Performing and recording as Pagan Wanderer Lu, Andy Regan combines his electro-indie-pop music with

What was the first song that really got to you lyrically? The one that made you feel like the singer was speaking to you directly, articulating something you had felt or experienced, and was expressing it back to you in a way which felt more real and powerful than plain speech could ever do.

Do actually think about this question. Stop reading for 30 seconds and think of the song. Remember we want the first such song. If you’ve picked correctly you will instantly want to listen to this song. You’ll go slightly gooey inside thinking of all the good times you’ve had together. You will subconsciously end up putting it on your next mix CD.

Now think of what, in a nutshell, that song was about. I’ll wager it’s covered by one of these:

• Being in Love/Not being loved back
• Being Sad/Tragedy
• Politics/Injustice
• Having Fun/Summer
• Being a creep and weirdo

I’ll bet what it wasn’t about was one of the following:

• Being in a band
• How much the singer of the song likes another band
• Doing gigs
• No one understanding your genius
• How all the other bands are not as good as you

Most people who really get hooked by music end up buying a guitar and having a go at being in a band. It is brilliant fun. Some people are good at it, some aren’t. Being in a shit band is more fun than not being in any band. It’s a short step from loving music to loving making it. So like moths to a flame songwriters who write about their personal experiences will tend to cluster around the theme of music itself. I’ve fallen foul of this too. I’ve tried to avoid talking about my own music, but I’ll own up now and say I’ve probably broken every ‘rule’ I invent for this column.

In doing so songwriters forget about that first hook. What made them love music in the first place was not its ability to recount tales of being in a band, but its ability to add a transcendent sheen to everday experiences, or open your mind to strange feelings.

But writing about being in a band puts a barrier between yourself and anyone who could enjoy your music as something transcendent or universal. There’s nothing transcendent about watching a band play a song about being in a band – you can’t lose yourself in it, it just reminds you you’re watching a band. And the experience is only universal if you want your band to play its songs about being in a band to large crowds of people who are also in a band.

You see how that paragraph was hard to read because it contained the word ‘band’ so many times? That’s what it’s like for someone who isn’t in a band listening to your band sing about being in a band. Band, band, band, fucking band. The scene that talks about itself. The circle jerk.

It ‘breaks the fourth wall’. This is a term from cinema which means that the characters in the film acknowledge that they’re in a film. Not inherently bad as a device, but it should be used with care as it breaks the cinematic ‘spell’. You can’t immerse yourself in something and forget your troubles if you’re being explicitly reminded of the artifice involved in any kind of art. Remember ‘A song is a beautiful lie’.

I think this is why so much of rap just leaves me cold. I confess to vast chasms of ignorance about this music, but the amount of stuff I hear where the big name rapper’s new single merely announces the fact that he or she is back with a new album. However sharply they rhyme about this, it’s pretty banal. At this extreme it’s using your music to portray yourself as a person to be admired by sheer force. Like a man trying to make you fancy him by waving his cock in your face.

A song should not be explicitly about ‘you’ the writer unless you have a particularly interesting life. Odds are you probably don’t, especially if your life mostly revolves around being in bands. This is why it’s good to look beyond yourself for inspiration. If you can scribble a couplet that sums up your recent breakup so others can relate to it then you’re roughly 99% of the way to having a good song. But there is literally nothing to say about being in a band which is interesting in and of itself.

It’s like car insurance, you’ll be interested in hearing about it if you’re in the market for a new policy. If not it’s like hearing zombified beings being puppeted through a conversation on autopilot by some malevolent spirit. ‘Oh I went to nofuckingclue.com to get mine, I saved four pounds’. ‘Oh really? My band played there and the sound guy was a dick’.

Also on the naughty step are songs which say ‘This song…’. As in ‘I wrote this song about you/because I feel so blue’. That’s taking the circle jerk and giving it a circumference of one person. ‘I am a songwriter writing a song about myself writing a song’. Inspirational.

Of course there are exceptions to all rules. One that springs to mind here is ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton’ by the Mountain Goats. The reason this is a good song is because it approaches ‘being in a band’ with a novelist’s eye. It broadens the characters’ experiences into something universal, ‘When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/ don’t expect him to thank or forgive you’. At a pinch anyone could transpose the ‘being in a death metal band’ angle into whatever their own dream is. Sadly most songwriters don’t have John Darnielle’s gift for detail and nuance.

Then we come to the final category… Songs about your own genius, and the lack of recognition thereof. Aside from the abject egocentricity of this choice of subject, what are the other reasons this does not make for a good song?

