This week I exchanged a few emails with a singer-songwriter named Shannon Hurley. She recently moved from LA to Nashville, and as a consequence her songwriting became less country.
I know, that sounds counterintuitive. I’ll let her explain:
Shannon: My songwriting changed in the most unexpected way. Instead of wanting to fit into the country genre, I went further out of the realm. I find that I quite like being the “indie-pop” songwriter in a city of country music. I am enjoying the experimentation of electronica, downtempo, chill-pop, etc. and blending them into my singer-songwriter world.
Tom: When and how did you start writing songs?
Shannon: I wrote my first song when I was about seven. It was called “Georgia Moonlight”. I remember exactly how it goes, and if someone paid me $1,000 then I will sing it. I even have the cassette tape I recorded it on..Maybe I’ll put it up on podcast for my own embarrassment
Tom: Music or lyrics?
Shannon: Both! They seem to happen for me at the same time. I often sit at my piano and start noodling around until a lyrical phrase and a melodic idea come together.
Tom: Have you got any tricks or tactics to come up with new songwriting ideas?
Shannon: Lately I have been enamored with bringing up different loops in Garageband. That’s the way “Life is Strange” (from my new project Lovers and Poets) started. A fresh groove is a great way to create a new song.
That particular loop I used in “Life is Strange” is just one of the basic “club” beats that comes with Garageband.
Tom: Your songs are very American, and very traditional. Are you ever tempted to go crazy and throw in five key changes then break into a 7/8 groove?
Shannon: Hmmm, probably not. I am not big into progressive meter changes or progressions that seem to go in random directions. I like simplicity, and all my favorite songs are easy to sing and play. The Kinks, The Who, Tom Petty, and The Beatles all had some great songs with only 3-4 chord changes. But who’s to say that I’ll never throw in an extra beat or an unpredictable chord? I will if the song calls for it. I’m just a slave to the song!
Tom: Personally I always over use certain chord progressions or keys – I have way too many songs in E lydian for example. Have you got any songwriting clichés you over use?
Shannon: I think every songwriter has little ticks and idiosynchrosies they rely on. Either you can fight it and try to go in entirely different direction, or you can use it to your advantage and it can become your “sound”. I don’t want to admit what I think is my weakness because that “weakness” may be what is drawing some listener into my music. But I know what I have to work with, and I am aware that my muscle memory is to play a certain way on the keyboard..but sometimes I will test my comfort zone and go off in a completely new songwriting direction.
Tom: The sample of Lovers and Poets sounds very different to your solo songs. What’s the idea behind this new project?
Shannon: I feel like my solo material is very personal and autobiographical. It’s also more organic with a full band sound. Lovers and Poets is more fanciful, and not based in reality. Instead, I chose to write about fictional situations or skewed the truth in some way to create alternate endings to things that have really happened to me. “Life is Strange” is a half-truth; I fell asleep at the wheel of my car in South Park, Colorado after playing keyboards for the band I was in at the time (called Jyemo). We had gotten through a sunrise set on the 4th of July. All I remember is listening to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, and then I was in the air, then the air bag inflated, shards of glass were everywhere, and I rolled a couple times in slow motion. I thought I was in heaven. Luckily I was unhurt (except for a case of shock) but it was the catalyst for the song. I heard Ralph Murphy speak here in Nashville, and he said there are no regrets in songwriting.
We can create our own truths, and things that didn’t happen, we can make them happen in our songs. So I thought, well, what if I wasn’t driving alone? What if I had a passenger..somebody I loved..and what if one of us died in the accident? And I wanted to be vague, like you can’t tell which of us had died. Or both. And I really wanted to tell a story of how fragile life is, how random life is.
Well shoot, I didn’t mean to end up on such a morbid note. On a more positive side, “The Things We Do for Love” is a song I wrote as a tribute to one of my favorite bands- Belle and Sebastian. So there, I hope readers feel warm and fuzzy now- I know B&S always does that for me!
PS. I’m always interested in interviewing songwriters about what makes them tick. Drop me an email if you want to talk about your songwriting at tomslattermusic AT gmail.com
Justin Timberlake’s Cry me a River might be guilty of stealing the title of a much better song, and having truly dreadful lyrics but I happen to think it’s an okay little ditty that does some interesting things.
Specifically, it only uses one chord progression. Most pop songs use chord changes to create interest, but here the songwriters have decided to stick with the same 4 chords and create interest in other ways.
Now, it’s a good set of chords – song starts with keybord arpeggios of G# min, D#7, E, D#7/C# which don’t stop until near the very end of the song.
