@Fredfresh: “@RavenousRaven #Songwriting should be spontaneous and meaningful. No rules. Ensuring well crafted harmonies? Who are we impressing?”
@Tomslatter “You’re supposed to be impressing the listener.”
@Fredfresh: “If you write music to impress a listener you will never write good music. #allaboutsoul”
I don’t think it’s an overstatement if I call Fredfresh a deluded idiot, is it?
Apparently, to him writing with passion and writing with the listener in mind are mutually exclusive.
Or at least, considering what you write means you’re not writing ‘from the heart’.
I disagree completely – the whole point about songwriting is to compose music that takes the listener on an emotional journey.
Yes, writing with passion is important – our best work is that which we care about the most – but craft is not opposed to art, passion is not the opposite of thought.
So I don’t agree with Fredfresh on this, but he does have a really good singing voice. Here’s his myspace.
So who should you write for? Does the listener matter?
6.00 - Wake up, mutter about the October chill, stumble from bedroom attempting not to wake other half who gets to wake up at a reasonable time every day.
6.10 – Over thick, treacle-like black coffee, check work email. Realise you have 100 things to do today, quite apart from the five lessons you have to teach.
6.45 – leave house, muttering once again about October chill, and hoping trains will be on time.
7.45 – Train does not arrive. Headache begins.
8.20 – Arrive at school half an hour later than expected. There are ten minutes remaining before first lesson. In this time I must photocopy worksheets for 3 classes, move amplifiers and practice PA into classroom and attend a staff meeting that began 5 minutes ago.
8.30 First lesson. Double period. Small year 11 class is learning learning a gospel influenced pop song as a group (class contains two keys players, one drummer, one bass player, two singers. Good mix.).
A few seconds listening – it’s one chord progression all the way through, mostly moving in fifths:
Ab Eb Bb F/A Cm
I think ‘I should steal that, it’s a good progression’. Lyrics are saccharine and unpleasant, but I quite like the wordy melody.
The drummer is playing too loud, one of the keyboard players insists on staying two beats behind everyone else and the singers are too shy to make enough noise to be audible despite being very good at what they do in private.
The class realise (With a little coaxing) that the original version of the song doesn’t have enough contrast in it, and we’ll have to do our own arrangement. We start changing things up, but keyboard player is more interested in blasting out piano riff from ‘Still Dre’, singer who originally chose the song is moaning about having to sing it and drummer has to show us how his heavy metal blast beats are progressing.
Headache is a subtle drone at the back of my skull.
10.30 Break Time. 5 minutes spent getting year 11 kids out of room (Teenagers walk incredibly slowly, and [if male] in a lopsided manner).
I realise that I need to use this time to do paperwork for next Thursday’s Black History Month concert.
[I'm not sure how much I agree with importing a very worthy, but very American concept into an English school. Sure we're multicultural - 3 quarters non white, roughly 30 different languages spoken, pupils' backgrounds include African (particularly Ghana and Nigeria), Caribbean, Polish, Lithuanian, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri-Lankan, Somalian, Afghani, Iranian. Black History Month is a very different thing to the traditional American concept and I'm not sure whether we've got it right yet. I'd rather every month recognised non-European history, but I understand the point of special awareness raising months to counter historical imbalances.]
Nevertheless, letter to parents written and passed on to admin staff to send out, posters printed, tickets printed, email sent out to staff involved – this is all a week later than it should have been as government inspectors were in during previous week.
Headache moves to rear of left eye.
10.55 – Form time. I haven’t prepared anything. Most pupils happy to sit and chat, some do homework in class computers, others play keyboard happily. Pupil A is more interested in placing Pupil B in a headlock, which I don’t notice immediately as Pupil C (not a member of my form) has decided to come into room unannounced to express his teenage love for Pupil D by pushing her, attempting to steal her bag, then running out of the room.
Pupil D races out in hot pursuit, by which time Pupil B’s cries have got my attention. The threat of detention splits them apart but ensuing bad language forces me to explain yet again why using ‘gay’ as a derogatory term is unnacceptable. As several pupils are members of odious African churches, this argument is resisted fiercely. I am not allowed to suggest that the best thing to do with the advice of religious figures is to assume the opposite is true.
Headache behind both eyes and at base of neck.
11.25 - First of three back to back year 7 classes – I teach the lower ability half of the 11-12 year olds in our school.
The lesson involves taking the names of famous musicians, turning them into a rhythm, then adding notes to create a short ostinato.
Class 1 manage to stand behind chairs, ready to start lesson after only 7 minutes of noise and foolishness. They love the idea of turning ‘Alicia Keys’ into an ostinato, but do not have the skills to work with a partner creating their own version. (Except pupil E and F, who are wonderful.)
