It truly is a gift to possess the ability to write a song. It doesn’t matter necessarily if people who hear it like it, enjoy it or have a strong, negative opinion on it, the real beauty is that you have created something from your inner self; from your own mind. And there is a certain euphoria that one experiences when a vision that has been germinating in the creative depths of your soul finally blossoms, evolving into an unexpectedly glorious anthem with rich progressions layered with hooks and melodic wonderment. It can leave you with a sense of egocentric awe as you bask in your accomplishment, revelling in the realisation that you have created a pop masterpiece.
And that’s how I felt many years ago when I realised that I had written something so brilliant, so utterly spellbinding, that I knew it would be a tough one for any publisher to ignore. It opened with two innocuous chords, repeated with slow changes; not new, not incredible and certainly not groundbreaking. The real magic lay in the tune which, like the progression, was simple, based predominantly around two notes with a rising tail at the end of each line. However, the melody possessed a syncopation in contrast to the square measure of the chords which gave it an alluringly addictive quality.
And its birth wasn’t laboured...I had just sort of come up with it. It was a tune that had come to me in a flash and which I had subsequently been humming, refining and repeating over and over in my mind for over a week. It was a little raw, all I really had was a verse (I hadn’t managed to progress it so that it evolved into a chorus of any sort), and the lyrics I had were sketchy at best. But what I had was hit-worthy I thought. All it needed was that killer chorus to give it the icing on the cake and a platinum-selling fortune generator was within my grasp.
My brother pitched up one afternoon and, as we sat down with a beer, I told him about this knockout masterpiece I had concocted. Recognising that I had seemingly whisked myself up into an excited frenzy over this compositional masterpiece, he eventually succumbed to my offer to play it to him. And so I did. Ok it was short, it was scrappy but he got the idea, and, as I finished and looked at him trying to gauge his reaction, he said...
“Well, I think you’re right, it’s brilliant...but you see, what you’ve written there is Rocketman by Elton John”.