There’s also the countermelody that starts at 13 secs, and is also used as the bridge melody. The rest of the song is all about different melodies and layers – the verse starts with a drum beat, bass line and staccato string pad chords emphasising the chord changes. The strings go legato for the chorus and Timberlake layers up the falsetto vox in his best Michael Jackson tribute mode.
The second verse adds some more interest by putting in a couple of short breaks from the drum beat and adding some extra vocal layers. I particularly like the staccato vocal melodies, eg at 3.28, which are a great example of one of my favourite features of modern rnb.
The whole point of the song is to create interest through the layering of different melodies and loops though, and there are certain points where the lack of harmonic changes starts to drag – essentially every time the song reaches ‘Cry me a river, cry me a river…’ where it sounds like an outro and therefore loses energy. And the ‘jammy jay’s done…’ rap sections are just laughable.
While it’s not a perfect song, and certainly needs some improvement in the lyrical department, there are some great ideas that I’d steal if I was thinking of writing in this style:
1. Staccato vocal melodies (usually in the natural minor mode) – very RnB but rarely heard in other genres.
2. Complicated chords – that is a good chord progression, I like the D#7/C#. It’s essentially a clever play on the common harmonic minor i IV V7 progression (eg. Am, F E7)
3. Tiny percussion breaks – a second verse always needs something new – why not have the rhythm section drop out for just one bar?
Talking of RnB style vocals, here’s a much better songwriter who does some great vocal stuff: Trouble Over Tokyo
One of my favourite modes is the aeolian. To me, every mode and scale has its own character and associations, and it’s important for a songwriter to know them all. True, you could cheat and have someone else master keys for you, but using automatic tools wont help you develop the songwriting pallette needed to be a truly talented songwriter.
Character
The Aeolian mode is also known as the minor scale. Or rather, it is in pop music. When a classical musician says ‘A minor’, they don’t quite mean the same thing as the popular musician. If you want to be technical, you could call it the ‘natural’ minor scale, but for most pop musicians ‘minor scale’ will do.
The aeolian mode can be used in your ‘normal’ minor key songs such as ‘Ain’t no sunshine’ which mostly uses chords i, iv and v, all minor.
However, if you focus on chords VI VII and i, you can get a sense of grandness that has been frequently used in pop and heavy metal. In fact that progression is one of the things that defines heavy metal as a seperate style from hard rock.
Construction
I prefer to compare modes to the ‘normal’ major scale. The major scale has these intervals:
First
Major second
Major third
Perfect fourth
Perfect fifth
Major sixth
Major seventh
Octave
The aeolian mode has minor intervals instead of minor, except for the second:
First
Major Second
Minor Third
Perfect Fourth
Perfect fifth
Minor Sixth
Minor Seventh
Octave
So, starting on an A note you’d have: A B C D E F G A
E Aeolian: E F# G A B C D E
G Aeolian: G A Bb C D Eb F G
eg. Amin7 B half-dim Cmaj7 Dmin7 Emin7 Fmaj7 Gdom7
In the major scale, the fifth chord is important in cadences. For the Aeolian you can also use the fifth chord, though the ‘gravity’ from Emin7 to Amin7 is somewhat weaker than from G7 to C. More effective, in my opinion, is the use of the seventh chord. For example moving from G to Am can sound ‘finished’, moving back to G can sound unresolved.
I’ve a pupil who, in UK education parlance, is ‘gifted’. He’s an incredibly talented musician, who leads ensembles, plays percussion instruments, sings and plays the guitar. He has a fantastic ear for melody, a great sense of rhythm, a true passion for music.
But there’s one thing he lacks, and it’s something that really stands out to me – he can’t remember structures, or hold a whole piece of music in his head.
He truly excels at is leading our school samba band, which is a kind of music based on cues, grooves and calls. You don’t need to remember exactly how many bars a groove lasts, or which order the calls come in – the band are trained to follow the mestre’s instructions.
My pupil’s true love is his rock band, and he’s started to write songs for them. it’s very clear to me that while he has great ideas for riffs, grooves and melodies, he isn’t thinking about the structure of his songs. As a consequence the songs go on too long, they get a little boring, and a lot of the time he misses changes when the band play them.
Are these big worries for a twelve year old? Absolutely not! We’re talking about a young man who is years ahead of the average child.
But what about your songs? Are you thinking of the structure as a whole? Are you worrying about the listener? Are you making sure you have enough development to maintain interest? Or are you writing songs like a twelve year old?
That structure is quite old fashioned, but lots of modern forms developed from it.
Compound 32-Bar structure.