Firstly emotion. If we’ve established anything so far it’s that a good song should connect emotionally. Whether it be via happiness, sadness, anger, love, confusion, curiosity…. the best songs ‘just work’. What feelings are you expressing when you bemoan a lack of recognition? Bitterness, condescension, superiority, egotism, and jealousy. Emotions which it’s a pretty good idea to try and rid your mind of entirely, yet here you are immortalising them in vinyl/plastic/binary?

Secondly, it just plain old makes you look like a dick. Remember what attracted you to music in the first place? Odds are it wasn’t some pampered arsehole whining about how no one appreciates his greatness. One way to approach writing a song is to think ‘what if this is the only song I write a particular person ever hears?’ By whinging about your recognition you pass up on the chance to say something worth being recognised for.

Make your songs good first, then maybe people will want to hear you talk about your band – but please save it for interviews.

Next time: ‘The Music: is originality the enemy of emotion?’

You might also be interested in...

• How to write a good song: Part Three: ‘Content’
• How to write a good song: Part Two – The Lyrics
• Singles round-up: Melodica Melody & Me, The Pipettes, Pagan Wanderer Lu
• How to write a good song: An introduction
• Interview: Pagan Wanderer Lu

Performing and recording as Pagan Wanderer Lu, Andy Regan combines his electro-indie-pop music with

Reader: Come now, Lu! A song can be about anything! It’s down to the writer to decide what a song should be about. A talented songwriter can turn any subject matter into a bona fide hit. Right?

Pffft.

I humbly invite you to consider whether the following are suitable subject matter for a pop song:

-       Renewing your car insurance

-       The conductive properties of various base metals

-       The correct way to make an omelette*

-       Your concerns about the fact it hurts when you pee

-       How unfair it is that people are mean about the songs you have written

The point is ‘a song can be about anything’ clearly doesn’t wash when we’re talking about writing a good song. Why is car insurance less interesting than New Band With Haircut #32,567b’s new song describing their desire to bump unmentionables with a non-specific object of desire? Well perhaps it isn’t. But just as the way that a given phrase is sung can make half arsed lyrics sound amazing, so most people just want the lyrics of music they like to reflect their own lives, and particularly their hopes and desires.

Bo-ring!

People don’t go to the cinema to watch films about people going to the cinema, they want dinosaurs and explosions and spaceships and sex and political intrigue and talking rabbits and time travel – preferably all at the same time. People admire imagination in films (and books – remember those?), so why are most pop lyrics so dull? “Woah yeah, I like making cups of tea too – just like this famous singer!”.

Music’s capable of more – yes it can sell you cereal with a catchy tune, sell you underage sex with a suggestive beat. But why shouldn’t it also try and broaden your horizons? Get you thinking? Teach you something?

If I was going to try and argue for why a song should be about something profound this is how I’d do it:

People love music. Songs remind you of events in your life. Bands shape what you wear. They influence the kind of person you want to be and the people you’re friends with. A specific song can become part of who person is – so isn’t it a shame if that song is shallow nonsense?

A song can have layers. The music is the bait on the hook of the lyrics, if it’s tasty enough you happily swallow the whole thing (no I’m not going to say ‘hook line and sinker’). When you’re on the dancefloor shimmying to the latest hits you’ll be shouting out the lyrics with a passion – is it too much to expect that they have the content to back that up? Isn’t a song that sounds and feels profound but is actually nonsense a little… dishonest?

Case Study: ‘Papillon’ by Editors.

[I didn’t want to use this column to slag off specific people’s songs but... well, it is a pretty awful song.]

The main chorus refrain is ‘it kicks like a sleep twitch’. On its own that’s a perfectly good line, though it suffers from the way Editors drop the music out each of the many times it’s sung, lest you should miss it.

Let’s examine the simile: A ‘sleep twitch’ is a small involuntary spasm in the night. It can wake you abruptly from a dream. It implies restlessness in the brain. It sounds a note of anxiety in what should be a peaceful state.

So you could see it working depending on what the ‘it’ in question is. But here’s the answer: ‘it’ isn’t anything. The rest of the song is disjointed waffle. So that one good line which could’ve been a nice ingredient becomes the only flavour – because the rest of the song is just stodge.

It contains the line ‘We’ll find our own way home somehow’. Now here’s a tried and tested rule for good lyrics, which I just made up. You know a line is mediocre if it’s unpatentable – if someone else could use the exact same line in another song and you wouldn’t be able to sue them.

‘It kicks like a sleep twitch’ will belong to Editors forever, ‘We’ll find our own way home somehow’ is what you say when the sat-nav breaks.

Other examples include: ‘You will choke, choke on the air you try to breathe’.

As opposed to choking on the air I’m not trying to breathe? Why will this happen? Will this happen as a result of the sleep twitch?

‘The world turns too fast, feel love before it’s gone’.

