To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest

So I've been doing a fair amount of songwriting lately. Most of the results have not yet made it to the recording phase (though as soon as they do, you can be sure you'll see them here, not to mention here and here.) Self-promotion aside, the reason I bring it up is that I've been struggling a bit with the concept of originality. Every song, at a certain level, seems to have been written before. No chord progression is quite unfamiliar, and every rhyme seems to have been around the block once or twice at least. There are, of course, notable exceptions (a recent favorite of mine, from the Magnetic Fields: "I want you crawling back to me / down on your knees yeah / like an appendectomy / sans anesthesia"). But on the whole, this sort of tricky wordplay only serves to illustrate the tremendous difficulty of coming up with something new.

That said, there is also an art to ripping something off. You can't just copy wholesale, but many a great song takes a few liberties with its influences. A borrowed lyric here, a scrap of an old favorite melody there, throw in the bridge from a jazz standard with a ii chord in the place of a IV, and you've got a brand new song. Of course there's not necessarily anything wrong with this. Dylan did it. Shakespeare did it. As Jonathan Lethem writes, "Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture." (for much more on this topic, take a look at The Ecstasy of Influence). Nonetheless, a certain anxiety rises in me every time I borrow a lyric, and inspires the urge to write this long disclaimer.

So here's one of my songs, along with a list of the various influences I cribbed from. Consider it a piece of a cultural map, or a bibliography, perhaps. I was going to post mp3s of the whole batch, but ironically enough it seems that copyright violation could be grounds for the whole blog to get deleted. So for now - find them on your own - and then write an angry letter to Blogger about the importance of the cultural commons. But don't tell them I suggested it...

Day Laborers and Petty Intellectuals - Sixpence
Sing a Song of Sixpence, Pocketful of Rye (nursery rhyme)
Ella Fitzgerald (among many versions) - It's Only a Paper Moon
Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven
Daniel Johnston - Devil Town
The Hold Steady - Massive Nights
The National - Fake Empires
Johnny Cash - I Walk the Line
and many more...