For me it starts in the shower...
I have lost count {actually, I never started} of the number of songs or fragments of songs or melodies or instrument parts that have come to me while I've been in the bath or the shower. Because I'll spend 2 to 3 hours reading in the bath, when I'm on a roll, I'll take my dictaphone into the bathroom with me. There have been loads of times when I haven't though, and I've had to shout really loud to one of my kids downstairs {an achievement in itself as they're often on headphones} to get my dictaphone up to me as an idea has come and I know that unless I get it down there and then, I'll forget it. Actually, it's not so much that I'll forget it, it just won't stay lodged in my head. I'll keep humming the part over and over but distract me for a minute, or if I'm thinking about the deoderant or remembering the perfumed oil for my feet or whatever, it's more often than not, gone. And on occasion, I've had to jump out of the bath and soak up the house running downstairs in the
Noddy Holder because no one was in and I had to get to the dictaphone !
Dang and durn that inspiration !
For me it starts with a seed.
The seed can be anything . . . a phrase that pops into my head, a fragment of a tune that I hear somewhere, a suggestion made by someone, an image, a dream, an emotion, a story told to me . . . anything could be a trigger.
Sometimes the words will come first, sometimes the tune.
This is me all over. There is simply no one way a song will come. Pretty much every song I've ever written or co~written has a story attached, most of which are long, involved and convoluted !
For example, in my sig there's a link to a song called "Bath days." That was the last song I ever recorded on my Tascam 8 track cassette portastudio, back in 2011. I even remember the date I wrote and recorded it ~ 22nd September. I'm
almost sure it was a Thursday, just because of where I was on my delivery round. I remember the date because I have three friends with that day as their birthday and I was thinking of them when the words:
"Bambi, Varuni and Ammittai
Shared birthdays on the same day."
They were their real names {well, Bambi's wasn't but everyone except me called her that. Even her parents and 4 sisters used to call her Bambi. I don't think anyone even knew her actual name, but I did because I'd asked}. Funnily enough, I'd included Varuni in a song about 13 years previous to that called "Varuni's bag." My initial intention was to write this deep and meaningful song about life and friends and strained or broken friendships and growth and loss and the things we pass through that make us who we are. But after trying for a few minutes, as I was driving, to come up with the next line to take the song on, I just came up with:
"But I simply couldn't be bothered to work this song out
In any depth or in any meaningful way !"
and in a bout of warped humour, I changed the "birthdays" to "bath days." I had a good laugh at that but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it so I decided that was going to be it. Deep and meaningful could go with some other song. I wrote it down on one of my delivery sheets and then this cutey pie melody came to me and I thought "that'd make a nice bit of lead guitar" {It became the intro}. The whole thing was done in about 15 minutes, but it
is a very short song. When I got home, I worked it out on guitar and recorded it just like that. Put some harmonica on it and called it finished. I was pleased with it because it was written in a period where I was consciously trying to write really short songs. My tunes were generally anything from 6 to 35 minutes and I was curious as to whether I could actually keep a song interesting {to me} in just 2~3 minutes. At first it felt like they were so incomplete. My intros were sometimes longer than that !