Season 2, Ep.18: The Song A Week Experiment--Any Other Way

For my next collection of songs, I wanted them to be even more stripped down than the Left Of Nashville EP if that’s even possible. Simplicity is beautiful. And honesty is simple. But that doesn’t mean that honesty is easy. Boiling a point down to its bare essentials isn’t easy, whether that’s musically or lyrically. 

I envision this next batch of songs as early Elliott Smith in outer space. I want to blend acoustic music with dreamy soundscapes. I want a desert night drive kind of feel to these songs. And in order to do that, less is more.

'Any Other Way’ was written in July in almost one sitting. My girlfriend had just broken up with me and this was an open letter to her. This was one of those rare occasions where it just fell out of the sky. The guitar part, lyrics and melody happened simultaneously. The sentence, “I can’t do it any other way” just came out. And it just went on from there. I wasn’t thinking about song craft at all. 

As much as I love clever wordsmiths such as Conor Oberst or Adam Duritz, that’s not where I am. Dabbling in country music has effected the way I write my personal songs. And I have an affinity for conversational lyrics. 

I knew this was going to be a short and simple song. Like I said, this was an open letter, so this was no time to use flowery words and imagery. I just wanted to get my point across.

“I can’t do it any other way” was my way of saying that “this is who I am.” "Music is what I do.” To have someone go from being my biggest cheerleader to turning on a dime and basically saying that they didn’t believe in me, left me more shocked than angry. So this isn’t an angry song. And I think it does a good job of expressing both my confusion as well as my resolve to seeing this thing music thing through.  

This is probably one of the most honest and vulnerable songs I have ever written. And it almost wrote itself. The chorus was the only thing that I really had to work on. Initially, it didn’t hook enough. But I had enough of the song that I liked to record a rough video on my computer and throw it on Facebook. I just had to get it off my chest and put it out there, somewhere, anywhere.

A little hack that I have learned to make simple lyrics not boring is to use internal rhymes. Not only will they make a lyric more interesting, they also make for writing better melodies.