How I wrote "Salt in the Water"
Balancing repetition and variety, and a philosophical take on bridges
Here’s a look at one of the more recents songs I’ve written. In March, I took a trip out to Nashville to see some old friends. Naturally, when I’m staying with friends in Nashville, there’s at least one guitar in the house. I picked up a classical guitar one morning and started strumming the chord progression that you’ll hear below. There’s something about playing someone else’s guitar that gives me a jolt, that sends me off in a direction I might not have taken if I was playing my guitar at home. So I worked out parts of this song during that trip, then came home and ended up finishing it a couple of months later.
This page of free writing gave me a lot to work with from the start. Near the middle, you can see a few lines that make up the first half of the first verse. I’m guessing that I started to write off the top of my own head at this point, because “not wanting to vanish / like salt in the water” sounds like something I would voluntarily write. These days, I’m really attracted to metaphors that feel grounded in reality, but aren’t cliche and overused. And those two lines are right up my alley. Anyone who makes pasta has witnessed salt and water blending together, and I thought there was some beauty and anguish in that as an image in the mind of someone who doesn’t want to disappear.
I think I also editorialized with “love is not a language.” I probably saw a headline for an article about love languages and decided to go in the opposite direction. Take what you will from that.
The sketch
I pretty much wrote all of the music for this one here. I had a feeling from the start that I wanted this to feel like a folk song, with a repeating chord progression and a verse-driven structure. It’s a simple walk down. Sometimes, keeping the music simple is a cue to get more complex and poetic with the lyrics, so that’s what I ended up doing.
Having said that, this version is more of a sketch than anything else. At the time, I don’t think I knew whether or not this could turn into a definite song, which is evident in how much of the melody I’m humming and not actually singing. There are some placeholder lyrics here after the first few lines, mostly from the free writing to see what could actually fit nicely with this tune. And, surprisingly, I wrote the music for a bridge and hummed along to it.
Second demo (one and a half verses)
Two days later, I come back to it and write a bit more. The first verse now has a lot more definition, lyrically and melodically. Usually, if I can piece together a strong first verse, I can start to visualize where the rest of the song should go (and that it can turn into a full-fledged song.) I’ve taken “cease to see the bad in you” and “a loud absence” and turned them into “cease to be fearful / of every last absence that’s unexplained.” And then I’ve reworked “bliss in something trendy” and “reality in dreams” into a pair of lines that has a bunch of short turns: “what’s blissful in dreams / in reality seems / so incredible.” Those kinds of decisions are really important early on in the songwriting process. If I know the melody, then I know how many and what kind of syllables make sense in different parts of the verse. I couldn’t swap those lines mentioned above and still make the song work.
In the second verse, I’ve added a little more. “Couple the thrills / with an effortless road / to venture on” looks like it was something I came up with on my own. But I’ve taken “I am still on that journey” from the free writing, but chopped off the pronoun and verb. And this is when I realize the challenge in this song: Will this song make sense without any pronouns?
Third demo (two verses)
At home, I don’t pick this back up for almost two months. You can hear a stark difference in the tone of the song now that I’m playing my guitar and not my friends’ classical. And my voice sounds more like normal, which indicates to me that I’ve found a degree of comfort and confidence in the song (you might’ve noticed that my singing on the first two demos is a bit more nasal and timid; I don’t think that’s a coincidence.)
The second verse is firmly in place, and I’ve definitely taken on that challenge of excluding any pronouns. I’ve elaborated on “working toward the end of something” with two contrasting sentiments (“fleeting and permanent all at once”), which I’m digging. And then I’ve reversed the order of “in love and leisure” to fit the short amount of space for rhymes at the end of the verse. It becomes “in leisure or love / by devil or dove / it comes naturally.” Funny enough, for how many songs there are about love, there are not a ton of words that rhyme with love. Not an easy thing to do!
Clearly, I still don’t know what to do with the bridge, but I’m keeping it in there. Just waiting for something to speak to me, but it hasn’t come yet.
Final demo
But it comes a few days later! I don’t write a ton of songs with bridges (probably because I’ve listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, who very rarely has bridges in his songs.) So when I do, I think carefully about its purpose. In my opinion, a bridge needs to live up to its name: it should be the pathway for one train of thought to another, and it should make a difference on the song. If it doesn’t, it kinda feels meaningless to me. With that said, I think that’s part of the reason it took me so long to settle on the lyrics for the bridge to this song.
On the second demo above, you can hear that I mumbled the words “always before” as the bridge ends and carries over into the main chord progression again. Even if I didn’t mean it, it really helped me figure out what the rest of the melody should be. I know how it should end, therefore, I can work backwards to piece it together.
The other task here is the lyrical content. What do I need to say here? Musically, I’ve introduced a second minor chord, an E minor, for some added tension. The whole progression of the bridge is G / A minor / E minor / F, or 5-6-3-4. So there ought to be some lyrical tension, too, right? Right. In the free writing, I focus on the phrase “asymmetrically alive”. I like that idea, but it’s too long to put straight into the song. So I start to play around with shorter words that roughly say the same thing, and that’s how I end up with “alive beyond the maudlin doubts”. Once I had that, I had to decide if there should be any rhymes, and I do with the second half “wasn’t enough before / but not anymore”. And this is one of the times when the labor of writing meets the magic of making art. I turned a two-word idea into an eleven-word stanza, and it still feels really lovely to me months after the fact.
I thought about writing a whole new verse to end the song, and I still might, but at the time it felt right to repeat the first half of the first verse. “Not wanting to vanish / like salt in the water again” feels a lot more defiant and confident coming after the bridge, in my opinion, and I always like finding opportunities to repeat phrases within a song, to give them a different context. I think of it as a reward for anyone who listens closely enough to the whole song.
Salt in the Water
love is not a language
or something to measure
in passing time
not wanting to vanish
like salt in the water again
cease to be fearful
of every last absence that’s
unexplained
what’s blissful in dreams
in reality seems so
incredible
working toward something
fleeting and permanent
all at once
couple the thrills
with an effortless road to
venture on
still on that journey
it takes a long time
it won’t ever end
in leisure or love
by devil or dove, it comes
naturally
alive beyond
the maudlin doubts
wasn’t enough before
but not anymore
© 2024, Ann the Wall Music (ASCAP)
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