The standard 32 bar follows an AABA structure, with B providing a contrast to the A sections. It’s pretty much a ternry structure, with the first a section repeated.
The usual pop song structure, (verse chorus verse chorus middle 8 chorus) can be seen as a variation on this. Instead of one musical idea in the A section, it can be divided into two, the verse and chorus.
A Verse Chorus
A Verse Chorus
B Middle 8
A Verse Chorus
You are Not Alone
This Michael Jackson song, while sentimental and a little unpleasant,with a genuinely disturbing video, nevertheless illustrates another way of adapting the 32 bar structure.
It does this by using a 32-bar structure as a verse (nearly. It’s actually 40 bars AABAA).
After the first of these there’s a small interval that uses some chromatic chords. The second verse is then a repeat of the 40 bar structure (with different words). This if followed by a middle section that takes us out of key again, before returning to the main melody, and repeating in ascending keys.
This too is a compound version of the 32 bar structure.
A (A’A'B’A'A’)
Interlude
A (A’A'B’A'A’)
B Bridge
A (A’ section repeated in ascending keys)
Outro
What should you take from this for your own songwriting? The ternary structure is a basic structural idea, but a very useful one. The basic idea of using one idea, contrasting it with another, then returning to the original idea, is always effective.
Listeners like comprehensible structures. That doesn’t mean they always need the same structure, but it does mean that adapting well known structures a little can be very effective. How could you adapt the 32 bar structure to your own ends?
A Small Aside
You Are Not Alone also uses some interesting chromatic chords. It’s in the key of B and several times goes to a G major chord. That’s a major chord built on the minor sixth, which isn’t part of the key but does contain the root note. Always worth a try.
A few days ago I received an email from a reader named Martin Andersson.
Martin writes:
Do you write on request?
I sure do
Here’s a topic I’d like to see covered a bit more indepth, but seldom run into, although it’s one of the most important parts of making a song: the Intro.
Do you have any tips on that one? I usually have no problem whatsoever writing words and chords, but when it comes to writing intros I more often than not find myself in a state of lack of inspiration. Sure, it’s always possible to vamp for a while, or just play a chord progression that’s somewhere else in the song, but most often that feels like a bad kind of compromise that doesn’t really do the song justice.
Thanks for writing, Martin. A great question that really got me thinking about my own songwriting. I have to admit, I’m often a little lazy when it comes to writing intros.
After a little thought, I’ve come up with four different ways to introduce a song:
1. Establish the groove.
This is very common, and pretty much the same as what Martin says he usually does:- vamping the chords for a while.
Popular song is very often based around a groove or beat, so why not begin by introducing that first? This Sting song has a great groove in five four that emphasises the first beat of the bar and the off beat of the second beat.
2. Build tension.
This Metallica song uses a variation on the main riff as an intro, but instead of introducing the groove straight away, it builds up, gradually adding layers of pounding toms and chugging guitars until the eventual appearance of the groove comes as a relief from the tension of the constant build up.
3. Use middle 8 material
This great indie rock anthem by the Manic Street Preachers has an intro that we hear again in the middle of the song. The middle of a song is where we need a break from the normal groove, harmony or feel of the song. Often we need something similar from the intro too, so why not use the same musical ideas in the intro and the middle eight?
4. Suprise the listener
This song by the prog-metal band Cynic has a great ’suprise’ intro with a huge contrast between the first chords and the groove that crashes in a few seconds later.
I wanted to embed this live performance instead, but I wasn’t allowed so check out the link if you want to hear the live version
In General
The intro is there to get the listener ready for the song, without giving away too much. It should introduce, tantalise, suggest.
A few extra tips:
End unresolved, for example end your intro on the second or fifth chord in the scale (Dm or G in C major)
Have less energy eg. slower tempo, lower key, less well defined rhythm or percussion
Balance – Longer intros only belong at the start of long songs – don’t build up tension over two minutes, only to go to a song that lasts for two minutes.
Finally, consider whether you need an intro at all. A lot of the time, launching straight into the first verse can work just as well.
This morning on the today program I heard an interview with Nick Troop, a songwriter who claimed to be doing a psychological study of songwriting to investigate psychological health or… something.
A brief investigation took me to Nick’s websites, and the first thing to point out, as Nick does, is that his analysis is not supposed to be scientific, and not supposed to be taken to seriously. It’s a bit of fun, although I’m sure it would be interesting to genuinely investigate the interaction between psychological health and songwriting.
His website ‘The Gospel According to David Bowie‘ analyses Bowie’s songs from a number of different angles. Unfortunately where I think he misses a trick is that he’s only analysing the lyrics. He even talks about the difficulty of analysing Low because it has so few words.
