Tidying through old papers and notebooks recently, I came across the first draft of From The Hill. Lots of you know already but it was the first tune we ever wrote and ultimately what led to the Hanging Bandits forming. If Alex and Santi had put these lyrics to a tune and no one really liked the end result, we probably wouldn’t be several EPs and an album in.
There’s more than a little luck involved here; although Hill was the first tune we wrote, it was one of the better ones all around. If we’d have come up with Crimson Town or North Of The Wall first (pretty cringy songs for us to look back on, we often joke about them; except Tom who still likes them), I think we may not have been inspired to carry on.
In this blog I’ll get into the choices I made. Why I think the finished version is superior than the original draft and some ideas I find useful when composing lyrics.
Below is the original lyric document.
These lyrics are pretty god awful but they have the sparks of From The Hill. Some of the lines as they appear above clearly were just doodles, as I flailed looking for some particular image to express the idea. Notably lines like ‘With the hubris to plan…’ which was probably some weird reference to Mice and Men. The song is about the survivors of a nuclear war sifting through the radioactive wreckage of their capital and so the hubris to make plans line was a reference to that. Evidently, I thought it sucked and this evolved into a better but still lame line, ‘The myths our fathers made and how they lived.’ This would eventually become, ‘Our father’s lives and their lover’s miserable myths.’
In hindsight, this is probably a wordier and less clear line than I would pick now. It does still get to most of what the previous incarnation of the line was getting at though; I was clearly trying for some ambiguity, contrast and drama. I wonder if now the better line is ‘The myths our father’s made and how they lived…’ But it maybe this line was altered due to it not fitting the melody. Knowing my writing at this time though; I probably thought it was just a bit too plain. Plain lines are great though and can evoke and express a lot, often more than complex or contrived sentences which over-egg the attempt to create resonance.
For excellent examples of this style of writing, consider the super conversational approach The Strokes take. At least on their early albums, I’m unfamiliar with the later work.
We could go and get forties
Fuck going to some party
‘Oh really? your friends are away now?’
– 12:51 The strokes
These lines are all things that could be said in dialogue; they almost feel like found poetry. They still have a lot to say, they still create image and story. For this reason, Julian Casablanca’s is one of the great lyricists of our generation.
There are also some small but important edits. Often the small edits, the single word changes, the line breaks, and things of this nature, are the most important. Notably, I swapped out ‘From this field’ to ‘From the hill’ and I think most people will agree that is a more interesting image; particularly I think because it frames the narrator as being above, looking down upon a wider area. It also contrasts with the sun imagery; establishing this idea that the sun has fallen to fragments and one of those fragments is in the valley below.
I also cut a very silly line about standing on the bones of Gods. I could speculate what I was attempting here but really it’s just whack and better for having been replaced thus; ‘trace the wire outline of man.’
Sometimes the writing process is just committing pen to page, allowing yourself to write trash, and then sifting through that to see if there’s anything real valuable in there. Early drafts almost invariably suck although occasionally a song does come pretty fully formed and requires minimal edits. I do edit the hell out of everything though and still cringe inside slightly at choices made in the past I wouldn’t make now. So it goes though; there’s nothing that got through my or the band’s quality control that’s a real whack bar since the first EP. Usually it will be a lack of clarity in the image that bothers me when I return to it.
The Hanging Bandits 