Opinion

Spiritual inspiration after a nasty review drove me to write one of my best songs

Rite & Reason: Melody and lyrics come to the musician in mysterious ways. And sometimes the humble pie of criticism can fuel great artistic triumph

Singer-songwriter Johnny Duhan: Our sweetest moments can come from our bitterest trials if we learn to swallow humble pie. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy
Johnny Duhan
Sun Sept 15 2024 - 00:30

Aristotle described poetry as the most philosophic of all writing. In his The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, TS Eliot said that “rather than be parroted by a hundred generations, I had rather be neglected and have one man say, ‘there is an old author who found out this before I did’.”

On first reading these, I asked myself, “why is poetry so unique?” The answer, which came to me slowly over a long career working with words as a lyricist, is that writing at its best is inspired beyond the skill of the writer.

In the book of my collected song lyrics, To The Light, I wrote that, “though I have paid as much diligence to the pure word as to the pure note” in my long calling as a songwriter, I admit that “song lyrics rarely achieve the heights of true poetry”.

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I did not mean to denigrate the skill of the wordsmith trade I dedicated my life to. Nor did I mean to belittle the many great popular song lyrics that achieved a true marriage with the music that elevated them. Songs such as Eleanor Rigby, The Boxer and God only Knows (to name just a few) demonstrate a degree of excellence that clearly shows they were inspired.

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Its melodic and poetic scope was way beyond my own skills as a wordsmith and musician

Reflecting on some of my own inspired works, I have come to the opinion that, when the spirit is right, a power beyond my own ability came into play during their composition that stretched not only my poetic skill but also my musical ability and helped me attain a level of lyricism and melodic design beyond the scope of my natural competence. Not only that, but the same mysterious spiritual power that gave rise to the works also endowed them with the means to find their way to become appreciated in the world, no matter how much opposition was put in the way of finding an appreciative audience.

The first instance of this occurred when I released my Family Album. A planned sales tour did not take place when we were unable to get it on the playlist of a major radio station as, we were told, the family was “a dead institution”. This was despite the fact that Christy Moore had had a hit with a cover version of one of the seminal songs from the album, The Voyage. That ballad has become one of the most popular Irish songs of modern times.

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My next encounter with the mysterious force of inspiration came when a song entitled Flame came to me in a long drawn-out compositional process that almost drove me out of my mind during the three-year search it took to find its pivotal final verse – a crucial verse that the song wouldn’t have been complete without – which came to me after an act of humility. That happened when my wife helped me swallow my pride on the heels of receiving one of the nastiest reviews of my career in a newspaper, an article that attacked the family values and religious convictions I espouse, rather than a legitimate critique of my work as a songwriter.

From this experience, I learned that our sweetest moments can come from our bitterest trials if we learn to swallow humble pie. Paradoxically, my harshest critic helped me complete the most inspirational song of my career and gave me material for a full chapter of part two of my autobiography, The Voyage.

When the spirit is right, a power beyond my own ability comes into play during composition

Another inspired composition related to Flame was The Burning Word. It took my breath away when it came to me, as its melodic and poetic scope was way beyond my own skills as a wordsmith and musician. But again I came up against enormous opposition when I attempted to get it played on air. My third and final inspired song, The Beacon – a zippy ballad based on a joyous family mountain-climb that culminates with prayer-like gasps of childish delight at the peak – came to me like a sign from heaven, but my efforts to get it played on radio turned out to be hell on earth.

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Despite the failed tour, the unsold boxes of CDs, and the humiliation I suffered after these debacles, the album Flame, which features The Beacon, eventually was lauded by The Irish Times and The Beacon was played on many regional stations, turning the song, appropriately, into a slow burner which is still glowing brighter than ever to this day. As I’ve said already, our sweetest moments can come from our bitterest trials, if we can only learn to eat humble pie from time to time.

Johnny Duhan cut his teeth with Granny’s Intentions in the 1960s and is still writing songs. He has been described in this newspaper as ‘a man who cares not a whit for trends, but rather one whose reason for living, perhaps, is to transcend such creative limitation’