Sometimes I wonder what compels me to try to write songs with other people. I wonder if it’s a bit like the urge to surf? One has countless pleasant paddles in the shallows that end in nothing but a good day out. But then, every so often, one feels a magical surge when cowriting, another sort of energy moving beneath you, like Coleridge’s Spirit beneath the ship in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and it’s the memory of that propulsion that keeps one trying different combinations of people, places and times. Catching a wave.
Cowriting certainly did not come naturally to me.
My first experience of cowriting was a long-distance version. The polymath Jason Hazeley, writer songwriter composer, who I knew from the pub and from the band Ben and Jason, gave me two verses of lyrics, and I wrote a strange clockwork harmony and melody part around them, and added another verse to make a song called ‘Under Your Wheels’. It felt Frankenstein-ish, cold on reflection, but it was a gentle introduction to the idea of working with someone else’s ideas. It didn’t involve any in-time compromises which was useful for a first foray.
My baptism of fire into the straight-up collaborative cowriting experience as I know and love it now — writers in a room sharing and writing equally — was on one of Kathryn Williams’s legendary songwriting retreats at The Convent in Gloucestershire. Here I was paired with various songwriters across a series of days. Astrid Williamson and I wrote a mournful song called ‘Boards at the Window’; on another day I was paired with Danny Wilson and Carra Bacon and from our three heads tumbled ‘Don’t Walk Away’; another song I wrote with Martin Carr of The Boo Radleys was called ‘The Mirror and the Bones’. These songs were among the 24 songs of the two-year Pivot song-a-month project, which I gifted to my Patreons. But they didn’t quite make the cut for the final album The Pivot On Which The World Turns when it was released in 2022.
Then there’s Zoom writing. Olivia Broadfield and I wrote what I consider to be some beautiful stumps during lockdown over Zoom. Looking back, these meets were as much about staying sane as about the songs we began. I wonder what will happen to them but I don’t think it’s the end of the story there.
More complete was the song I wrote with Vivien Scotson over Zoom, ‘Always Been There’, which made it onto on her latest album. Our Zoom connection, part of a songwriting retreat organised by Chris Difford, led us to meet in person one January afternoon when we wrote a song together called ‘Red Flags’ in about 90 minutes. I think ‘Red Flags’ is a remarkable song and a meeting of minds, a dual-edged remembrance of sexual vulnerability and vibrancy and the danger of younger days. We have both recorded ‘Red Flags’ for our respective albums.
There are other ways of cowriting songs that I’ve experienced which are equally effective. There’s an alchemic songwriting experience, where someone’s mere physical presence can make a load of stuff fall out. For example, I had these chords and I’d been mooching around with them for months with no results. It was the last morning of another retreat Kath organised, this one linked to the Chester Literary Festival. David Ford came and sat in the room, and without warning two verses and two choruses flooded out of me. He just needed to be there. A few days later, he wrote a bridge section, and bingo - we had ‘Brambles & Briars’, which did make the album.
I attribute similar alchemic influences to bass player Jon Thorne and a few of the songs coming on Wildfires; just being in his musical orbit changed my melodic thinking.
One of the most beautiful recent cowriting experiences I have had has been with my dear friend Kathryn Williams. We wrote a song together very late at night, very tired, after a ragged day of promo pushing our tour all over the socials which is an exhausting and hollowing experience, not the moment you’d expect to be capable of doing anything creative. We ended up marrying together some words she had scribbled in her notebook in a moment of lyrical flash on a train, and some picked notes and chord movements which reflected the ways the words made me feel listening to her read them, when in my tiredness I could bypass all that critical left-side brain that tends to stomp on tendrils. The resulting song ’Tender’ has made it onto her next album and I believe it’s a thing of beauty.
It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes you just feel that you’ve fallen into a pit with someone and you’re trying to climb out. But it’s ok, there’s fun even in the rough and tumble. At worst it’s time spent with someone you like trying to find something or solve something. Like a treasure hunt. Or a maze.
I still find it a strange ballet to dance, a flailing about of ideas and impulses where one’s own feelings and the feelings of others can either get you lost or get you caught on a wave together.
The funny thing about co-writing is, you never quite know which way it’s going to go until you try.