Is originality possible in songwriting?
over the last few months I’ve been having regular songwriting sessions with my sixth form students. They’re a heavy metal band – a genre that has an interesting mix of originality and copycat songwriting.
Like any other genre, over time you can see clear innovations – metal has pushed modal and chromatic harmony into new areas for pop music and explored new guitar and vocal timbres.
However, generally speaking, any one band, album or song tends to fit into a wider style. You can listen to a song and say ‘there’s a Metllica style verse riff, with Iron maiden chords for the chorus, and a half time coda like Machine Head’s Davidian….’
My sixth formers are at the stage in their songwriting where they’re using other songs as templates. For example they’ve noticed the loud-soft-loud dynamics of Remember Tomorrow by Maiden and Fade to Black by Metallica and applied them to a song of their own.
Any long time reader of this blog will know that this is exactly the sort of ideas stealing that I approve of, but recently, and worryingly, my thoughts have turned to the idea of originality.
So, I have two questions for you:
- If you’ve composed your own words and melody – but used chords, structure and other stereotypical ideas from a well defined genre, is the song original?
- And does it matter if it is?
What do you think? Use the comments to let me know
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This might be a cop out, but I don’t think originality is binary. I think a song can be partially original. In your example, the words and melody are original, but the rest is not. I also think it doesn’t matter if you call a song original or not. The most important questions for me are “Do I like it? Do I want to hear it again?”
I absolutely love cover songs. There are times when a cover song is more appealing to me than the original. That proves to me that originality doesn’t matter to me.
As to whether we should try to be original? I think it depends on what’s important to the individual. When I write, I don’t think about originality except to the extent that I don’t want to steal anything. I just want the words and music to be true to me whether they sound like something else or not.
Theological Creation theory has plenty of variations. The one that applies here says this: God created the world by taking preexisting elements from the universe–unorganized matter–and putting it together. “Ideas,” like matter, are the same. An idea, I suppose, is a preexisting platonic intangible that can be altered only by super- or sub-imposition of a second preexisting idea. Color theory carries similar implications: these colors exist independently of even human existence (though there’s always the argument: “if it’s never been seen or heard or thought or felt, does it exist?” but I’m going to assume that, yes, it does) and new colors can only be created by the blending (or imposition) of a second preexisting color.
In the same way, a song is never original in the sense that the ideas were manufactured without influence by the artist. They were manufactured–the means of production were processed by the artist and organized to be coherent and meaningful to those members of the social structure to whom the art is directed. For instance, an indie artist, such as myself, takes the tools appropriate for an indie artist (say, an acoustic guitar, a tambourine, and a voice) and creates a melody appropriate for indie music and a guitar line and chord changes and a beat appropriate for indie music. But this sounds completely unoriginal per se (where originality per se is perceived originality through an unprecedented or nearly unprecedented blending and imposition of preexisting ideas) does it not?
However, my pure indie music is not that. It’s been tainted–in the best sense possible–by other influences, including other music I’ve heard, literature I’ve read, art I’ve seen, people I’ve met, etc. and this is why The Shins have an original sound and Death Cab for Cutie has an original sound while still existing in the category of indie music. Each has taken personal, artistic, religious, regional (though they did begin regionally similar), etc. influences and subconsciously and consciously imposed and blended those ideas (and ideologies) with the subset ideas of indie music.
That’s where originality per se (which is the originality that matters) comes from. Yes, everything is a throwback and an allusion of some kind. We only know the words we know because they’re part of a language that we use to communicate. But if we used original words, nobody would understand us and anything we did say would not be meaningful. The great writers and speakers are those who exhibited originality per se by putting these words in a certain order at the right time to say something both original per se and meaningful.
- Stephen Cope
http://songwritten.org