A Song For You

On Lyrics, Empowerment Through Songwriting & Transformation Through Song

‘I’ve been so many places

In my life and time

I’ve sung so many songs

I’ve made some bad rhymes

I've acted out my life in stages

With ten thousand people watching

But we're alone now

And I'm singing this song to you’

A Song For You by Donny Hathaway

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been typing the lyrics of all my recorded songs into the internet, as the distribution software I use now has the functionality to add lyrics to streaming services. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while and I keep not getting around to it because I have a fairly terrible personal filing system and I can never find a complete collection of my lyrics, printed or digital. So I decided just to bite the bullet and transcribe them as I listened. Of course I couldn’t find my headphones either so I listened at a volume of 1 on my phone, holding it up to my ear as I typed, like a weird little fairy whispering secrets to me, so as not to drive my family crazy - we were all home dealing with our mild bout of Covid. Half the time I struggled to understand what I was singing and my words were strangely unfamiliar. I’d type up the wrong lyric and be baffled by myself and then suddenly the right words would emerge through the fog and I’d find the girl I remembered being when I wrote the song.

I don’t tend to listen to my own albums, unless I’m singing along to re-learn a song for an upcoming show, so it was quite a journey through time and space.

Most of my songs come with a physical jolt attached - some take me to darkened bedrooms, some to a car pulled over on the side of the road, to lying on the ground looking through the trees, an old studio couch, a doctor’s waiting room, a nightclub bathroom. You can’t choose where inspiration strikes. Sometimes I’ll be mid conversation with someone when a word flips a switch inside and the voice of whoever I’m talking to recedes into a low hum as I smile and nod politely while my neurons begin firing and clunkily arranging and rearranging words inside the candlelit cavern of my brain.

I wrote a song about this very thing with my dad called Songs Don’t Care, I’m sure any songwriters out there will relate:

Songs don’t care if you’re sleepin’

Or if you’re standing at the kitchen sink

Songs don’t care if nobody’s listening

Songs don’t care what anyone thinks

Songs don’t care if the baby’s cryin’

Or if you gotta go to work

Songs don’t care, songs don’t care, songs don’t care.

For me, songs have always been a way of making sense of things, giving them a shape I can understand. Sometimes I find what I need in a song that already exists, sometimes its necessary to write it myself.

I decided to learn how to play Chrissy Amphlett’s anthemic Boys In Town to sing on my book tour, as I’d written about the impact the song had on me as a very young teenager and was also fascinated by my research into it that revealed Chrissy wrote it almost as an exorcism, or as a way to turn her powerlessness into strength. Of course I already knew all the words, they were seared into me by a lifetime of repeated listening.

Chrissy Amphlett interview in Songwriters Speak: Conversations about creating music, by Debbie Kruger 2005

I sung it outside of the safety of my bedroom, in a bookstore in a mall at my first book event for ‘Lovers Dreamers Fighters’ on Friday night. It felt powerful to sing, the words both exposed and held close so much darkness and so much resolve. It wasn’t my story, but I could feel it, and half the people there told me after how much the song meant to them. It’s a song that somehow hits a raw nerve inside people and makes them feel less alone, defiant or more understood. People held it close to their hearts. I bet Chrissy never imagined her song would outlive her and be sung in a bookstore by a woman in a floral maxi dress who’d loved it for forty years when she wrote it in a bathtub fuelled by hot tears and disappointment.

I’d flown to Melbourne on the busiest airport day of the year - or indeed in recent memory - and it was totally bonkers, lines snaking out the door onto the street just to walk through security. It took me almost two hours to get to my gate. I somehow knew they were going to lose my beloved Telecaster ‘White Chocolate’ before they did. Luckily I was in Music City and help was at hand - my buddy Joel Silbersher kindly brought me his beloved SG ‘Cherry’ to play instead.

He told me he’d played it in God and Hoss and it was a good one. I believed him. I believe experiences and memories live on inside/underneath/within objects and places and songs even, that there’s as much going on underneath as there is on the surface. I felt a little bit emotional when I thought about playing the same instrument that Joel had wrung songs like ‘My Pal’ from. ‘My Pal’ also transforms pain into power, delivering the raw, unfiltered experience of teenage isolation and is undoubtedly one of the greatest songs in the Australian canon, with the unforgettable lyric ‘you’re my only friend and you don’t even like me’. It hurts but it hurts so good.

Here’s a little excerpt from my book, talking about Loretta Lynn’s empowerment through songwriting:

To Loretta, songwriting was not only an escape from poverty, but

also an outlet for her bottled-up frustrations, a way to express her

innermost feelings safely in an era when women were expected to put

up and shut up. ‘When Doolittle would do something, I would write it.

If I’d said it to him, “Why”, he would’ve smacked me down. But I could

write it, and sing it, and say, “There!” You know? “Take that!”’ ‘Don’t

Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)’ got Loretta her

first gold record – and the first gold record any female country singer

had ever won. She also got the ultimate revenge on the women who

would flirt with her husband, while delivering a constant reminder to

her man that he should appreciate who he was married to, with songs

such as her number one hit ‘Fist City’. That one has a poetic knockout

punch: about being a real woman and serving up a fist-shaped meal.*

Loretta noted cockily that those songs made her a lot of money too.

Songwriting can be a little like the Japanese art of kintsugi: taking

broken things and putting them back together with gold, embracing

the breaks, the flaws, remaking them stronger and more beautiful.

*Due to legal reasons, I wasn’t allowed to print Loretta’s Fist City lyrics in the book, but this is the internet where anything goes, so here is Verse 2 in all it’s glory;

Come on and tell me what you told my friends
If you think you're brave enough
And I'll show you what a real woman is
Since you think you're hot stuff
You'll bite off more than you can chew
If you get too cute or witty 

You better move your feet

If you don't wanna eat

A meal that's called fist city

Its goddamn subversive genius, served up with a wink and a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-mouth smile. At the end of this video the host says to Loretta, ‘You sounded like you was singing at somebody’ and she replies ‘you’re doggone right!’.

I want to hear about your transformative songs - songs that fill you with fortitude and take you to a place where you feel tougher, triumphant, less alone. Please share in the comments and I’ll make a good playlist from them that I’ll share later. I live for this stuff.

PS: If you happen to reside in Sydney, Brisbane or Canberra, Australia, here are the details of my upcoming book events - I’d love to see you there!

THURSDAY 21st APRIL - BERKELOUW PADDINGTON, SYDNEY

In Conversation with Mark Mordue (Boy On Fire)

6pm with drinks and a couple of songs

To join us please email and leave your name with rsvp.events@harpercollins.com.au

SATURDAY 23rd APRIL - BRISBANE POWERHOUSE, BRISBANE

In Conversation with Andrew Stafford (Something To Believe In) plus a couple of songs.

BOOK HERE

FRIDAY 29th APRIL - NATIONAL LIBRARY, CANBERRA

BOOK HERE FOR ‘In Conversation with Beejay Silcox’ - this is free but bookings are essential

BOOK HERE FOR ‘In Conversation with Beejay Silcox, plus two course DINNER at Bookplate & INTIMATE SOLO PERFORMANCE’