Babytalk and Writing Lyrics

(Photo by Jocelyn Mathewes.)

I’ve been doing a ton of writing lately, a few new things for my album and a lot of songs with other people for their albums. Jason Mraz, John Legend, Mika, Missy Higgins, Gin Wigmore, a bunch more. And as the days of writing follow one another, a kind of easy-flowing creativity starts to peek around the edges of effort and intention.

Every artist is different, every songwriter has her own quirky methods, work habits, bugaboos. But it’s interesting how many practices are nearly universal among the songwriters I know.

One interesting thing that almost every songwriter does while writing songs is to babble. No, I don’t mean they babble to themselves in between the times when they’re writing the song. (Most of them don’t, anyway.) I mean songwriters babble as part of writing a song. If a section of melody has no lyrics, we babble nonsense lyrics to the tune. Sometimes, in a new melody without lyrics, there will be a few notes for which it’s plainly obvious what vowel is needed, even if the words haven’t even come yet. Some long notes just obviously scream out for the sound “Aaaayyy,” others want to be “Ohhhh.” It’s amazing how often a series of nonsense syllables will suddenly sound a lot like a recognizable series of words, and then quickly resolve itself into an actual line of lyrics. It’s something like a cloudy, blurry image, seen through the lens of a camera, gradually coming into focus. And often these lines are the best lines in the song, the ones that sit on the melody just right.

Maybe the nonsense syllables are the sound of the songwriter’s subconscious calling up through the darkness to their conscious mind. The words have already been figured out, down there, but the message is garbled and needs decoding.

I’d say this was a local oddity of the craft of writing songs, but for two things: first, songwriters all over the world come up with this method on their own, usually in their teens when they first try to write songs, before they’ve met any other songwriters; and second, this method of generating lyrics sounds an awful lot like a theory of language acquisition which I’ve read of several times.

In this theory, babble is a natural tendency of every baby. We’ve all heard pre-verbal babies, doing that peculiar thing called babytalk. (“Gooba doogie bogga boggy.” It really does sound like a songwriter trying out sounds over a melody.) Babies seem driven to exercise the muscles that create different vowels and consonants, and they exercise them seemingly randomly.

As I’ve heard this theory of speech acquisition described, babies actually are doing something pretty random, running through the various repertoire of tongue, palate, lip and glottal movements that are the building blocks of all languages, while learning to also hum during these movements. The result: babytalk.

But things really start to accelerate when you add parents to the equation. Because while baby is making mostly cute and random sounds, the parents’ brains are desperately searching for intelligibility, a sound from Junior which resembles a real word, or even a single consonant. When a baby first utters the sound of the letter “B,” the parents will laugh with delight and bend down close, smiling, repeating the sound and trying to get her to say it again. This process continues with other sounds too, the baby getting lots of smiles and happy Mom and Dad reinforcement every time she says something that sounds like a word. And so the baby ends up honing the sounds of her parents’ language, while the other babbled sounds fall away.

A similar thing happens when the baby, babbling away in a series of random, but more and more English-sounding, sounds, finally says his first word, often a word which the parents have been trying repeatedly to get him to say. (Don’t tell me the Moms aren’t gunning for the word “Mom” to be first! They totally are.) And now the process continues with full words, each new full word or near-word rewarded by parental smiles and delight and pride.

The babble slowly comes into focus as actual words. Hmmm, that sounds just like writing a song.

I wonder if what I’m saying is that a lot of lyricists do their work by firing up the old babble machinery that has been rusting since they were a year old?

What might be more amazing would be if speech, all speech, were generated by large numbers of random sounds and syllables constantly pumped through the mind by automatic babble generators within it. As I imagine it, the subconscious would be filled with babble machines, sending random sounds and words around the brain, a continuous bubbling brook of near-talk, awaiting reception and decoding by listening subsystems, probably the same listening systems that decode the speech heard coming through our ears from the outside world. Most of the results of babble being decoded would be meaningless and arbitrary, but some of the decoded results would be a propos to the current situation that the person is in, and some would actually make it past the filters that allow some statements to be uttered but not others.

This might explain why we often blurt out something unexpected, something we didn’t consciously think of, but which is the perfect thing to say.

This also may explain speaking in tongues, if you’re not inclined towards more religious explanations.

It might explain the appeal of nonsense syllables in marching songs, soccer chants, children’s music.

Anyway, whether or not this is actually the way language happens in the mind, I’m certain it’s how lyrics happen in a song. Babytalk.