Mickey Newbury talks songwriting........

“I got a call from a famous writer while I’ve been in town, now I’m not gonna call his name, but he called to congratulate me on the new album,” Newbury starts off our conversation. “Then he asks me how the hell I’m still writing after all these years. I asked him why he doesn’t write and he said he didn’t have anything to write about anymore.”

Newbury pauses, as he must have when he heard that statement from a fellow songwriter, then continues.

“I asked him if he’d ever given any thought to writing a song about not having anything to write about? Just sit down and say he has nothing to say.”

Newbury explains that he writes just the way he suggested to his songwriter friend – when he sits down to write, he writes what is on his mind.

“The reason none of my songs have hook lines is ‘cause I don’t start with any story or hook line. If I wake up and feel like writing and the sun is shining, I might start off with ‘… I woke up this morning and the sun is shining…’ or ‘… I woke up this morning and it was raining …’ Seldom does that wind up being the lead line, but it creates a thread that goes through the song and somewhere down the line the sounds starts.

“It’s an old way of writing and I really believe in it because it’s the only way you can get into an unconscious flow. If you ever want to study a song and see if it’s inspired, take the lines and switch them around and see if they still have content and still make sense.”

Newbury illustrates with “Sweet Memories” – “My world is like a river, as dark as it is deep…night after night the past slips in, and gathers all my sleep…my days are just an endless stream, of emptiness to me … filled only by the fleeting moments of the memories.’ Now take those line and switch them around.

” ‘My days are just an endless stream, of emptiness to me…filled only by the fleeting moments of the memories … my world is like a river, as dark as it is deep … night after night the past slips in, and gathers all my sleep’.”

Newbury contends that the unconscious mind is what writes lines like those, as opposed to the conscious mind, which comes up with the hook lines and clever innuendos.

“The unconscious mind, which retains 100% of its input, as opposed to the conscious mind, which retains only 15% of its input, is crazy as hell,” he says. “I loved that kind of writing…’cause you never know what’s gonna come out. Free flowing is the way to go (for writing a song)…but you can’t take credit for it and your ego doesn’t get stroked when you write like that. But it’s the source of the greater art if you can tap into it and are able to tap into it when you need it, you do it when you need it and then when you don’t need it, you are on another level.”