Before what’s gone? The world? The love? You don’t know do you? But yes, I see what you’re saying. It’s important to experience the emotion known as ‘love’ because our time on earth is shorter than you think. An unoriginal sentiment, which you have just fudged.

Or are you suggesting that now you’ve woken us both up by twitching in your sleep we might as well get down to some rumpy pumpy, just in case the world starts spinning wildly faster and faster until it flies off into space and is engulfed by the sun? You charmer.

For what it’s worth the meter of the song is also horrible. It’s crammed with joining words, and verbosity – it neither reflects the rhythms of every day speech, nor does it manage to be poetry. It is, in short, a song which isn’t about anything. So the passion that song is capable of harnessing is being channelled into… nothing.

Reader: “Egad, Lu! What about authorial intention? I heard that ‘Papillon’ is actually about [EditorsMan’s dog** dying/similar story]!”

‘Bimble bomble bumble boo

I like chops and you like fruit

Dangly dingly singly song

We’ll leave this town before too long’

^This is a poem I just wrote about my wife.

What do you mean it’s bollocks!? It’s about my wife, you shameless twat. Stop reading my column right now!

Authorial intention is very nice, and every now and again it’s good to know about it. It is not, however, a substitute for successfully communicating your intention in the first place. I’m all for songs that need a bit of unravelling, or use ambiguity. There are enough songs out there that condescend to their listeners and spell everything out, just in case they aren’t smart enough to understand. Spare me.

A song shouldn’t mean nothing. It’s shouldn’t be a string of half arsed pseudo poetic metaphors cobbled together in isolation because they just sound good, padded out with truisms, clichés, trite observations, gossip and blank ‘Facebook status update’ style affirmations of the writer’s mood.

But then it’s all subjective, isn’t it? So perhaps if Editors were writing this column they’d say the opposite.

Next time: Breaking the fourth wall – the ultimate songwriting no-no.

*I realised when typing this article that this is the first time in my life I have ever had to spell the word ‘omelette’. Who knew it had three E’s?

**Funnily enough whilst the word ‘Papillon’ is French for butterfly it is also a poncey breed of dog, so for all I know this is actually true.

You might also be interested in...

• How to Write a Good Song: Part Four — Breaking the Fourth Wall
• How to write a good song: Part Two – The Lyrics
• Singles round-up: Melodica Melody & Me, The Pipettes, Pagan Wanderer Lu
• How to write a good song: An introduction
• Interview: Pagan Wanderer Lu

2. Due to a disastrous failure to plan ahead, I missed Jens Lekman when he played London’s Union Chapel last night. Here’s a rather marvellous video by Paul Bridgewater of Jens’ performance of Pocketful of Money. *Sigh*.

3. Also, Jens remixed Au Revoir Simone’ s Shadows into 3/4 time, and after he did so, put together a rather amazing mixtape of waltzes that span genre and time. Listen to the mix: A Summer in 3/4 Time. And read what Jens has to say about it on his blog.

4. Despite the Mercury nomination, Villagers’ album Becoming a Jackal doesn’t really do it for me. Irish artist Conor O’Brien sounds rather a lot too much like Conor Oberst and the recordings — aside from current single ‘Ship of Promises’ and one or two others — sound somehow flat. For quite a while I’ve been failing to see what all the fuss was about. But I was recently blown away by this gorgeous session he did for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.

5. FFS contributor Stephen Thomas challenged me to choose my six favourite Beach Boys songs for his website We Write Lists. It was really difficult, involved me making up all sorts of rules to narrow them down (one from each album… one written by Carl, one by Dennis, one cover…. none by MIke Love) and I’m still not sure I’m happy with my choices. It was worth it for the chance to do some anti-Love propaganda though. Here’s the 6 on Spotify. In other Beach Boys-Spotify news, a person (I don’t know who) has made a brilliant playlist of Beach Boys covers. Listen here.

6. Six music have been playing the rather wonderful northern indie-folkers Stealing Sheep recently. Listen on MySpace. They remind me of a non-French Ödland, who I’ve banged on about on this blog before. If you’ve not listened to them yet, you should: MySpace.

7. Australian band Boy & Bear supported Laura Marling on her UK tour earlier this year. Their energy didn’t really transmit to the back of the huge, posh, sit-down venue I saw them in, but check out this lovely video, sent in by FFS reader Sam Kimish. Those harmonies… *swoon*

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Performing and recording as Pagan Wanderer Lu, Andy Regan combines his electro-indie-pop music with clever, wry and sometimes political lyrics. Andy also writes at paganwandererlu.wordpress.com and has done a turn as a guest blogger for the Independent. In his second installment of his series for FFS on how to write a good song, he considers the importance -or not- of lyrics…

Throughout my teenage years I never heard an adequate explanation as to why every Pulp album I bought from 1995 to the present day (i.e. all of them) featured the above instruction in its liner notes. In ‘researching’ (cough) this column I did a quick google search, not for first the first time, and sitting at the top of the results on something called ‘PulpWiki’ I finally found an explanation for it from Jarvis Cocker himself:

“If you read them whilst listening to the recordings you’re extracting the lyrics from their natural habitat (…) When you’re listening to a song, the lyrics are subservient to the rhyme. Whereas if you read them off a page they have a natural rhythm.”

