Telling Your Stories in Song- Putting Poems to Music
For over 25 years, I have been trying to get someone to put my Woodsmoke & Perfume poetry into music. A helicopter pilot working in Escravos, Nigeria, and a friend of Kris Kristofferson, volunteered. His musical style was acoustic guitar and Western. After weeks of working through chords, he came up with some incredible music, but in the end, he conceded that my poetry was too challenging to work with. He couldn’t fit the lyrics to the music.
Later, I was inspired by an Afrobeat Highlife concert in Lagos, Nigeria, with Femi Kuti and the terrific blues guitarist B.B. King. Highlife concerts are intoxicating in themselves, but with the added inspiration of B.B. King’s electric blues guitar rhythms and riffs, I was hooked. I knew my poems needed a similar vehicle that allows the music to flow around my words, like rocks in a river, rather than forcing my words to fit the music. The Afrobeat approach allows the vocalist to enter and exit the musical conversation organically, speaking or singing in patterns that mirror natural speech rhythms and storytelling cadences.
Then, a few weeks ago, I was reading “How Music Works,” written by Talking Heads’ co-founder David Byrne, and realized he had the same inspiration for fronting his lyrics. He needed to tell his stories, and Afrobeat was his vehicle.
Afrobeat music breathes with the story, expanding and contracting to accommodate the emotional peaks and valleys of the narrative. Horn sections, blues guitar and percussion can punctuate key moments in the story, while the underlying groove provides a hypnotic foundation that draws listeners into the narrative world.
David Byrne recognized this storytelling potential early in his career, incorporating these African musical principles into Talking Heads’ work and his solo projects. This approach transforms the song from a musical composition with added words into a musical story where rhythm, melody, and narrative flow as integrated elements. So, if David could do it, could I?
I decided to hire a band. (Just kidding, but essentially the same difference.) I hired an AI band via Suno, uploaded my highly modified digital voice and genuine lyrics and wrote a complex set of prompts. The results blew me away. The AI was able to read my poems, written without punctuation and with only white space to indicate the breathing rhythms of the lyrics, exactly as I had written them. My poems had come to life, “highlife” to be exact. My first song is a rendition of my first published poem, “In Koko’s Bar”, a true story, which was the inspiration for my collected work of poems, Woodsmoke & Perfume. Let me know what you think. Can an old bush pilot learn new tricks?
Original photography by John S Goulet and painting by Larry Nadolsky
