It won’t always work for you, or the song may be through-and-through terrible. Something like “I met a devil woman/She took my heart away” from Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” is not super-evocative. But here’s another one pulled at random from my phone, from the Screaming Females’ “Little Anne”:
I sense your friends across the room, leaning, tall, and deathly ill
Right off the bat, I think of a band I once knew of where two of the guys were unusually tall heroin addicts, a combination which always makes my skin crawl. (Sorry, lanky junkies.) Image-wise, that’s a good sign. The “I sense your friends across the room” part is great, too, because it tells us these people have a quality to them that is almost tactile. And now I’m thinking of people like that, situations like that. The best moments in art, wherever you may find them, are those which are so specific it feels universal. Only Screaming Females’ Marissa Paternoster has written that exact line, yet almost anyone can find connection with it or can imagine it.
Contrast this with “I met a devil woman/She took my heart away.” Sure, we’ve all been heartbroken, but what actual connection can anyone find with a lyric that generic? It evokes no picture, no situation. (Also, really? She did all that while you were perfect and lovable and blameless? Or is anyone who doesn’t love you a devil woman, Randy Bachman?) Lyrics like this are why rock songwriting gets a bad rap.
Which highlights something I think is true about all art: When you use cliche or generalities in order to appeal to as many people as possible, you forfeit the possibility for connection. Yeah, you may get stadiums full of people chanting along with your dumb song, but they’ll never, ever think about your song after it’s over. And BTO may have piles of publishing royalties coming in forever (I like to imagine Randy Bachman flinging loonies and toonies to the side as he struts through his local Robin’s), but guys: Screaming Females are mentioned in a writing blog. Who won here today?
To be clear: “Little Anne” doesn’t make its magic by feeling all cool and subcultural while “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” is somehow populist and square. It’s that Marissa Paternoster chose better words for that first line, none of which are any more complicated or dark on their own than the ones in Bachman’s. Meanwhile, that first line of “Never Going Back Again” is seven one-syllable words.
Let’s recap:
- Steal a line
- Make something new of it
- At which point you are free to tell people (or not) where you got the idea
- Just don’t use the original line in your published/produced work
- Or this may happen.
*Note: I did end up syncing my phone with my computer, and now this song and many others that weren’t in my cloud are now safely back on my phone. I know it’s been gnawing at you the whole post.