(October 10th) Jack Kerouac Literary Festival, Talk and Reading

                On October 10^th, 3:30 PM I was at the talk and reading by Tanya Donelly and Rick Moody. Tanya is a Grammy nominated musician and Rick Moody is a novelist and short story writer. Both of them discussed how they craft songs and talked about their experiences with music and its meaning. Some questions asked in this talk were: Do songs have plot? Can songs be like a narrative like that in writing? How important are lyrics in songs?

                Rick and Tanya both spoke about how music can be a narrative just like writing, how it can have a storyline, and how it can convey a message. They connected Jack Kerouac with this in that Kerouac could write in a musical direction without being encumbered by plot. So basically, they were saying that the best lyrics are worked fast and not overlabored. Too much time trying to come up with lyrics for a deep plot, they argued, takes away from the musical direction of the song, and instead interferes with its flow. With this, it also implies that Kerouac’s writings are able to flow nicely without harping on any conflict or plot too much, giving it a musical feel when thought of abstractly.

                A person from the audience wanted some advice on how to write song lyrics, that she thought too hard and still was at an obstacle for coming up with lyrics. Both Moody and Donelly agreed that the songs don’t come from the instruments, but instead the lyrics are the first step that get thought of at “opportune times” that aren’t expected. So basically they recommended getting the lyrics down first and then doing the melody later, because they said coming up with a melody first limits what you can do for lyrics. For instance, Moody and Donelly played a song they created called “Meteor Shower”. This song piece originated from when Donelly one day woke up at a very early time, I think 4 am, to go to the beach and watch the meteor shower in the sky. With this imagery and his memory, he came up with a song about it, doing the lyrics first to get a clear sense of where the song is headed.

                One could wonder if writers ever feel lonely. Moody, being a novelist and short story writer, admitted that writing life is rather solitary. Moody said he picked up music because playing music with other people created a sense of discovery and creativity. With music, Moody wasn’t just doing things alone like in his writing, and he also thought that music could make you discover yourself and unleash your creativity in a musical form to express to others. He brought up a point about how songs are a short story, being a few minutes in length. Prose, he described, could be seen as a songwriting impulse at great length. Writing is much longer than what you’d see in usual song lyrics, but writing can also be written in a way that is musical; this also goes back to how Donelly and Moody said that Kerouac could write in a musical direction, giving his works flow and not suffering from the weight of too much plot.

                Moody and Donelly played several songs for the audience, a few of them their own creations, and discussed how they remembered the songs. Moody talked about a song that had an odd time signature, and that he didn’t try memorizing the time signature, but rather tried an intuitive approach at “feeling” what the notes would be played as in an attempt to not overcomplicate playing the song. So rather than switching from 7/16 time signature to 4/4 in certain sections, he would “get a feel” and just play the notes and not think too much about it. There were interesting melodies played, and even though the lyrics were hard to understand from the microphone being too loud, I was able to appreciate how they incorporated a story into a song while making the melody match and flow nicely.

                After this reading and talk was done, I consider stories I’ve read that try too hard to delve into plot, and they don’t flow nicely and it winds up not being fun to read. I like stories that you can think into while not harping too much on the plot, and stories that can be understood more clearly with a better flow. A song can be a concise story, and I think stories could be more like songs in the sense that they don’t need to be verbose to get a point across. Considering that these people said Kerouac was able to write in a musical direction and have a flow in his writing without restricting it to plot, I can see this as an admirable trait Kerouac had for his writings.