Song Club #18: Bars

Bars make potent background and foreground for songs.

QUICK NOTE: Through May, I’m trying experiment where I share my weekly efforts to write a song a week—using these prompts. In doing this, my hope is to create a space where y’all might feel safe doing the same.

I’m looking for ways to make Song Club feel like an active and supportive community, as opposed to a broadcast. This is just one experiment in doing so. LMK how it feels?

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Songs about bars and drinking are a mainstay in popular music. I haven’t done any quantitative analysis, but bars and drinking are probably a top three song topic (sitting alongside love and sex).

There are songs about bars, and songs simply set in them. There are songs that lament drinking, and songs that celebrate it.  In ‘Lived In Bars’ by Cat Power, Chan Marshall explores her difficult and troubled relationship with drinking. Elliott Smith’s ‘Between The Bars’ is sung to himself from the perspective of alcohol. Far, far at the other end of the spectrum, you have ‘Tubthumping’ by Chumbawamba, which if it isn’t celebratory of booze, has at least been used that way for some time. 

Bars make potent background and foreground for songs, no matter the tenor.  Some people meet and fall in love in bars, and others get into fist fights. Some people experience bars as a sort of home, and others find bars undo the idea and reality of home. Bars are a distinctly adult third place, and they are steeped in the complexity adulthood brings: simultaneously wonderful and wretched.

For all these reasons (and more), this week I want us to explore bars in our songwriting. 

Keep going, 

Lucy 

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SONG PROVOCATIONS

Write a song about the first time you ever went to a bar

Start with some object writing and dig into the moment: what sense memories arise? Keep writing til you have a rich cache of images for your song. You might also reflect on the newness of the experience, the unfamiliar faces, and the thrill of stepping into a world of adulthood and independence for the first time.