Which somewhat steals the thunder from what I was going to say… This idea of lyrics in their ‘natural habitat’ is a nice way to sum up today’s column (thanks Jarvis – again!).

Last time I mentioned that I believe we (animals) learned to sing before we could speak. The twitterings of birds looking to score are a form of communication which is totally removed from ‘meaning’. When a bird sings he’s saying ‘lets make eggs together’ – he’s just saying it directly, unfiltered by interpretation. It’s not contained within the sound – but then neither is ‘meaning’ contained in any of the words humans use.

Words came later, when people started wanting to say more complicated things like “You know how that tribe from the other side of the forest keep killing us? Well, I reckon if we put a sharpened piece of rock on the end of a stick it could really tip the balance in our favour”.

The word ‘love’ is not love itself, but I know a few songs that sure feel like love. Why? Having so much honey the bees envy you is quite a claim (and one which is difficult to falsify). It’s also damned hard to understand how such an expression could accurately convey the feelings of elation David Ruffin somehow manages to put into it.

Here’s an experiment you can all do. Next time you’re in a supermarket, go up to a number of strangers and say ‘I want to hold your hand’. Do it in your most monotone voice. Let me know what happens.

Now try this – go up to them and sing ‘I wanna hold your hand’ by the Beatles. The first time you’ll sound like a stalker, the second time, well… probably just like some likeably eccentric nutter.

How does this work?

Well, the bottom line is we don’t know. But I’d suggest it works the same way the smell of bacon cooking (or your favourite vegetarian alternative) makes you salivate. It skips the barrier of language and goes straight to the buttons hidden deep in your brain. The reason people went loopy for the Beatles wasn’t because it had never previously occurred to them that they might want to hold someone’s hand. It was because the melody managed to describe what wanting to hold someone’s hand felt like.

Of course it’s possible for language alone to conjure up the same feelings as physical sensations do. The entire phone sex industry relies on this. Likewise a review of a nice restaurant will make you hungry. A letter from a distant loved one will make you pine for them. And so on. But melody can enhance the words themselves and make them mean what they say more than just saying them.

This is the absolute essence of writing a good song.

Now this column isn’t meant as a manual, and it’s sure as hell not meant to imply that I personally am better at writing songs than anyone else – history will decide that. But I know that a sure fire way of writing a song which people can ‘appreciate’ but which doesn’t connect is to write clever, wordy lyrics which just use the melody as the route from one syllable to the next (think Billy Bragg).

Songwriting is not just an excuse for you to address a crowd whilst holding a guitar. The synthesis of what you’re trying to say and how you say it is crucial to connecting.

Let me tell you a secret: this is how people get away with writing shit lyrics. If the melody is strong enough you can sing the most banal thing you want and no one will care. Exactly 100% of X Factor style pop is made this way, bypassing Wernicke’s area of your left temporal lobe and going straight to the bit of you that likes kisses, cuddles, and intimate touching.

So far I’ve probably been giving the impression that I think merely singing some words is so mystical and wonderful that singing any old shit is a perfectly good approach to writing a song. Nope.

Last time I said that humans have evolved beyond where ‘song’ originated from. The ‘natural habitat’ of a modern pop song is not the jungle, it’s the city – it’s the hectic modern world, after the Greeks invented democracy, after the industrial revolution, the rise and fall of the British Empire, September 11^th, the Large Hadron Collider, the Hubble space telescope, Charles Darwin, and the Simpsons. We know stuff now.

Autechre once said that with the advance of technology in the world there was no reason why any two bands need to sound the same. I’d like to suggest that with the amount of information in the world there’s no reason why any two songs need to be about the same thing.

Sufjan Stevens took a novel approach when he undertook to write a whole album about the state of Illinois. Imposing strict constraints on what you’re going to write can often force you to be more creative. The alternative is assuming whatever you come up with without really trying is automatically going to be good, because of your innate talent. Retreating to a library and flicking through history books might not be the most rock n roll approach to music, but it’s really no more contrived than Elvis waggling his groin on TV.

