SONGWRITING
SMALL SONGS : AN ODE TO SCRAPS | Kevin MacDougall
Fragments and extras . Remains and remnants . The isolated pieces of the songs that never were . The central musical ideas around which nothing was ever built . The essence of each musical dream that was never to be fully realized . Scraps .
I ’ ve grown quite fond of them , to be honest .
But they ’ re also completely frustrating . You open up that lyric journal or your Voice Memos app , and there they are , staring back at you , taunting you . “ You never made much of me , did you ?” they say . “ You never discovered where I could go , or what I had the potential to be ,” they complain .
I tell them to hush .
Whether the scraps begin as a bit of creative inspiration we might find during a writing session , or they are discovered within a moment of spontaneous meditation during a service , many of them stick with us . And then they have the audacity to accumulate .
Some of my scraps are still scraps , and that ’ s all they will ever be . Others have eventually found a home within a “ full-fledged song " many months — or even years — later . And still other scraps have continued to occupy my attention and imagination long after I relegated them to the vault . They have continued singing to me until I realized they weren ’ t in need of anything else to complete them , because they were statements enough on their own . They didn ’ t need other parts to help them be what they needed to be .
And that ’ s the encouragement I have for worship songwriters this month , because , when it comes to those poor , lost musical pieces we ’ ve determined to be scraps , we don ’ t usually do much of anything with them .
But we really could .
I grew up in the Calvary Chapel movement ( as well as in some other denominations and
non-denominations ), in the era just after the Jesus Movement had filled the church with hippies . As a kid in the late 80 ’ s and 90 ’ s , a lot of the songs we sang were incredibly simple ; maybe four lines repeating . Some referred to them as “ choruses .” As such , they could be easily remembered , and were often sung by congregations that didn ’ t have hymnals , in a time before projecting lyrics became the norm . I also remember these songs being printed out in the weekly bulletin . Sunday church could feature eight or ten of these little “ choruses ” in a single service , and yet the worship time only took up about twenty minutes .
It ’ s pretty wild when you compare that to the epic , lengthy songs that are so common today : Three verses , pre-choruses , choruses , a bridge which develops dynamically and dominates the song , further choruses , back to the bridge , etc .
I experienced this transition between worship styles in real time as a teenager .
And maybe that ’ s why I have a fondness for song scraps . When I find there are pieces of