HeyJaredSongwritings
A conversation about songs, writing and songwriting, between Kate van der Borgh and Nick Asbury.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 7
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- Sep 27, 2026
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- Aug 16, 2026
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I definitely do (opens the original)
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Bit of a comical turn this week – a song about trying to convince a conspiracy theorist that you’re genuinely in love with them. ‘Comic song’ is a tough genre that easily tips into novelty song. Even having written this one myself, I tend to get images of Richard Vranch (was that his name?) chuckling at the Whose Line Is It Anyway piano.But there was a long Tin Pan Alley tradition of comic songs, some very good. And I like the way this sounds like one of those songs, but contains more contempora
Into the wild blue yonder (opens the original)
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Sending out these Sunday songs has prompted me to dig back through my mainly baffling voice notes to find unfinished fragments. I sometimes strum a guitar and wait for phrases to float up, which occasionally lock together into a ‘thing’ of some sort – maybe an opening line or chorus. In this case, I had a two-year-old note containing the chorus of this song but nothing else, just a mumbled idea of a verse. I found there was enough in there to build out a whole song, including the stunning formal
Loose ends (opens the original)
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My memory is that this one began with a first line: “He’s over here, asking himself if he’s over her.” The chronic word player in me liked the shift in the here / her, and the way it changed the meaning of over. That eventually led to a similar shift in the second verse – “She’s over there, wondering whether, she’s over their thing together.”All of this set up a kind of emotional distance in the song, with the singer taking the god’s eye view a
Thought about you all night long (opens the original)
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Or just another verse-verse-bridge-verse love song. I do enjoy writing this stuff, however unsatisfying it is to have AI as a way of sharing it. I think of the 32-bar Tin Pan Alley song as the American equivalent of the sonnet form – a set structure in which it’s nevertheless possible to say everything about love and other things. Verse 1 sets up the proposition, verse 2 develops it and appeals to our sense of repetition, the bridge introduces another thought and is a departure similar to the ‘t
Quarter to blue (opens the original)
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This one is my attempt at addressing the urgent shortage of songs about trains and feeling sad. As in previous posts, the lyrics and music are by me. I then uploaded my own piano/guitar version to Suno, which generated the cover version. (This involved numerous failed attempts, in which it insisted on rearranging the song in bizarre ways, but I eventually got to a pretty faithful version that I think has a nice, train-like shuffle to it.) Again, none of the voices or instruments in this recordin
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