Where Do Songs Come From, Anyway?

Reflections on Amy Rigby’s Girl To City and the mystery of creation

So I was lying awake a couple of nights ago thinking about songwriting. Not about doing it myself, mind you; just about the general process. Where do songs come from, anyway?

My restless night was partially due to having recently read Girl To City, the memoirs of the singer-songwriter Amy Rigby. Among many other things, Rigby talks a bit about how certain songs came to her. Sometimes, she says, they just pop into her head, describing the process as akin to a radio transmitting it into her brain. She doesn’t have to be sitting at a desk, or playing a guitar, waiting for the muse to strike, for this to happen; she could be in the subway, or shopping, or cooking dinner.

This particular superpower has always fascinated me. Not everyone can write songs; if they could, wouldn’t everyone be doing that? To be perfectly honest, there have been two or three times in my own life when songs, of a sort, have suddenly come more or less full-blown into my head while shopping or walking or performing a similarly mundane activity, but in my case, they’re not good songs. (Trust me on this. You don’t want to hear them, and I definitely won’t sing them for anyone unless I’m four or five cocktails into the evening.)

Of course, songs don’t really magically appear out of thin air. They’re crafted by people who know how to shape words and music within a certain recognizable art form — or more accurately, any number of variations on/iterations of that form — to produce something that will, they hope, resonate with listeners.

And yet, even the songwriters themselves know there’s a certain mystery of creation involved.

I’ve read my share of rock memoirs, which lately seem to be as common as Instant Pot cookbooks or toilet paper shortages. (One thing, one bonus, I wish applied to authors of memoirs: Any time a reporter wants to interview you, just give them a copy of your book and tell them to read the damn thing and stop bothering you, because why would you go to the great trouble of writing at length about your life and getting it published just so you could talk more about it to a stranger? I admit I may be projecting a bit here, carrying the social distancing theme to a place it doesn’t necessarily have to be.)

Many of these memoirs are partially set in the early punk era of 1970s New York City, corresponding with a lasting interest in that time and place by both its aging participants and younger readers who wish they could have been there, man. And, yes, it also strikes a sympathetic chord with me since I grew up feeling as alienated in the New York suburbs as the next person, and those were my own formative teen years. Girl To City is one of these memoirs, but it stands out from the pack in several ways. Basically, it reflects who Rigby is: modest, honest, with an eye for the telling detail and an organic sense of humor that are also signatures of her songwriting. The memoir is about how we’re shaped by the places we live, the people we meet, the music we love, and finally, the confidence we gain — often at great cost — in order to become the person we were meant to be all along.

Aside from Rigby’s personal journey from her childhood in a Pittsburgh suburb to teenage art student in Manhattan and avid fan of the bands at CBGB’s, to twentysomething band member to thirtysomething band member/songwriter and finally to solo act, the narrative thread that binds the book together, and what I found continually compelling, is her descriptions of intra-band dynamics. (The insider descriptions reminded me the most of the 2015 memoir Your Band Sucks by Jon Fine of Bitch Magnet, an obscure post-hardcore indie cult band; Fine was a different type of musician for very different bands than Rigby, but I found the ring of the familiar in both of their descriptions of the day-to-day lives of subsistence-level bands as they play tiny clubs and survive seemingly endless road trips criss-crossing the USA in a van, creating the unavoidable intimacy of a chosen, tight family. (Both books also delve into what happens to indie musicians when they’re no longer in their twenties and adult lives and responsibilities come into the picture. Rigby goes into great detail about the temp jobs she took on and, despite her best efforts to separate these jobs and her coworkers from her “real” job playing music, how she sometimes found herself surprised at the comfort she took from them and the gratifying support she received from her coworkers.)

Handmade is a word that comes to mind with a lot of Rigby’s music, including the CD “One Way Ticket To My Life,” which she released last October as a companion to the book; it’s, a collection of 4-track demos she recorded in the ’80s and ’90s, mixed and mastered by her husband and sometime recording partner Wreckless Eric Goulden. (As a recording duo, Eric and Amy love futzing around with production, creating intriguing aural collages that sound simultaneously a little bit off, and perfect. Other recordings of hers are more polished, but one constant is the trademark catch in her voice that telegraphs to the listener, “Hey, I need to tell you something important, just between us.”)

One of Rigby’s songwriting talents is the ability to wrap subversive lyrics in a sweetly melodic candy shell; it’s a gift I’ve long found especially appealing and practiced by a relative handful of writers, including the late Kirsty MacColl and the late Adam Schlesinger along with the still-extant Dave Cantor, who wrote literate, witty songs for the jazz-pop group Dave’s True Story in the ’90s and naughts. (Like Cantor, Rigby cut her musical teeth in New York but unlike him, eventually broke out of the comfy but ultimately limiting metro-area circuit. And like MacColl, she’s also a mistress of the snarky ex-boyfriend kiss-off song.) Importantly, and in common with those artists, she’s rooted in the real world along with the rest of us; she’s human-scale, consistently relatable in her musical accounts of mucking about in the everyday and trying to keep it together despite, well, how life can go sometimes.

Like MacColl in her songs “Bad” and “My Affair,” Rigby’s adept at writing about wanting to be more than the daughter of, the wife of, the mother of, the anonymous office drone. Her listeners share in the vicarious joy of the singer rebelling against expectations and outside control and finding liberation and self-confidence in following her heart. She’s skilled enough with both songs and prose that her audience easily finds themselves in her accounts, and recognizes a courageous, even valiant journey.

Rigby shows great courage as she gradually takes control of her existence, juggling marriage and motherhood with touring and recording. Today, by all accounts (most importantly, hers), she has a pretty good life. It’s one that she made for herself. To share in it for a bit, however remotely, is a pleasure. It’s the redemptive poetry of self-assertion. There’s a little mystery of creation in that, too.