WORDS WITHOUT MUSIC

Words without Music

The only belonging I actually lost on August 4 was my lyrics notebook. Although our little apartment suffered heavy damage, nothing was completely lost. Doors and windows had flown out of their frames, a table’s legs broke, plants fell out of pots, our newly bought TV split in half, a bookshelf shattered into millions of pieces. Some things could be fixed, others had to be thrown out. But nothing disappeared. Nothing except my lyrics notebook. 

I left our Mar Mikhael apartment that night and asked my friends who went back the next day to look for it. They searched the streets around our building, nearby dumpsters, and the cemetery below. No sign of my notebook.

If I Die

I wait for the sun

Let the sun bury me in light
Mermaids sing like in the beginning 

There is nothing left under the sun
Houses stand like tombs
Bodies back in wombs
There is nothing left but the sun

Bury me in light

August 5. I only remember the sun. 

I wake up at 7 a.m., after a short, nightmare-filled sleep. My mother had given me a sleeping pill, but my dehydrated, drained body was bound to crash anyway. In the gray that overtook the city the night before, I forgot we were in August. Bright, scorching, smoldering August. 

I get dressed and rush to the hospital. The sun is invasive, blinding. I feel its rays burning my skin, screeching in my ears. During the 20-minute drive, the sun is defiant and provocative. I want it gone.

I never thought of myself as a writer. I didn’t write growing up. I tried keeping a diary when I was nine, like all my favorite characters in books. I planned to start an elaborate mystery novel when I was twelve. Both experiments failed miserably. The diary lasted three days; the novel, four pages. 

Although I majored in literature, I made sure to avoid creative writing classes. I had decided early on that I was a reader, not a writer. I wrote analytical and creative essays in school and university, and I wrote well, because I understood the assignment. I wrote what was expected of me.

My literature teacher in school told me that I was literary with a scientific brain — I was logical, clear, to the point, but I lacked poetry. She said I would some day make a great journalist.

I used to think words could not affect me the way music does. 

I grew up with music always playing in our home. My mother is a music teacher. She taught me the guitar and the basics of singing. My father, grandfather, uncles, and cousins are all avid music lovers. Family gatherings revolved around music. I took piano lessons for ten years and have been singing since I was seven. As a shy kid, music was my refuge and the only way I was comfortable expressing myself.

Music is abstract, rich, layered. Its impact is instantly felt, even if not immediately understood. Words felt too dry, too precise. They didn’t move me, but perhaps because I didn’t allow them to. I dismissed lyrics, and poetry by extension. They only existed, for me, to serve the music in songs.

Home is so Sad

You were lying where
you had cut my hair
right beneath the table
where we eat the bread you make
Home is so sad

Glass in our coffee
towels on trees
blood from your nostrils
blood from your ears
soil splattered on our walls like drops of blood
Home is so sad

There’s a hole where your knee should be
but I am not afraid
I am not afraid
Home is so sad
it stays as it was left

I first read Philip Larkin’s poem “Home Is So Sad,” on my cousin’s Instagram post, in my boyfriend’s hospital room in Mount Lebanon some time in August 2020. Larkin wrote it on New Year’s Eve, 1958, in Loughborough, England. “Home is so sad, it stays as it was left.”

When my two bandmates and I founded Postcards in 2012, I was the designated songwriter since I was the band’s lead singer. I found myself writing lyrics “scientifically,” just as my teacher had predicted. For our first two EPs (2013 and 2015), I only wrote because I had to, because pop songs need words. We composed the music together, then I wrote words that fit the assignment. I recycled formulaic sentences from songs we liked to use in ours. The music expressed what we wanted to say. Words were just needed to fill in the blanks. They only had to sound good. I knew they weren’t great, but I preferred writing this way. Dissociating from the process meant keeping my distance. I could detach myself from the “I” in these songs.

I wanted to make and play music, but I wasn’t willing to expose myself with words. And I was not a poet, after all, nor a real writer.

Cut to 2016. 

“Julia, you have an opinion about everything. I refuse to believe you have nothing to say.” 

The slap in the face that forced me to confront my fear. Our producer and friend, Fadi, told me this as we were writing our first full-length album, I’ll Be Here in the Morning.

Someone had seen through my insecurities masquerading as indifference. He knew I wasn’t putting my heart — or head, for that matter — into the lyrics. Our music was evolving and we were growing as people. The lyrics needed to follow suit.

Fadi’s words echoed a friend’s, who had once told me “I don’t see you in your songs.” His comment angered me at the time, but I brushed it off. I couldn’t afford to think about it because I knew I would have to come to terms with what I’ve known since I was nine. Writing, even if only for myself, terrified me.

I had no idea where to start. A songwriter friend advised me to carry a notebook at all times. I bought a small black one, and began writing down texts I liked from books, movies, music, conversations. I absorbed everything around me. It was easier to begin with taking in the outside world before attempting to bring out my inner one.

Songs I loved acquired new meaning, because I allowed the words to move me. I discovered the beauty — and safety — of words paired with music and melodies. Writing lyrics meant I was still half-hidden behind music. My words weren’t standing alone, they were part of a whole. I slowly understood how lyrics, not just music, could shape a song. A sentence could mean multitudes, depending on how it was sung, where the melody began, what instruments were being played. The choice of instruments, tempo, melodies, rhythms, timbre, arrangements, words — all these combine to make you think and feel something.

Words and music were inherently bound in our songs, and it allowed me to somewhat comfortably inject a part of myself in the lyrics. Somehow the idea of being a lyricist was easier to swallow than that of being a writer.

In the podcast Song Exploder, artists explain the process behind songs they’ve written. Jeff Tweedy, Wilco’s lead singer and songwriter, a guest on one of the episodes, explains how when the band is playing he mutters syllables or random words as he’s coming up with a vocal melody. Some of these words make it to the final song, or even shape the theme of the lyrics entirely. He says this allows his subconscious to connect between words and music in ways he wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. 

This was a revelation, because I had been doing the same instinctively but I thought my process was just lazy. I thought that writing based on instinct, the way I sometimes did with music, meant I wasn’t a real writer. The more I read about other writers’ processes, the less harsh I could be with myself.

We composed the music for “Red” in July 2020. While we were playing the song, figuring out the arrangement, I was experimenting with a vocal melody and I found myself singing “I am by your side,” with the syllables fitting right in. The last version we did before August was instrumental only, with this single sentence I repeated. An omen.