Music Think Tank - MTT Open

The Joy of Songwriting

by Kilissa Cissoko

Ah ha!! This morning I realized that writing a song is very much like cooking! Perhaps I thought of it because in the car on the way home from dropping my son at daycamp I heard on NPR a review of a movie about Julia Childs. When I got home I set to work sketching out a new song and it came to me that I’m engaged in “The Joy of Songwriting”!

So, that’s the premise—here’s the connection. A delicious meal evolves through a set series of lovingly tended stages. My songs emerge through a comparable process. I hope the results are delicious!

prep – includes planning and shopping! (listening, studying, reading about music, absorbing!!)
deciding on the cuisine… flavors, styles (style, genre)
selecting a dish (song topic, hook, etc)
chopping, washing, getting ingredients together (sorting through the ideas)
heating the pan (turning on the amp, the computer, tuning the guitar!)
sautéing the onions, garlic (getting warmed up, trying out ideas)
searing, stir-frying (getting the outer edges fixed, reigning in the ideas, finding the boundaries)
steaming, simmering (deepening into the ideas, digging into the spirit of the emerging song)
tasting (running through the song so far, recording rough demos, playbacks)
adding spice (putting in details, lyrical, melodic, harmonic, instrumental)
curing the sauce (rehearsing, refining)
getting the side dishes ready – (different sections of the song are like the salad, the rice)
baking, roasting (letting it sit and mellow for a while)
setting the table (organizing a recording, or performance)
gathering the guests (getting together musicians, audience)
enjoying the meal (performing, enjoying)
…and… lest we forget… the cleanup! (winding cables, making backups!!!)

So, when you are cooking and sitting down to eat, imagine that you just wrote a song! And I hope to be serving up songs to suit the appetite!

Kilissa Cissoko is a songwriter of longstanding on the Buffalo indie music scene.

www.kilissa.com.

www.myspace.com/kilissacissoko