Chris Reublin's Answers Where did the inspiration for the songs you wrote come from? Was it triggered by an event, experience, person or feeling? Or, did the music just come creeping in at night out of nowhere? All of the above. I was never a discipline songwiter. Meaning to say, I didn't sit down and force myself to write very often, it usually just happened when it happened. Sometimes an event or an experience or a person could be an inspiration, but there was always some sort of emotion that I need to express. Did the idea(s) come in the form of a melody or lyrics or just a concept (“I’m going to write a song about that.”) Almost all of the songs I've ever written seemed to follow a certain progression. I would be in a certain mood, or emotional state, and the music I would play, whether alone, or with the band, would come out as a kind of soundtrack, or representation of how I was feeling. There were a few times where we set out to write a certain type of song, but even then, if you were depressed, or melancholy, you just didn't have the interest in writing a happy song. Which comes first, lyrics or melody? The music always came first, usually in the form of a single phrase, or pattern or hook that we stumbled on while rehearsing or improvising. Then using a typical framework like say, Verse - Bridge - Chorus, we would experiment with different arrangements. Vocal melodies seemed to just evolve from the music, and the lyrics always came last for me. A lot of the time, lyrics wrote themselves from words that evolved from humming the melody. Certain words and phrases just fit the timing and cadence and syllables. Sometime this even dictated what the song was eventually about. If it is just an idea, where do you start? How do you turn an idea into a melody or in the case of lyrics, how do you create a melody to go with them? As I mentioned before, In my own personal creative process, lyrics usually followed the music, and evolved from the cadence and timing of the rudimentary humming which acted as a sort of "placeholder" for where the lyrics would eventually fit. To put it simply, some words fit, and some words don't. Limitations on what words fit into a certain song also seem to conform to several other "rules", in no particular order. First are the patterns you see in everyday human speech. If you observe conversations between people, and listen as if it is music, you will begin to see certain patterns emerge. For example, arguments or aggressive conversations are full of fast, staccato speech patterns, and hard, brittle consonant sounds. In contrast, conversations between lovers are full of soft vowel sounds, and lengthened and smoothed syllables. Secondly are the syllables and rhyme structure of the words themselves. In this aspect, songwriting isn't that different than composing poetry, where the music dictates the rhyme pattern, number of syllables and verbal rhythm. A third consideration is the phonetic accent of certain syllables. Again, just like in human speech, changing the accented syllable in a word can change the meaning, so getting the music and lyrics to agree on this accent can sometimes take some work. In the case where an idea, lyrics or content came first, I would use these same general guidelines in reverse. For example, If I had a concept for a love song, followed by lyrics, I would compose the music as a soft legato rhythm, trying to maintain the lyrical accents and meaning of the words. To simplify it, you are basically writing two pieces of poetry, one musical, and one lyrical, and they need to be synchronous. I should point out that I am not really that sophisticated as a songwriter, and this is really just a dissection of what occurs on a more primitive level during the process. Did you “compose” in your mind before actually playing it? Did you guys ever actually write your music down? Or do you just noodle around with melody ideas till something coherent emerges? I have always had music and words churning in my mind. In fact, I have always had this strange obsessiveness about the musical quality of certain words I hear. I used to keep a diary of these words, because it would run in a loop until I wrote it down. It was never the meaning of a word, only the sound. A lot of the time the musical quality of the word would begin to evolve into something, and i would race to hum it into a tape recorder, or play it on a musical instument, to sort of "cement" it, so I didn't forget. When the band was touring there was always a musical instrument around, so any time you were working on something in your head, you could pick up a guitar and it went very quickly from inner composition to reality. This led to hours and hours of recordings of hummed or strummed song fragments, most of which never evolved further. I still hear things coalescing in my head all the time, but I am a little more selective now about what i choose to keep or discard. As for written music, the only thing I have ever written down were words. I can't write or read sheet music. I can play anything I hear, but I have never grasped the concept of "seeing" music. As for the last part of your question, "Noodling" is my preferred method, and is probably the most accurate way to describe my musical abilities: I am a "Noodler" who occassionally finds something useful. As a final note, I want to point out that I very rarely worked alone in the creative process. I tried to answer these questions about what goes on inside my own head, but i don't want to give the impression that I worked alone, or in a vacuum, or was more than a small piece of something that elevated my own limited ability. The band environment was essential to me personally as a songwiter, and many of my ideas would have remained just an idea without Steve Ballard's abilities as a true songwriter to turn it into something cohesive.