The reason ‘Illinois’ works is because Sufjan (we’re on first name terms) brought an emotional truth to bear on what he wrote, through the music. Just listen to the ‘Oh my god…’ on ‘John Wayne Gacy’. The scene setting verses utterly giving up on any attempt to convey the full horror and resorting instead to what might be called a ‘place holding’ phrase, and that fragile, trembling melody… It still gives me chills.

I think achieving that synthesis from good, interesting lyrics to good song is miles harder than the move from banal cereal box sentiment to good song. That’s why going ‘tra la la’ is so popular, there’s no linguistic barrier.

It’s why so many people outside Iceland love Sigur Ros – their mix of a language few people speak and a language they’ve just made up means there’s nothing between you and The Song. Of course Jonsi’s beautiful voice helps, but just listen to his solo album where the words are partly in English – his lyrics are rubbish! If he’s singing that sort of banal twaddle when he’s singing in Icelandic then I’m glad I don’t speak it.

So Jarvis was right after all, the really great lyrics are the ones which ‘naturally inhabit’ the song.

Next time: What should a song be about?

You might also be interested in...

• How to Write a Good Song: Part Four — Breaking the Fourth Wall
• How to write a good song: Part Three: ‘Content’
• Singles round-up: Melodica Melody & Me, The Pipettes, Pagan Wanderer Lu
• How to write a good song: An introduction
• Interview: Pagan Wanderer Lu

The sound problems, hour-long queues for loos and bars, scarce water on a boiling hot day (exacerbated by a bizarre rule that only bottles of 500ml or less could be taken into the arena) and rude staff were just some of a litany of problems that meant every festival-goer came away with a complaint.

Worst of all for FFS was that the festival bus was deliberately timed to arrive mid-afternoon (we phoned up the bus company, who said Hop Farm had told them to arrive at 2.30) — which turned out to be after Foy Vance, the Magic Numbers, Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling had played — we arrived to hear the heartbreaking announcement “Give it up for an amazing set, from the wonderful Laura Marling”. And with no stage times available before the festival, there was nothing to be done to prevent it.

Someone at Hop Farm certainly does have great taste in music, but perhaps they should stick to making playlists. It seems to be about all they can manage.

• Juliet Cochrane’s review of Laura Marling and Johnny Flynn
• Peter Rice’s review of Bob Dylan

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I want to write, and I want to write about music. There are, in my mind, only two types of people in this world: those who are musically talented, and those who aren’t. It’s those who aren’t that tend to go into music writing. That’s certainly why I’m here. You can throw any instrument you like at me, and I will prove myself adept at not playing all of them. Throw me a pencil, I might come up with something. Throw me a saxophone and you’ll get a talentless squelchy wail.

And so, I write about music. It’s the only option, really. Everyone needs to express themselves, about life, and love, and the things that excite them; if I can’t do this in song, like Disney always told me I should, then writing will have to do. And nothing excites me more than music.

It’s a similar motivation that leads William Miller, the protagonist in Almost Famous, to write. He starts writing for underground music magazines – small affairs that nobody really reads – but keeps pushing forward. Eventually he has a chance to meet his hero, a successful journalist from his home-town (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who acts as a mentor to the young writer. After some trial-and-error experiences, the fifteen year-old Miller is given a chance by Rolling Stone, who are unaware of his age, to interview rock band Stillwater. When William gets pulled into their nationwide tour, he finds himself experiencing a different sort of life from his repressed home existence, and risks losing his journalistic balance as he starts to befriend the band.

Almost Famous is not so much a film about music as it is a film about music-writing, and the motivations critics and journalists have behind their words. Cameron Crowe both wrote and directed the film, basing it loosely on his own experiences as a young music writer in the Seventies, and as such he touches on every aspect of our wishes, dreams and insecurities. We write about music out of a love and passion for it that, more often than not, we feel is simply too important not to be written down. It is arrogant, yes, but we are the musicians without the music, and we share many of the same influences and aspirations, only without the means to express ourselves through sound.

But Crowe also understands that a music writer, more often than not, just wants to be with the musician. Not, perhaps, in some sort of obsessive admiration (though there is, of course, always some awe at said musician’s ability to pick up inanimate objects and produce sounds more soulful than a human alone can create), nor simply in order to pick up some level of credibility-by-association (though, again, there must be a certain amount of that, or we wouldn’t always eagerly tell everyone else the famous people we have met). No, we journalists, more often than not, want to be around musicians simply so that we can be accepted by them, and be their friends, and in doing so, be equals with them. It’s sad, and it’s selfish, but it’s terribly, terribly true, and so many writers spend their lives shadowing the bands they love simply to feel they are, in the most brutal of terms, as good as the people they admire.

