To Bridge or Not to Bridge

What is the longest that you have worked on a song?

Three months consistent. "At Seventeen" took three months.

Was the middle part the hardest?

No It scared me. I wrote the first verse quickly. Then I got paranoid about the bridge. And then I knew I needed a chorus. By the second verse I was paranoid because I couldn't figure out what to say that would be.… The first verse was so bare-bones. Honest and truthful. I couldn't figure out how to keep that up and keep the song interesting without starting to bleed all over everybody. Then the third verse and bridge was like: How can I end this so there's some hope without doing the thing I saw every movie script based on, which was, "Gee, life is great, I'm getting married, my skin cleared up." It took along time because I was cautious with it.

Did you find yourself breaking the song down in your mind once you got past the first verse and bridge and looking then for whatever is missing?

If I'm in trouble. What happens is, I'll have a first verse and be able to go nowhere with it, and it will roll around for six months. Then I'll ask someone else for help and I'll bring in a co-writer.

In my songs I used to say everything in the first verse.

Or the first two verses, and then there's nowhere to go.

Shel Silverstein told me one of the best things was to use past, present, and future. If you look at those key elements, you can build your three verses and it doesn't need to be a total verse. You might just change the tense of one word.

Right. That's a great piece of advice.

Here's a song that starts in the past …

So where is it going?

If a whole song is in the past, it's going to start to get boring.

After a verse and a chorus. Do you ever get stuck? A couple of years ago I noticed I was writing verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-out, and I thought, "Wait a minute. I didn't use to write like that." I found that the co-writing thing I had been doing too much of it.

I found that some co-writers expected a bridge, and I was putting them in songs that didn't need bridges.

I usually use them for a lift. My stuff tends to be so intense when I'm writing for myself that I hit the end of the second chorus and it's like I need a break.

Melodies & Bad Manners

Do you find that your melodies have changed over the years? I went through a stage where every time I'd learn a new chord it would inspire a song.

I've written so many F# minors. I've always been pretty melodic. It was one of the things that attracted attention when I was a kid. I used to have guys like Frank Loesser and Johnny Mercer telling me that I was going to be a good songwriter someday. Imagine the intimidation factor! But I think it was because I was born melodic. I grew up around melodies, so my melodies have always been pretty strong. My rhythms have changed a lot. I think that's because I've become a better player. A lot of it is because one day it hit me with blinding force that I didn't have to write for my voice. When you start out as a singer and then become a songwriter -- a singer who writes songs -- you are always writing for yourself.

I've always heard great voices as I've written.

That's so much freedom, but that was an amazing revelation to me and I still tend to try and write with people who have very different voices from mine. My voice is so distinctive at this point that it puts the Janis Ian stamp on something. I'll pitch it to people and they'll go, "Oh, she sounds depressing." It won't matter what the song is saying. The thing about co-writing is you want somebody who is going to take a right turn or left turn where you would go but not be stupid, and you want somebody unique so you can write better than you are or at least as well.

I want a co-writer who is going to bring 100 percent to the table. I don't want someone who has three other appointments that day.

Don't get me started on that. I start off by saying my attitude is, if nothing else we'll have a decent lunch and if we get nothing that's fine with me. Deana [Carter], when we first started writing, said, "I'm so worried about writing with Janis Ian!" I said, "What are you worried about? If you turn in a piece of crap, they say, 'God, Janis can't write anymore.'" I try to walk in without an agenda.

Then there's the line counters wanting to put their initials next to their lines. Hopefully the two will be …

Seamless. I've had a couple of bad experiences in the last two years with people who I had written well with and then they kind of shot up the charts and became very famous. I had one where first the person forgot we had an appointment and I thought, "Well, okay" and rebooked through their secretary -- which is weird to me anyway. Booking a songwriting appointment? The next time I got to the office, and it was on a different day and they had an appointment with a big breaking band, and they said, "Well, I've got an hour and a half." I can write like that but I don't like it.

Next Page: Making god and the fbi; Guitars & Practicing ....