Do you remember your first songs ?

[grimtraveller]

As a kind of encouragement to those who have yet to write their own songs or who are currently finding it difficult or who have 'writer's block' {such as it is}, I thought it might be fun to cast our minds back to the first songs we came up with.

Can you recall the first song you wrote ? What do you recall about it and what made you want to write songs in the first place ?
Do you cringe with embarrasment thinking about them now or do you feel they were good efforts that stand up still ? Are there any lines or musical parts you'd happilly consign to oblivion ?
This includes music and lyrics, either singularly or together and also collaborations if your first songs were written with others. Were the songs very much "you" or were they obviously derivative ?

 

[Spazhands]

I remember sat in my old bedroom with my partner in grime drinking real cider and staring at a blank Ableton screen. That evening in particular we just ended up messing around with his Roland synth and not much more!! But we did get a riff down off my crappy old strat and went from there. We never really had much deliberation, it was more like "what does this track need" it just built and built until it sounded like it needed no more. I listened to it upon reading this thread, musically it is there... quality not so much!

 

[StevenJacksonMu]

I remember it with great fondness sitting down with my friend Sean and writing a song called 'Watchers' then 'When I Saw Her Smiling Face'.
I loved those songs then and I still love them.
There was a 'naiveness' to it ...we couldn't care less about quality or any of that stuff, it was just a lot of fun.
We recorded those 2 songs many times, on a crappy cassette recorder, on a better crappy cassette recorder, on a 4 track cassette recorder and then on an 8 track reel-to-reel.
I still think the best of those was on the 4 track cassette.
That was a great time, I didn't realize it then, but I do now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td0JjeEZvfo

 

[Armistice]

I did teen angst pretty badly from memory, but a few later efforts I can vaguely remember...

I didn't know enough about music to write good stuff then.

Now that I do, I don't know enough about people to get them to listen.

It's a journey...

I used to specialise (a bit later) in instrumental guitar... easy to trot out a pre-thought piece you'd written months ago when looking into that special someone's eyes (whoever that was at the time) and say, "I wrote this for you..."

What a liar I was... there's a song on my first album called "Comets" that had about 6 girl's names before that at various stages, although to me it was always "Comets" - written when Halley's Comet was around... used to trot it out all the time! They loved it...

Sensitive New Age Guitarist....

 

[bdenton]

It was when Elton John's "Your Song" came out...

When I heard it, I thought, "If that can be a #1 hit then I can write songs, too.

If not my first then one of my earliest (with apologies to Jim Peterik and the Ides of March; I kinda lifted parts of the melody from "Vehicle")...

I see you in your tie-dyed clothes, you wear the latest style
But when it comes to things that count you miss it by a mile
You're standing on the corner there with all your straight-brained friends
But girl you know your time on top is coming to an end

That song got worse, but I did get better as a songwriter...

 

[bdenton]

I did teen angst pretty badly from memory, but a few later efforts I can vaguely remember...

I didn't know enough about music to write good stuff then.

Now that I do, I don't know enough about people to get them to listen.

It's a journey...

I used to specialise (a bit later) in instrumental guitar... easy to trot out a pre-thought piece you'd written months ago when looking into that special someone's eyes (whoever that was at the time) and say, "I wrote this for you..."

What a liar I was... there's a song on my first album called "Comets" that had about 6 girl's names before that at various stages, although to me it was always "Comets" - written when Halley's Comet was around... used to trot it out all the time! They loved it...

Sensitive New Age Guitarist....

It was kinda cool growing up in the 50's and 60's...

My favorite "party riff" is just C - F - G and sometimes Am, and playing a medley of all of the songs from that era with girl's names in them. There are about 30 songs from that era that have a girl's name in it, and I can usually manage to "hit" at least a couple of girls with my medley...

 

[tonesponge]

I think I was four or five years old when I wrote my first song. It was called "The Birthday Bee," and my parents made me sing it to all the relatives who proclaimed it to be the sh*t.

Don't get me wrong. It was no "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," but it was good in its own way.

My latest efforts are but futile attempts to recapture those glory days.

 

[D_Vincent]

Its been so long ago I cant really remember the first song I wrote...Im pretty sure I wrote some songs when I first started playing guitar however I cant remember them.

 

[Dogbreath]

I wrote my first song when I was 8. It was pretty cheesy.

but it had a good beat.

 

[Xdrummer]

I clearly remember the first song I "wrote" (actually co-wrote). One of the first cover bands I was in were jamming on a Saturday afternoon (it was about 1967) and came up with what we thought was a very cool groove. I started to sing some lyrics and a couple of the other guys offered some words here and there.

We reached an agreement on the final song "format" and recorded live to a 1/4" 2 track reel to reel (this was long before cassettes, CDs or hard disc recording). From the start of the jam to the live recording probably lated 2-3 hours.

We hauled that huge 2 track out Satuday night to a party, playing "our song" for whoever would listen ...... and received huge ego boosts as people told us it (and we) were destined for greatness.

In hindsight (with the advantage of some 40 more years of writing playing and recording), the song sucked and we were not all that gifted as musicians - but the joy of actually creating an original "work of art" and the pride of having people hear and respond to our creation fueled what has gone on to be a very long profesional/semi-professional musical career.

 

[moresound]

I was very young and could barely talk let alone make sentences but my mom said that I use to go around the house singing *poo poo is good*

 

[Armistice]

I was very young and could barely talk let alone make sentences but my mom said that I use to go around the house singing *poo poo is good*

Would you say that your work has matured over the years, more?

