This is an exercise to practice starting with a title. ‘Potholes’ as a title has something interesting and intriguing about it, to me at least. The goal of this exercise is to write an outline for a song using this title. You do not have to write the song, you just need to roughly have an idea of how it might be structured.
I have taken this title from Randy Newman, so let’s see how he has done it by way of example:
V1: I love the women in my life. My mother, my wife, my daughter. Sometimes we say bad things to each other, but we soon forget them…
C: God bless the potholes down memory lane
V2: I love my dad. I remember when I took my wife to meet him for the first time he told this long and drawn out story. Then the second time, he went and told it again!
C: God bless the potholes down memory lane
You can see he has used the idea of potholes as an expansion of the metaphor of “memory lane”. This is a really nice and unexpected spin on it. Given this basic skeleton, we could go and have a shot at writing this song. If you haven’t already heard how Randy Newman does it, go and have a listen.
So now, have a go at forming your own skeleton for a song entitled ‘Potholes’.
I haven’t found as clever a spin as Randy Newman, but treating ‘Potholes’ in the most basic form of the metaphor as in the thing that trip you up in life. I am imagining a song something like:
V1: I was going through life absolutely fine, windows down, air rushing past. Suddenly, I hit one of…
C: Potholes in life
V2: I was stuck, didn’t know what to do. No one warns you about the…
C: Potholes in life
B: Actually, looking back I think everything happens for a reason and a lot of good has come of it. I’m grateful for the…
It is a busy day with work, but I am going to try this during my lunch break. This is definitely not my finest work, the chorus is sloppily worded:
V1: Man got drafted to go to war. He boards the bus. His loved ones waving at him, mother and sweetheart crying. The bus blew a tire due to the ill repaired road.
Chorus: The little pauses resulting from potholes make life better
V2: Same man overseas at war. Riding from the battlefront back to the shelter of the barracks. The axle breaks on his vehicle and has to stop when it hits a pothole, just as he watches the other vehicle hit an IED on the street.
Chorus: The little pauses resulting from potholes make life better
Bridge: Sometimes, things piss you off when they don’t go as planned. You feel hopeless and lost. But the little obstacles that cause minor temporary damage often define us.
V3: Same man, at home. His wife’s water just broke. He is driving her quickly to the hospital, due to speed, he is not paying close attention to the road. He hits a pothole and his tire blows. They can’t drive. Baby is born in the car next to the lake where he proposed to her.
Chorus: The little pauses resulting from potholes make life better.
There you go. Best I could do cold in 5 minutes. This is a great exercise Jamie! Thanks!
I really like your first verse. Setting the metaphor of living life to driving. The second verse doesn’t really convey as much to me. I know it’s just a skeleton, but seems it may need a little more fleshing out. The bridge has a nice turnaround on accepting your lot in life and learning from the difficulties. Nice job.
I really like how you have taken the inconvenience of the pothole and found the positive sides of it in three different scenarios, with the bridge explicitly giving this message. This is exactly the right idea of targeting the same central part from different angles. When you do this it is very important that the verses build upon each other rather than be completely separate stories. I know you have got a narrative here with the same man drafted, going and then returning from war, but for some reason the baby came out of nowhere for me. Maybe if in verse 1 it was clear that his wife was pregnant or something, and in verse 2 he is pleased to be alive so that he can one day see his child etc. this would keep this unified.
I agree, the “second verse curse”! I would want verse 1 to be all happy until the point of the pothole, then verse 2 to be the real struggle, somehow leading back to the chorus, and then yes the bridge turning it round into gratitude. But verse 2 would certainly be the hardest bit to write I suspect.