On Monday I went to Brighton to meet up with collaborator and friend James. He had agreed to help me turn my tiny song ‘Happy New Year’ into a whole song. Before our session, my main task was to finish writing it.
The original tiny song has just one verse and a chorus, and it goes like this:
city closed, by the coast I wander silent as a ghost
I didn’t eat, but I drank enough to filter out the cold
I can hear a firework and some song I don’t know
someone’s kissing someone and they’re raising up a toast
happy new year, happy new year, happy new year
happy new year, happy new year, happy new year
I don’t think I’ve ever spent a hogmanay (as we call NYE in Scotland) completely alone, but the idea of just wandering the streets as some kind of liminal being whilst everyone distantly celebrates inspired this song. Having laid the emotional groundwork in that first verse, the chorus of “happy new year”s sound cynical. Oh, I’m alone on new year’s eve!
I had to write a second verse and originally wanted to keep it in the same tone, cynical and apathetic. I wanted to include a couple of lines about the narrator losing a job at a perfume shop because they couldn’t smell after COVID. But it just seemed too doom-y, and kind of laughably bad. Also, any mention of COVID would completely date the song.
When writing, doom is easy. I think when we’re all teenagers, writing our first short stories for class, we opt for doom. We think we need to be serious, and doom… well, doom is serious. When I was 16 I wrote a short story for English about people getting lost in a wood and becoming part of a Grimms fairytale, but all with unhappy endings. Dark fairytales must be to teenage girls what the Joker is to teen boys. Edgy! Different! I’m so twisted, my mind is so twiistteeddddd!!!
Doom is a cliche when used without measure. It’s just as cliche as joy, if not more so.
In my songwriting, too, I would often opt for doom. In my late teens and early twenties I’d sing about how guys didn’t want to date me, and really milked every tragic or merely inconvenient interaction for all the songwriting juice it could render. Kissed me and then told me you had a girlfriend? Doom, doom for days! Didn’t say hello to me at the traffic light? Doom!!!
I’ve sourced one of my most doomy songs to share with you here. Just a snippet of the lyrics though, because back then I was attempting to be the female Elvis Costello, which I thought I could achieve if I sang like I had marbles permanently stuck up my nose.
My eyes are just tired, they’re not red I’m not crying
So many people look down and they sigh, you and I
Are wasting our time
Toeing the line
Don’t ask if I’m fine, I’m just wasting my time
And of course my whole EP Hurricane is also rather… gloomy. Which I guess is what you’d expect out of songs which were written after a breakup. I actually got called out by someone mentoring me who said I wrote “slow, self-analysis ballads.” Ouch!
Regardless of the fact that I have written happy songs (When You Walk In, many of my tiny songs), I had to make a concerted effort when writing the rest of Happy New Year to make it not doomy.
I thought about times on New Year’s Eve when I had been alone, or felt alone. My strongest memory was of new years' 2011. I was in Edinburgh at the time, in my second year of university. My pals and I had gone out on the streets with a bottle of sparkling wine to skirt around the street party which we didn’t have tickets for, but if you’re in the right place you can see the firework show at midnight. When the bells rang we were on Rose Street, one street away from the big party. As the countdown neared its end, I detached from my gaggle of friends and sprinted down the pedestrian avenue to see — between a crack in the buildings — a burst of fireworks.
In that moment I didn’t know where my friends were, I was completely alone and felt it as I stood there, but it wasn’t a sad alone. It was a different kind, a feeling of “something is going to happen.” One of those special moments when you just feel in communion with yourself and the big, wide universe.
So I took that feeling and tried to sprinkle it in to the second verse of ‘Happy New Year.’ Not to create an overwhelming feeling of JOY, no, it’s too early in the song for that, but to just give that alone-ness some ambiguity. Is it good? Is it bad? The second verse ends with the line,
I’m on the edge of something good or nothing else at all
And then I wrote a happy bridge. So by the time we end the song, the '“happy new year”s aren’t cynical anymore.
When I listen to some really great songwriting, I realise that songs can take you on a journey. A song doesn’t necessarily have to be a snapshot of one emotion, they can actually be a vehicle that carries you from one emotion to the next. I remember when I worked with Findlay Napier and Boo Hewerdine on their Bird on a Wire songwriting course, they challenged us to write a song where the refrain actually meant something different every time it repeated, just through the context created by the verses inbetween.
Obviously, ‘Happy New Year’ isn’t going to be released until much later this year. But if you are curious, there’s a snippet of the bridge in this Instagram post.
things i liked
✶ I’ve been going to Foyles’ cafe once a week to write this newsletter and I gotta say, as much as the coffee is incredbily average, if you get there when the scones just come out of the oven, it’s great
✶ I’ve watched Love is Blind seasons 1 and 2, and was swithering over whether to watch 3, but this has just sealed the deal for me:
✶ Taylor Swift’s Midnights is out and at first listen I was not convinced. But, like most of her work in recent years, it grows on you. My current favourite is ‘Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve.’
✶ Also this Caroline Polachek song is greattttttt
Bing bong! It’s the end of the newsletter. Thank you for reading, as always. Keep your eyes peeled for things…. soon……….
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Olivia 🌈🎶