The worst thing, of course, is that, as our parents always tried to teach us, nobody is inherently better than anyone else. In fact, it is only when we devote ourselves to the idea of being accepted that we create the myth that we are not. And, of course, we lie to ourselves and believe that it is better to be a musician, and that if we were musicians, none of this would matter. All bollocks, of course. One musician will envy the song-writing ability of another, who in turn might envy the voice of another, who in turn may envy another’s skills with, say, a keytar, who in turn… well, you get the idea.

Maybe this isn’t it. In fact, it almost certainly isn’t – Almost Famous is, on the face of it, a film about meeting your heroes, or about loyalty, or about ‘bros before hos’, or, maybe, at a push, simply a film about a young rock journalist taken for the ride of his life by a fictional seventies rock group. But watching it as someone who writes about music, I was always going to see more than that – I was always going to see the selfish and disappointing motivations of music journalism, because I am guilty of them too. Of course we write about music because we love it – of course we do. But there’s more to it than that. At least, there is for me.

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1. There’s a rather wonderful new song by Laura Marling doing the rounds. It was debuted on her North American tour last month. Luckily some smartie caught it on video: Laura Marling – Who Am I?

2. The lovely Chris at Broken Sound Music has a blogful of excellent music recommendations for you to check out. Broken Sound are the folk that first released Peggy Sue’s EPs before they boarded the good ship Wichita.

3. Speaking of Wichita, it’s their 10th birthday celebrations this week at the Garage in Highbury, North London. If you’re in the area I recommend catching Peggy Sue, First Aid Kit and Meg Baird on 13 July. Listings and ticket info.

4. The Dufflefolks (who I’ve known since FFS was just a twinkle in my eye — Louis from the band wrote the Folk Fan’s Guide to Hip Hop for us) won the competition to open Green Man last week. Although a little incredulous about the truly brill Al Lewis & Sarah Howells being knocked out earlier in the competition, I’m really happy for the beardy foursome. Here is the video for their track Homegrown to celebrate.

5. And speaking of Al Lewis & Sarah Howells, their new album In the Wake, is now on pre-order. It’s so new that I’ve not had a listen to it yet, but I’ve spotted one or two familiar tracks — including Throw Me A Line, The Arsonist and Make a Little Room — which have got my ears quivering with anticipation. Artwork is by Anika Mottershaw.

6. Speaking of Anika, I looked after one of her shows last week featuring Left With Pictures and Ödland. Check out Left With Pictures’ In Time project, which sees them write and record a new song every month. Also well worth a listen is Ödland’s album Ottocento, available on Spotify. I’ve never seen a band so lacily pretty, retro or French. All of which are Very Good Things in my book.

7. I went to Hop Farm Festival a week ago, and have been struggling to write my review since. What should have been a brilliant day (Line up: Laura Marling, Johnny Flynn, Mumford & Sons, Ray Davies, Seasick Steve, Bob blimmin Dylan) was marred by getting the official festival bus — which unbeknown to us was timed to arrive at the site after four acts had already played (no stage times were made available in advance) — so I missed Laura Marling and Johnny Flynn as well as the Magic Numbers and Foy Vance. The festival was generally very poorly organised, so I wouldn’t recommend going unless they come up with a line-up that wonderful again, and if you do be sure to make your own way there. Full review of the music with input from my Dylan-expert uncle, Peter Rice, coming soon.

8. In happier news, Nordic music blog Eardrums is an absolute must for indie-pop fans. And its tireless editor Knut has just put together a brilliant compilation of collaborations by some of their favourite artists. The 3-part album Between Two Waves, which Knut calls a “a non-profit project from music lovers to music lovers”, is free to download. The only criteria for the music, says Knut, was that it should be “warm and melodic”. We think the bands have hit the nail on the head.

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Performing and recording as Pagan Wanderer Lu, Andy Regan combines his electro-indie-pop music with

It is an irrefutable fact that ‘Mr Writer’ by the Stereophonics is the worst song ever written.

Irrefutably the best song ever written

Likewise no one can sensibly disagree that ‘Common People’ by Pulp is the best. It is truly remarkable that, following 6,000 years of human history, this peak and trough in creative endeavour came to pass within just three short years of the same decade.

David Bowie once said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture – (or possibly someone else said it – I believe what I want to believe).

Richard Dawkins once wrote that the key to understanding evolution from a gene’s point of view was to think of DNA, not as a blueprint for a living thing, but as a recipe. A set of instructions which create the conditions under which a cake will appear, rather than a particular segment of cake corresponding to a particular line in the recipe.

Heston Blumenthal regularly asserts that all the high concept and wacky techno cookery in the world are no use whatsoever if the plate of food that you get at the end doesn’t taste great.

Stevie Wonder once sang ‘just because a record has a groove don’t make it in the groove’.

