Similar in many ways to my poetry writing, song writing is something that doesn’t take long. Unlike the poetry, it is something that does hold my interest a little more. I have played guitar for over 5 years and have occasionally strayed from strumming out my favourite songs to come up with a few of my own.

There are two main influences in my style of music, the first being Jim Steinman and the second being Bruce Springsteen. Both songwriters have similar focuses and styles, but also have their own unique and distinct subjects.

I came to Bruce Springsteen’s music in 2000, through his commercial hits Dancing In The Dark and Born In The USA. Although not his greatest songs in some ways, they were the thumping anthems that drew me in. The first Springsteen album I purchased was his Greatest Hits collection purely for these two songs. Out of sheer laziness, and the fact that I was too far from the stereo to be bothered to skip tracks, I let the album run its course and found that away from the bombastic anthems there was something else there. There was a human touch, songs that told stories about people; people beaten, people down on their luck, people in love, people who were real.

In his songs, from the Asbury Park boardwalks of his first album to the war torn lives of his latest, Springsteen always focuses on the person and the way their lives are changing or have been changed. The vision of his songs is cinematic, but his subjects are all human.

Jim Steinman has a similar visual feel to his songs, the main difference being that he takes the real people of Springsteen and takes them on extreme flights of fantasy. His work is dark, occasionally gothic, always humorous and taken as far as it can go before being pushed even further. Probably the best example of this is the song Bat Out Of Hell, one of Steinman’s most loved tracks. The song itself is sung by young and old, but some still fail to see the images that Steinman has implanted into the lyrics. The title, like many of his titles, is an oft used phrase meaning to go fast. This works well with the song as it features a motorcyclist tearing through the streets of a city, but it also has a double meaning which comes at the end of the song. The motorcycle crashes, so extreme that this rider sees his beating heart tearing out of his chest and being flung from his chest “like a bat out of hell.” Listen to the lyrics if you don’t believe me.

It is Steinman’s plays on words that I have always thought make a song something more than it is with simple clichéd lyrics. Take the cliché and turn it on its head. When it doesn’t work, it’s bad, but when it does, it’s genius. I think personally I’m nowhere near the genius level yet, although one lyric of mine that I do like is from a song called “A Conspiracy Of Mirrors”, and it is the hookline from the end of the chorus which goes “I know I can never be a winner/In this conspiracy of mirrors.” It’s a line that is surreal, yet describes how life can sometimes be, when all you seem to see are the same things staring back at you time and time again, and you feel as though you are trapped in a ring of mirrors with no escape.

Below are the lyrics of two new songs from a collection called Fortune. The songs were written at the beginning of October, and all followed the same theme of light coming out of darkness. There were lots of images of things going wrong, deceit and doubt, but there was also an underlying tone that despite all that is and has happened there is always a chance that something good will come. There were some songs that dealt only with one side of the coin, others that swayed from one side to the other. The two songs I have posted the title track, Fortune, and a song called Living For Tomorrow.