When I was still studying I wrote a dissertation on genre in heavy metal, which brought me into contact with a lot of pop music analysis. Almost all of it is useless, for the simple reason that it refuses to engage with the actual music. Sociology related to pop music seemed to have similarities (though I read far less of that), and I can’t comment about psychological work related to pop music, except to point out that lyrics are a small part of popular music, and most certainly not the primary conveyors of meaning.
I’m a little dissapointed that Nick hasn’t teamed up with a musicologist to properly analyse Bowie’s music.
Bowie, as far as I am aware, has written only one song that is directly about his personal life (the excellent Jump, They Say). His lyrics have always been distant, and he has rarely worn his heart on his sleeve. The whole point of Bowie’s music has been to explore the interplay of character, theatre, artifice. He has also often written for other people, with all the implications that might have for self expression, and made use of various word randomising techniques which suggest a minimal regard at times for the literal meaning of the words. He has also referred to his deliberately commercial 80s albums as his ‘pension plan’ and written accordingly. I’m not sure how one could ever tell which of Bowie’s lyrics literally reflect his emotional state, and which are pastiche or parody, or simply far less to do with his own psychology.
And more importantly, lyric writing is not songwriting. If you want to analyse Bowie’s music, and you’re not going to talk about the gospel chord changes in Word on a Wing or Space Oddity, the use of improvisation and the use of the studio as a tool, his showcasing of excellent soloists, the riffs of Carlos Alomar, the tension between Bowie’s and Eno’s approach to arrangement… then really you’ve missed so much I wonder what the point is.
I know, I know, Nick Troop is only having fun and I’m not saying his articles aren’t interesting. I just think Bowie’s songwriting has always been about much more than his lyrics.
PS. Nick Troop is also a pretty good songwriter in his own right. Have a listen to the tracks on nicktroop.com
Martin says his first pet hate in songwriting is rhyming. Specifically:
1. Rhyme is not a substitute for meaning
2. A good, clever or complex rhyming scheme is not a sufficient or necessary condition for a song being good
My own pet hates are Beatles rip-offs and old fashioned harmony. Though I suppose I could have gone for my real big, genuine number 1 hate – Anything Bob Dylan has written. Ever.
Of course, I probably shouldn’t admit to disliking Bob Dylan. But I do. Passionately.
Anyway, ignore me and go and read Martin’s blog.
Disclaimer – this isn’t an advert, Gary Ewer doesn’t know I’m writing this. I just like his blog.
Seriously, Gary Ewer’s ‘Essential Secrets of Songwriting’ is a great blog, with some fantastic posts on the technical side of songwriting. Recent posts that I think are particularly useful include:
In this post Gary Ewer analyses a song by Cobra Starship to make the point that the tonic, or ‘home’ note of your key has a specific role in melodies. He gives some great advice on when and when not to use it.
The Mixolydian is a mode I associate with country, blues, heavy rock and the Beatles. It isn’t the only scale used in those styles, and it isn’t limited to those styles, but with it’s dominant seventh tonic chord and the emphasis on the seventh note of the scale, it always conjures up images of old fashioned, American rock. It’s a beer drinking, gibson chugging, guitar twangin’ mode (or at least, that’s how it feel to me).
Construction
The mixolydian mode is almost the same as the ‘normal’ major scale, except that the seventh note is flattened by one semitone. So in C Mixolydian the notes would be C D E F G A Bb C.
You can do the same to any major scale. For example, G mixolydian is G A B C D E F G (all the white notes on the keyboard starting at G). D mixolydian is D E F# G A B C D.
To generalise, the intervals in the mixolydian mode are:
Tone Tone Semitone Tone Tone Semitone, Tone
It might look like a tiny change but having that flattened seventh creates a very distinct harmony that is miles away from the major scale.
Chords:
The seven chords in those mode are:
I7 iimin7 iii Half-dim IV Maj7 v Min7 vi Min7 VII Maj7
In C Mixolydian: C7 Dmin7 E Half-dim F Maj7 G Min7 A Min7 Bb Maj7 In G Mixolydian: G7 Amin7 B Half-dim C Maj7 D Min7 E Min7 F Maj7
In the major scale, we’re used to chords VI and V being important. Chord V in particular often comes before I to form a cadence. In the Mixolydian mode, the VII chord performs a similar function, as in one of the most famous songs that uses the mixolydian mode, Sweet home Alabama:
What to do if you want that mixolydian sound? Try writing chord progressions that use chords I and VII, eg. C Bb F, G C F and work from there.
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