 

[FunkDaddy]

I remember my first lyric, wrote it as I was bored on the bus coming home from drum lessons.

Can't remember my first song.

 

[Greg_L]

I remember a few my first songs. Very well. They're not really any different from what I write now. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I recorded one of them as a bonus track for my next album.

 

[moresound]

Would you say that your work has matured over the years, more?

No ..... No I can't Armistice same old poo poo. But it's good!

 

[Cwadroon]

When I was eleven, I traded my bmx bike(and at eleven back then, your bike was your life! lol)to a kid down the street for his geetar. And yeah, definately the first songs were not good at all ahaahah. But by 17, I had a tascam portastudio, tables, guitars,a bass and a beat machine and was getting the hang of it a little better. I actually pulled that unit out the other day and was impressed by what I recorded back then, and how much more involved and exact you had to be when recording like that compared to computer software.

 

[grimtraveller]

My initial song attempts weren't really serious or with any goal in mind. I didn't know what I was doing, didn't know why I was doing it; it was just something that I 'did'. I still don't know why. When I was 12 and learning the cello, I grew to hate it {I love it now...} but I did write one song on it. It was very simple, just running from the lowest string to the highest, via the two middle ones and back with variations. 35 years ago it might've been but I can still remember it now. It didn't even have a title. [It wasn't until over 30 years later that I even began to consider it a song].
Then about a year later, my two cousins and I were messing about with a cassette recorder and we formed a group for a couple of hours and called ourselves the Autotroughs ! We got the name from a dictionary. None of us played anything, we just put our lyrics to existing tunes. I was 13 at the time and the lyrics were awful. We did one to the tune of "Bony Moronie" that had the immortally rubbish lines
"I know a girl called Boney Maronie/She's as skinny as a stick of macaroni/She hates him, he hates me/And we had a fight beneath the apple tree/ And I banged his head against the tree".

We weren't on drugs, honest.
I hadn't even heard of "Bony Moronie" at the time, my cuz taught me it. But whenever I hear it, I think of that stupid song and my cousin Maureen.
We did another that day to the tune of "Pharoah's song" from 'Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat'. This one was more 'me' influenced as it concerned this fat racist at my school. It was quite derogatory as I recall, casting aspersions about his weight, but I only remember the opening lines;
"Well I was wandering along by the banks of the river/When 7 fat Linnanes bombed me out of the sky, uh huh huh !". Linnane was the surname of the guy in question. It was great fun to do and long before I was conscious of such a thing, I was projecting feelings and angst into song. To be honest, that realization has only just occurred to me as I type this.

With a couple of mates at school around the same time, we'd put our own lyrics to Beatle tunes; I always laughed at "Fake Stripper" which went to the tune of "Day tripper" with it's maulingly embarrassing chorus of "She was a fake stripper, padded knockers, yeah !/ It took me sooooo long to find out ~but I found out !" Believe it or not, they get worse. That's actually the least putrid of the lot. We were only 13 !
One of my friends that actually played the guitar and I improvised a short ditty called "Sweet F.A" which is an English phrase that means 'nothing' (often changed to sweet Fanny Adams or sweet Felicity Arkwright). Good thing the tape was running. As I recall, the music was good (it sort of nicked a pattern that this other kid that was known as Grog, had written. His real name was Colin. He was a short but tough kid from Manchester and played a mean guitar at 15) and my on the spot lyrics were probably worthy of death or deportation.....

 

[ido1957]

My first song is posted on my Soundclick Page. "Overtime with Phil Traynor". Cassette recording. Every song since then is there too but tend to be recorded betteras I moved shortly therafter to ADAT. The last half dozen are straight to computer.

 

[rayc]

I rerecorded it last year: "Whisper" on the soundclick page. It was/is a collaboration with Eric Drabwell & we've recently begun writing together again across the Pacific mind!
It sprang forth fully formed.
We did a few others in that year but the 1st one stands out as the most "complete".
I guess it's a case of all the ideas waiting to be used...

 

[grimtraveller]

By the time I was 17 I had gotten big time into the Stones, Floyd, Zeppelin and Uriah Heep. But it was Deep Purple that provided the final push into seriously writing. One saturday afternoon, I wrote the lyrics to three songs, "Natural music man", "Renegade lady midnight" and "Abandon is the aim". They were abysmal. They were so bad that even I want to sue me ! The chorus of "Natural music man" was to the chorus tune of Deep Purple's "Speed King" and went;
"Coz I'm the natural music man
The black rhythm answer to all your fantasies" !!!

AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH !!.

Shoot me now ! I'll come quietly....

"Renegade lady midnight" was about a friend who was a prostitute and needed a loving rescue. Totally made up, and I can't recall a thing about it except the title and subject matter. The only noteworthy thing about it is that it was years before I ever heard or even heard of "Roxanne". 'Abandon is the aim' was another piece of total crap. It was my attempt to be all rebellious and break down all conventional values, even though I believed in most of them ! It's effectiveness and estimation in my eyes can be seen from the fact that I can't remember a single line from it. I do recall however, that each verse had three lines, the last of each being 'abandon is the aim'.
After these dismal attempts, I didn't write anything for a couple of years and then, lyrically I only came up with fragments here and there. I concluded that I couldn't write lyrics. But I wasn't distraught because by then I was learning the bass and I was writing bits of actual music, having worked out how to send the bass through my tape deck mic input and stereo amp.