Class 2 manage to stand behind chairs ready to start lesson after 10 minutes of noise and foolishness. I make them line-up outside classroom and re-enter room twice. They two love the idea of turning ‘Alicia Keys’ into an ostinato, and as a whole group are more than capable of singing this and me ‘Steve Vai’ ostinato in two parts. I try asking them to go to the keyboards to create their own ostinatos. Some great successes, some abysmal failures. Several pupils have discovered the sound effects kit on the keyboard. My pleas that cow and gunshot sound effects are un-pitched fall on deaf ears.
I realise I will need to go back to basics with these pupils – lack of group co-operation skills is hampering musical progress.
13.25 – Lunch break. I chase up emails for BHM concert, help some pupils with keyboard practice, attempt to unpack some boxes of office equipment and try to get some of our newly refurbished practice rooms into some sort of order. I also answer some email correspondence, and drink some water.
Headache eases somewhat.
14.00 – Class 3 – we try pair work – pupils run straight to keyboards despite clear instructions not to do so – we are trying a vocal exercise. Bring pupils back, repeat instructions. They run straight to keyboards again.
Time to improvise
Bring pupils back for third time, go through some simple pair work games designed to increase team skills in a fun way. They engage and enjoy them. We then try the musical activity again. Half attempt it, half run straight to keyboards.
We attempt keyboard composition activity. It works with half of class.
Back to the drawing board with year 7 for next week. They’re lovely kids, but clearly aren’t getting it at the moment.
15.00 wolf down half of lunch I didn’t have time to eat at lunch break.
15.15 meeting on teaching and learning. Yawn. Headache reaches crescendo.
16.30 eat other half of lunch, which is stale and unpleasant. Finish more correspondence re: BHM concert.
17.00 Leave for home. Headache beats out counterpoint to rhythm of train.
18.30 answer some more work emails, begin preparing lessons for next day.
There is one songwriting rule that forms the basis of countless books, blogs and magazine articles, a rule that is so central to some songwriters’ methods that it often goes unspoken:- You should write songs for the market.
The assumption that songwriters should compose songs to be sold and earn money is hardly a new one, and for many decades it has been a viable goal. Indeed, the idea of the performer as songwriter has only been around in popular music since the 60s when the Beatles made it the norm, and countless artists before and since made their living by singing someone elses songs.
Songwriting ‘factories’ from Tin Pan Alley to Motown records and Stock, Aitken and Waterman have all manufactured songs for artists to perform and had great successes, sometimes artistically, most often commerically. There’s certainly nothing wrong with writing a song to be sold, if that’s what you want to do, and no-one would deny that wonderful songwriting was done in Tin Pan Alley and under the Motown label (whether anything worthwhile was produced by SAW is perhaps harder to argue).
In his book ‘Future Hit DNA’, (which argues that songwriters should allow the market and technology to dictate how they compose) Jay Frank suggests that motivations and ideas such as music coming from the soul, being lead by the artist are fine only if ‘music is nothing more than a hobby’, not worthy of consideration by a professional musician who needs to earn a living. Berklee offers a course that promises to teach you the ‘structures and techniques that work best’ in creating hit songs, and there are countless other songwriting blogs and websites that work from the same basis. The goal of writing a top 40 hit is held up as important. Other motiviations are ignored or implicitly (or in Frank’s case explicitly) denigrated.
Ralph Murphy, composer of insipid country hits such as ‘Talking in your Sleep,’ boasts of analysing only number 1 songs, implying that commercial success is what makes a song worth writing. Of course, from his point of view it is. He advises songwriters to think of audience first, to stick to proven formulas, to write for ‘women listening at 10am’ because they are the people that buy records. His website is full of such advice, (and almost never mentions music at all, except in the vaguest terms such as counting the number of verses in a song) all of it designed to help songwriters turn out songs as bland and pointless as the ones he has written.
In business it is quite normal to tailor a product to the customer, to start with market research and from there design a product with the intention of it selling. Similarly, it is possible to treat the songwriting process like the design of a product, and for some it is succesful. The question I’m interested in, is whether it is right to think of the market as you compose. I believe it is not.
If you really want to, there is nothing wrong with writing songs with the intention of having another artist sing their way into a chart somewhere. I would argue however, that it’s a bad idea for two reasons. One, the very idea of a homogenous market of hit singles is out of date, and two (which we’ll take a look at in part two of this article), there are better reasons for writing songs. Some of those reasons are even likely to make you money, if that’s what you’re after.
Do you mean we should ignore the listener?
There’s a vast difference between the market and the listener. The listener is a human being, with tastes, with needs, with emotions. Writing for the listener means making musical decisions that will move, suprise and delight. Writing for a market means making musical decisions that won’t offend, that don’t suprise, that says the same things, in the same way, as a thousand songs you’ve heard before.
The two are diametrically opposed. You can write for a listener, or write for a market.
There are no more hits
Commercial songwriting depends on the existence of a mass market. It needs the world of number 1 records, best selling albums, omnipresent hit artists of the Michael Jackson, Madonna type. Unfortunately, that version of the record business is all but dead. Physical sales have collapsed, single sales likewise. The peak year was 1999, and since then everything has been in decline. Teenagers are listening to streams or downloading without paying; the market is fragmenting. Never again will we have a world of ubiquitous hit singles.