Draw a straight line through each of these viewpoints, and mark the point on the map where those lines intersect. There you will find an ancient tome, bound in the skin of all four members of the Beatles (it exists outside time) marked ‘How to write a good song’. Whoever possesses it can never fail to consistently combine words and music in a way which all human beings would recognise as unambiguously perfect. Once it is found it will render all music criticism, end of year lists, and the concept of ‘reviewing’ music obsolete.

Until you return from your quest, we have this column. I’ll do my best.

My problem is I can’t quite shake this feeling that music is important. That it matters what goes through someone’s mind when they sit down with their guitar, piano, harp, casio keyboard, or omnichord and try to write a song. And that, even if it’s not important, it’s at least interesting.

Some people write songs with all the detailed premeditation and introspection with which they go to the toilet – I envy them. Others write painstakingly, agonising over every syllable and semi-quaver, over the positioning of a microphone or the tone of a guitar – I envy them too. The funny thing is that both approaches produce great songs, but not consistently. So is songwriting a recipe rather than a formula?

"Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole..."

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, better known as the KLF, produced a book called ‘The Manual: or how to have a number one single’. Aside from guaranteeing to refund the cost of purchase to anyone who followed its instructions to the letter and failed to have a hit, it included the assertion that if two individuals, using the same pieces of equipment, produced two pieces of music, both consisting of nothing but a kick drum playing the fours at 120bpm for eight minutes it would still be possible for one of those records to be ‘better’ than the other.

The book asserts that something of the personality of the creator would still find its way into the groove, and be detectable by the listener. I made such a recording once, I never bothered listening to it all – I suppose it would be dull having your own personality hammered into your head for eight minutes.

But is that what makes a good song? Personality?

Music comes from two places buried deep within our evolutionary past. The first and most important is ‘song’ in the sense that a bird ‘sings’ – a means of communication which predates language. I’ll come back to that in another column, partly because it deserves 1,000 words to itself, and partly because the second, and more titillating is to do with sex.

I am perfectly convinced that the desire to make music is a sublimed manifestation of the urge to attract mating partners.

I’m not saying that every individual who writes a song secretly thinks ‘this will get me laid’ — though some clearly do. But these basic desires are as fundamental to how we think as the shape of our legs is to how to we walk.

I’m often surprised at how people feel thinking about music in this way cheapens it in some way. What I’m saying is that whilst the root of music is in this basic need to draw attention to oneself and be impressive, it’s evolved along with us, and become a pastime in its own right.

Birds sing because they want to get it on. It shows that they’re not afraid to announce their presence to predators, that they can put themselves at risk and survive. This is an arousing quality in the person who’s going to go out and bring your children worms to eat, as any female bird will tell you.

The ways of attracting attention have become more sophisticated, and intermingled with other cultural changes. Being a musician would once have been a sign of immense wealth for example, and though those days are clearly long gone the glamour remains.

To be in the moment of singing a song is to step outside yourself and approach something more primal and instinctive.

Away from the fussiness of words and the restrictions on self expression that blight us day by day. To stand up and make noise still seems thrilling, even in the sanctioned environment of a stage. Quite how this explains tweecore – the least sexy genre ever invented – I don’t know, but people in cardigans deserve love too I suppose…

The point is that personality shining through two otherwise identical tracks makes sense in this context. But If the idea of creating a ‘good’ song is for people to feel attracted to you personally, then you can you separate your image of a person from how you see their song? Think of poor old SuBo getting up to sing for the first time and the carefully stage-managed incredulity of the judges when it turned out her voice wasn’t as wonky as the rest of her. Or how often have you seen a picture of the new singer you like for the first time and been surprised at what you see?

So should this be ‘How to write a good song’, or ‘How to make a song sexy’? How do female musicians fit into this equation? In nature it’s usually the males that do the elaborate mating displays, after all. And is there some element of fetishising? I have been known to watch a band’s performance and be wracked with feelings of lust for the gear they use. I have heard synths described as ‘sexy’. Is the part of your brain that makes you love a song the same bit that makes you want to lick ladies’ shoes?

Next time: Why do all Pulp records include the instruction ‘Do not read the lyrics whilst listening to the recordings’?

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• How to write a good song: Part Two – The Lyrics
• Singles round-up: Melodica Melody & Me, The Pipettes, Pagan Wanderer Lu
• Interview: Pagan Wanderer Lu

1. Hadestown
For the past couple of months it’s been all I could do to tear myself away from Anais Mitchell’s concept album/folk opera Hadestown, released this year. I hate to come over all Jo-Wiley-talking-about-U2, but it really is a stunning modern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice. It features guest vocals from Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Ben Knox Milller from the Low Anthem as well as Greg Brown and Ani DeFranco. It’s definitely the best thing I’ve heard all year. Hear on Myspace or Spotify. Buy from Amazon.

