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From Full Flight
By Marty Balin and Robert Yehling
©2002 SAF Publishing. Reprinted by Permission.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Songwriter's Soul

Today, the key for me is to take a melody from the first inspiration into words, and follow what the song is trying to express without becoming too complicated. I work with Paul Kantner, who is a very complicated, post-modernist writer. He puts all these styles together into giant songs with changes of rhythm and time structures. They're very complicated, very hard to get into and learn. Once you get into them, you can make something out of them. As you might expect, the hardest songs for me to write, those that took a long time for me to put together and for us to record in the studio, were songs that didn't go very far. The successes were the songs that I put down very quickly; they were nearly complete when they first came to me.
I'll sing and hum a melody over and over until words start to happen, then I'll write them down. I'll write a song three or four times, then Bang! That perfect word will come up, the essence of the whole thing. Hemingway said, "I work all day and hope to get one true line." That's how I feel. I try to get that one thing that's always true, and always works. Sometimes I'll write a song that will come out in five minutes; those are the best songs. Or I may let a melody go into my head for years until I hear what it says to me, because I want to find the exact words. The right word with the right sound on stage is enormous. If it's the wrong word … well, it goes to what Mark Twain said about the difference between a lightning bug and lightning - a word.
Sometimes, I just play with words: "Plastic Fantastic Lover" was just word play. I recently wrote a song called "Shooting Star," talking about a relationship, and I'm using words like "zoom" and "zip." On another song I wrote, "Skydiver," I used the words "free fallin'" and "Jump! Jump!" to get the feeling across. These are things I want to hear 'em sing from the stage - you get a lot of people singing "zoom" and "zip," or "Jump! Jump!" and it gets to be fun.

Windsurf across the air so blue
Dancing 'round and 'round with you
Roaming the sky like eagles do
Up above the earth with all the view

Skydiver
Free fallin'
C'mon let's Jump! Jump! Jump!

A major part of songwriting, of course, is singing. The music or lyrical beat has to be there when you read a poem out loud before it truly works on paper. The song has to have a voice. I always sing; I have always sung. Even today, no matter where I go, I'm whistling or singing or humming, or messing around with the words to a song. There's always a melody in my head. It's proven that it makes you happy. It's been proven metaphysically that singing, and music, open up your chakras (spiritual energy centers) and raise your energy level - well, that's the case with uplifting music. We have this great ability within us, with sound, to heal ourselves, make ourselves happy, and connect with all of the arts.
That takes me to my favorite type of song - the love song. All great love songs connect within us. It's not just emotional; it's also spiritual - "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," you know. I'm an admirer of the classic Persian poets, especially Rumi and Omar Khayyam. In their works, they're not really making love to a woman, although it seems to read like that. They're making love with God; it's divine intoxication. In The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam is talking about the soul going back to God and about his relationship with the feminine divine; it's not just about open love and drinking flasks of wine and eating bread under a tree! Every word they used was the right word, the right sound, the right tone, the right note for the right chakra. That's the way I always wanted to write, putting different levels to it. The words I write are one thing. The sound it makes takes you to another place, and the spirit of the sound can bring you somewhere else altogether.

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Summer Inhaled