Oh absolutely no mystery here ! To me if a music’s mystery can’t hold through the scrutiny of its writing process, it wasn’t all that mysterious to begin with.
I don’t think learning more about how something was made makes the finished artpiece any less powerful. If anything, I always enjoy pieces of art where you “see the strings” of how it was made, and it somehow still manages to move you, it stills feels like its own thing.
As for your question about the lyrics, I tried to gather my thoughts to answer you more precisely.
Lyrics are something I think about all the time, and they’re a crucial part of my writing process. They can inform what kind of “attitude” I want the song to have, they can impact a whole part of the song’s structure, if I want a specific sentence to appear at a specific time. As such, the writing of the lyrics is really intertwined with the writing of the songs, sometimes it comes very early on, I’ll do a sketch on the OPZ, or write something with the acoustic guitar, and I’ll have a bunch of ideas and themes that start to take shape in my head. Most of the time, very early on, the “feel” of what the song needs to convey appears through a connection of words and sounds, or words and harmonies, or words and rhythms.
I say “the feel” because it’s not necessarily a “theme” or a “narrative”, I’m not into making songs that say something specific, it’s more exciting and fullfilling for me to create strings of words that convey a meaning aching more to a sensory experience. When you feel the wind on your skin, and you enjoy or dislike that feeling, the wind on your skin isn’t “making sense” in the usual lexical way, and you feeling it isn’t telling a story, yet there’s a kind of meaning to it, a connection to something deeper you can’t quite reduce into a word. I want my words to generate these kind of things, in that sense, I’m not afraid to “make no sense”, but I’m also very concerned of what I’m saying because it’s uneasy to challenge meaning. So once I feel like the connection between the words and the music creates that kind of sensation, it’s all about balance and that’s where most of the work goes.
I must precise though, that this doesn’t mean I reject actual meaning as a whole, first because you can’t (even your choice of instruments carry cultural / social signifiers), second because if I wasn’t interested in words I wouldn’t use them at all and stick to instrumental. What interests me about words, is the space between their meaning and the impression they make from interpretating them. I don’t think there’s such thing as an “honest” word, they always seem to mean something but make us feel something else on top of it. I think poetic is about exploiting the hidden force in between those two things, harnessing the doubt under the words. And music, by creating a setting for them to be expressed in, can enhance that power and make words and ideas that much more powerful.
That’s why sometimes I know a lyrics line or verse has to be at a precise point in time, but the music I’ve written didn’t quite match that, doesn’t add much to it, so I’ll work on the instrumentation over and over until it does. Sometimes it’s the opposite, I’ll find a new instrumentation or harmony that’s got such a strong force to it, that it’s pushing the song in a direction the lyrics can’t follow, or it’s weakened by it, and if they’re not as powerful to me than the music, or not connecting to it in some meaningful way, then I’ll either change them or even just take them out of the song altogether.
Sorry if this is a little all over the place but as you can see, it’s very hard for me to put into words the complex mechanics of using “words” to go beyond their meaning, and using the partially abstracted artform that is “music” to generate new forms of meaning through words.
So, I feel like I’ve partially answered that question already but yes I do and no I don’t it really depends. Obviously the last song “The Bird, The Bones” (or not obviously what do I know!) has been written on the Piano first. Then I jammed on it with norns and a folk guitar which is all the little bits of stereo fx sounds you hear left and right. But also “Misaligned” was written on the OPZ (even if in the end there’s almost nothing left of the original jam, except I used the OPZ to sequence the arpegiatted sounds made on a Vermona Perfourmer throughout the track). So it’s kind of a split. I love acoustic instruments, and I love how they keep me in check about the harmonies and the overall “flow” of what I’m writing, the human nature of it and the imperfection that stems from it. But then I also feel frustrated at some point that I rely so much on muscle memory to the point that it’s hard to fight that and be creative. Which is where the electronic gear comes into play, because I feel much more freedom from myself when writing through electronic means than I do when sitting with an acoustic instrument.
I also do a lot of little percussions to trigger ideas and rhythms and they’re often a good starting point for a song. I made myself a little “toy table” corner where I can play and record and bang on various little things that make noise and it’s a very nice way to start things up. It looks something like this (the toothbrush on the left has bells in its handle and sounds fantastic by the way) :
I hope this was an interesting answer that justified writing such a long post !
