Dean Wareham talks songwriting
This guest post is by Scott Douglas, whose Substack newsletter is Terse Bloviation. Scott saw Luna’s first Washington, D.C. show in January 1993. Almost four years later, he met the woman who is now his wife and learned that she was also at that 1993 concert.
Thanks to Dean for answering a few emailed questions about his songwriting.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a Luna song that has a conventional bridge. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.) Has that been a conscious decision, or is it just how songs play out as you work on them? It seems like you’re a connoisseur of late 60s/70s high-quality radio-friendly rock, where a bridge is common. Why not make use of this element?
Dean: There are a few Luna songs—from Pup Tent—that have an instrumental bridge. “Beggar’s Bliss” and “Tracy I Love You” come to mind, but yes, you are right, it is pretty rare, and with those two songs the chord progression came from Sean. To tell you the truth, writing the bridge section of “Tracy I Love You” took us an entire day in the studio, trying this chord and that—but it worked out.
I never really studied songwriting techniques, and starting out, it just never occurred to me to write a bridge, or modulate to another key (another popular trick). But on my last couple of solo albums there are several songs with a bridge—“the Last Word” is one I’m sorta proud of as it has lyrics too and is my favourite song. “Cashing In” has an instrumental bridge and modulates a couple of times. So I’m learning.
You wrote a tour diary in 2015 that included an airline losing your pedalboard, which, you wrote, “contains everything I need to sound like Dean Wareham.” How long does it typically take to settle on the right effects for a song? When recording Luna albums, was that generally worked out before you went into the studio? And have you ever significantly changed the effects for a song after playing it live and realizing it should sound different?
Dean: It’s only worked out in the studio, and it can take a while to settle on a sound. A song gets to a certain point where you have the rhythm tracks and the vocal down, but you want a special sound to add excitement or a texture to glue it all together. We live in an era of hundreds and hundreds of effects pedals, everyone is building them, and now with digital processing they can make all kinds of crazy sounds. But I still gravitate to a few simple things: reverb, delay, tremolo, vibrato, overdrive, fuzz. A lot of shoegaze and psych bands kinda bore me with the excessive use of effects. I want to hear guitarists play something interesting—I mean interesting notes, a solo that tells a story, not just a wash of effects.
And as to the last point, we are forever tweaking our pedalboards.
Finally, lyrics. I got the impression from this making-of-Penthouse discussion that you generally write lyrics once you have the riff/melody. How often, if ever, have you had lyrics sitting around waiting for the right tune?
Dean: I do have plenty of half-finished lyrics sitting around, rhyming couplets or topics I want to write about. The lyrics and the music originate in different places, but they have to work together, and the music dictates what kind of lyrics are appropriate. As Ned Rorem writes somewhere, “Poetry may be the egg from which the nightingale is hatched, though in the last analysis that nightingale must come first.”
Thanks so much to Scott for this post. If anyone else thinks they might have something that might interest the readers of A Head Full of Wishes please get in touch.
You can see some of Dean’s “half finished lyrics” in some notebooks that were published in a special “archives” edition of Esopus a few years back. I wrote about it, and included a couple of snaps here.
Dean’s lyrics have also been published in a lovely book with illustrations by Ed Templeton called “Hearing Voices” - I think Dean might still have some copies for sale.
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