Over my 50-plus years in the business of popular music, I cannot count the times I have heard the question, “How do you come up with these songs?” Or, “What’s the secret?” I heard it again, this week and, as before, the answer is that there is no formula involved, at least in my case, that I can pass on. I have mentioned some of the triggers in previous columns, but the short answer, overall, is that the source of songs is literally everything and anything. Experiences you have, a lovely phrase you read or hear some place, an incident in the news, a love affair, a goodbye, the passing of someone, a joke (yes a joke; Ken Corsbie told me a joke after a show in Barbados in a gaff and that led to me writing “Cricket in the Jungle”); or some perception that gradually comes to you out of the blue, or bang, like a gunshot. Of course, your antennae have to be up for these things. (As I’ve said before, you have to be an observer, a noticer; you have to be, as in Ken’s joke, after you laugh, “Hey, you know that bit is basically saying, this game of cricket is so wonderful, even the animals play it.” Once that notion settles in the brain, the song is born.) So the short answer is awareness. I recall the Trinidad calypsonian Crazy, telling me years ago in a car in Port-of-Spain how people are always bringing him song ideas (I have heard Sparrow did the same thing with writers like Piggy Joseph and others, tailoring a song idea with the Sparrow mastery). I remember Crazy saying that, most of the time, the material was useless. He used the phrase, “the song didn’t resemble me,” indicating how astute the observer process must be: here was Crazy, no matter how good the song was, immediately recognizing that it was not the kind of material that he was known for, so that is part of the process as well; in his case, knowing, for instance, that risqué material would be out of place in his repertoire, for his persona.
