What songs inspire you to write?
It's impossible to say because it's so coincidental.
What I mean by that is this; no song in particular inspires me to write or to put it a better way, I'm not in need of having to listen to any in order to write. I never sit down with the intention of "right now, I'm going to write a song." They literally just come. They could come at any time, in any guise, under any pretext. They've come in conversations, while making love, on the toilet, while driving, out walking, waiting in a long line waiting to get into a supermarket during the covid lockdown, in the bath and the shower, eating dinner, babysitting, while watching TV or a movie {once, an idea came part way into a movie I was at the cinema watching with my wife & our friends and I had to spend over an hour humming it till the film ended and I was able to get to a phone to ring the house and then hum it into the answering machine !}
A couple of examples.
i]Back in December, I'd just watched a video about unusual time signatures and as I was setting off for work, I played mouth drums to the beat of Mahogany Rush's "Hey little lover" which is in 5/4. As I played mouth drums and added all the extra flourishes that I would have put in if I could actually play the drums, a riff jumped into my head in 5/4 and so I ran to my dictaphone to get it down so I'd remember it. Then as I was going out the door another pattern in the same time signature but a different emphasis and feel came so I rushed to get that down too. Later, I worked on both. They ended up in different songs. One of them is joined to a song I wrote based on something my sister used to sing. It was her taking the piss out of something racist that used to be said to us when we were kids in not so enlightened early 70s London. The other piece was joined to what was initially going to be my attempt at a really raw basic piece of punk. Both have turned out pretty cool although neither is totally finished yet.
ii]I was singing a song in a dream and I forced myself to get up and hum it in my dictaphone. Went back to sleep and 3 more times, the same thing happened. So I added them to the song and eventually came up with 4 more verses for a total of 8. The arrangement was fairly straightforward in each verse.
Anyway, in our local newsagent shop, I deliver the newspapers in the early hours of the morning and while I'm quickly sorting out the papers into the order I'm going to deliver them, sometimes, the radio in the shop is playing. The shop owner is from Pakistan and she or whoever is first in the shop that morning has the radio on a station that plays either Indian or Pakistani music. Because I love Indian music, it naturally catches my ear, not necessarily consciously listening but aware that it's there and something is playing. But there is one tune I've been hearing over and over since January and the beat and pattern of the percussion obviously seeped into my mind and at some point decided that verses 5 and 6 of the song I'd written {now sporting the somewhat challenging title of "Little princess of boast"} would be patterned after that particular piece I've been hearing for months. Which then led to the idea of different styles for the verses per se, in groups of 2, so verses 7&8 are in a reggae flavoured style and verses 1 & 2 have an acoustic guitar pattern reminiscent of the guitar strumming pattern of "All my loving."
That's what I mean when I say it's coincidental. As I'm riding about delivering the papers or walking to work, I'm listening to music {it could be from pretty much any genre going} on my ipod and I will sometimes incorporate an aspect of what I'm listening to into a song I'm working on. It may be a direct lift of a musical passage that I'm going to massage into something new, it may be a particular instrument and the way it's played, it may be a harmony that has sparked off a train of musical thought in my head, it may be a production idea that I think would be an idea to experiment with. But whatever it is, it's never intentional. Had I not been listening to that particular piece, the idea might not have struck me. I don't have to be in any particular mood to write songs. Moods aren't important for me to get a song together. Since I started writing pieces of music on my bass back in the early 80s the tunes have just kept on coming and since I actually started crafting whole songs in the early 90s, I've never been able to stop. I'll even steal ideas from myself.