2. Best bits playlist
Reminded by the brilliant new album from Canadian supergroup Stars, I realised that the first words sung by Amy Millan on their 2004 album Set Yourself on Fire, is probably my favourite bit of a pop song, ever. Following Torquil Campbell’s scene setting, Millan comes in with ‘This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin’. It’s goosebumps central. We asked for your best bits suggestions on twitter and compiled this: our best bits playlist.

3. Laura Marling debuts new material
Here’s a brand spanking new Laura Marling song, Who Am I?, which she performed when she was in Texas last month. It’s making us pretty excited for album number three, due later this year.

4. Mountain Man
This three piece from Vermont have beat me to my secret ambition to start a folk madrigal choir. Their swoony three-piece harmonies and sparse or acapella arrangements are just lovely. Have a listen on Myspace and Spotify or buy their album on Amazon.

5. Bandstand Busking at Meltdown
Thomas, Ian and Anika from Bandstand Busking organised two fantastic free gigs at The Royal Festival Hall as part of Richard Thompson’s Meltdown festival. The first featured Laura Hocking and Sam Amidon and for the second they lined up Johnny Flynn, Broadcast 2000 and Slow Club. Performance of the afternoon went to Broadcast 2000 — sandwiched between Johnny and Slow Club — whose full-band set up is not to be missed. Live, the already=brilliant songs take on a life of their own, becoming almost performance art with the elegant bowing of the three string players contrasting with furious drumming and glock-bashing from the rhythm section.

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• The Folk Artist Twitter Directory
• Schmercury Poll interview series: Anais Mitchell
• EP: Dharohar Project, Laura Marling & Mumford & Sons - iTunes Live
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• Laura Marling announced as Foxtrot's secret headliner

FFS asked you for your #bestbits of songs on twitter today — your favourite couple of seconds of music, one that makes you swoon, cry or nigh-on burst with joy. You came up with so many good suggestions that we couldn’t stop ourselves from sharing them with the world at large. Here they are on a Spotify playlist: FFS #bestbits

1. Mumford & Sons – I Gave You All “And you rip it from my hands, and you swear it’s all gone”.I bloody love that bit - matthewkingdon
2. Clint Mansell – Death Is The Road To Awe the big, dramatic pause – ardvarc
3. The Mountain Goats – Going To Georgia where John’s voice cracks as he sings “The world shiiiines…” – roastfacedkilla
4. Band – The Weight “To get back to Miss Fanny, you know she’s the only one” a gutsy line – carol_crawford
5. The Mountain Goats – Dilaudid “And take your foot off of the brake, for christs sake!” 1:46. I got Goosebumps. – jonoganz
6. Neutral Milk Hotel – Two-Headed Boy when the sound goes a bit weird cause he sings “catching signals” so loud. 1:09 :’) – jonoganz
7. Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Heart Like A Wheel the harmony bit from 1:48- 2:10ish – francopopfille
8. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Maps the spine-tingly intro – ardvarc
9. Rilo Kiley – Spectacular Views When Jenny Lewis shouts “It’s so f–king beautiful” – arteeeee
10. Neko Case – Star Witness there is a moment when she holds a note on the word “Clean” that is so crystal clear It’s unreal – PeskyRattigan
11. Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – Open All Night “I remember Wanda up on scrap metal hill and them big brown eyes make your heart stand still” – Alicemcsage
12. Tom Waits – Martha 2:04 to 2:34. Beautiful. Could make me cry any time. – Rob_Hurst
13. She & Him – Home Zooey singing “…and i can be sweeter” – dan_corfield
14. Kirsty MacColl – They Don’t Know The “Ba-aaaaay-bee” bit – Duchamps_Brides
15. Blue Roses — Greatest Thoughts ‘I know you’d never change a thing, not for anyone or anything’  WoodlandBear
16. Tom McRae – I Ain’t Scared Of Lightning “I was born in a summer storm…I live there still”. Amazing. – rory1070
17. The Mountain Goats – No Children “You are coming down with me HAND IN UNLOVABLE HAND” – forfolkssake
18. Belle and Sebastian – Don’t Leave The Light On Baby the key change – helentrue
19. Stars – Your Ex Lover Is Dead When Amy Millan comes in singing “This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin” – forfolkssake

And it’s not on Spotify, but we’ll leave you with this rather excellent double name drop by our very own Stephen (WoodlandBear): “Once I was with Stephen Fretwell and Guy Garvey texted him: ‘I love the way Dylan sings ‘the silent type’ in Tangled Up In Blue.’”

Guy Garvey said it’s good. So it’s good.

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