“Record labels know how to drive hits,” Message says. But in an age when revenues from recorded music are on the slide, the hit-based approach is growing obsolete. UK industry revenues rose 4.7 per cent to £3.9bn last year, boosted by the popularity of live music. But album sales were 3.5 per cent down on the previous year. It’s worse in the US, where album sales in the first half of 2010 were 11 per cent down on the same period last year. Japan, the world’s second biggest market, is registering similar falls. With recorded music revenue falling and other forms of income such as concerts getting more lucrative, the balance of power between talent and labels has shifted.
Is the death of the mass music market a bad thing? No. Mass markets require blandness. As Andrew Dubber on the New Music Strategies blog says, the music industry in 1999 was ‘A world of a few stars selling millions of copies of safe and frequently dull music’. It was a lifeless place, as mass markets always are. Interesting, exciting, expressive art is not found in the mass market, it is found at the edges, outside the mainstream. Every now and then something exceptional breaks through, something innovative and new, but those unusual hits like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, occur in spite of the market, not because of it.
As the market fragments all that will be left are those edges – smaller markets, each with their own songwriting idiosyncracies. All the lessons that the mass market songwriter has learnt – the standard chord changes, the three minute limit, the stock structures – are useless in this world. At the edges, innovation is needed. Listeners need something new, not the same old rubbish they’ve always been given. If the way to get noticed, the measure of success is no longer blandness and the ability to not offend any listener, the songwriter has no choice but to look outside the mainstream.
The mass music market was unusual anyway, founded on a monopoly of musical discovery channels that came into existence during the twentieth century, only to be destroyed by the internet.
The idea of a mass market hit will soon be a thing of the past and anyone telling you to write for it is out of date. If this means songwriters will stop thinking of the market before they write, it can only be a good thing.
Part two will look at some better motivatins for writing songs
There’s this song that I want to write. It’s the greatest song you’ll ever hear. The melody is captivating, the lyrics moving, the accompaniment inspired. The interplay of the different instruments is unique and bewitching.
In short, it’s the best song ever. It will take you on a musical journey you’ve never ever been on before. It’s the song I’ll be known for – people will sing its praises for decades.
The problem is, I can’t write it. I’ve been trying every day since I was ten to write this song, and I still haven’t got there.
I’m nearer now than I was 18 years ago, ten years ago, five years ago. I’m nearer than I was last week, and there’s a song brewing at the back of my head right now that might just be it.
Or might not.
Do I hate eveything else I’ve written? No, I certainly don’t. In particular I’m very proud of the music I’ve produced in the last year. But I haven’t written that song yet.
Songwright.co.uk is dead. Long live IndieSongwriter.net.
Yes, I’m changing the name of this site to Indiesongwriter.net after four years under the old name.
There are a couple of reasons.
Spelling
‘Songwright’ looks quite good on paper, but when you try and tell people the name of the site verbally, things can get very confusing.
“It’s songwright, but spelled like ‘shipwright’ or ‘playwright’. Get it?”
IndieSongwriter.net, on the other hand, isn’t in any way ambiguous.
You
The second reason is while ‘songwright’ encapsulates something of what this blog is about – the craft of songwriting – it says nothing about you, the audience.
Now, I’ve got a pretty good idea of the kind of songwriter I’m aiming for with this blog, and hopefully you’ll recognise yourself in this description.
I’m writing, as the new name suggests, for indepedent songwriters.
As an indie songwriter, you mostly perform your own songs.
You put creativity before commercial potential.
You write to express yourself, for the joy of writing.
You aren’t interested in writing for the top-40.
You wouldn’t be at home in Nashville.
You are equally interested in the craft and art of songwriting
You don’t want your songwriting now to be the same as you songwriting in six months’, a year’s, or a decade’s time.
That isn’t an exhaustive list, but hopefully it gives you the idea. This blog has always been for songwriters outside the mainstream, who don’t just want to write a clone of whatever this week’s number 1 hit is. It’s for songwriters who care about the craft and art of what they do.
There’s no such thing as a conceptual songwriter. As an artist you are free to choose from all sorts of funky media and part of the game is to work outside the box and provoke thought and criticism. Songwriting isn’t like that. Composition is like that, but songwriting isn’t. As a songwriter you’ve signed up to write songs, and the popular song isn’t a very flexible form. It’s not quite as restrictive as being a sonnetwriter, but it’s closer to that than, say, a novelwriter.
There’s nothing to stop you exploding the confines of the form and writing 15-minute one-chord freeform poetry, but that’s not a song. You could argue that it is, but you’d be wrong (the word song refers to a pretty specific musical form, and let’s assume we’re talking about popular song, even late 20th Century popular song to keep things simple).
I don’t want to get into the semantics of whether we use the word ‘song’ just for short vocal forms, or for any piece of music with vocals but I do want to both agree and disagree with Ben.
I agree that no songwriter can avoid the technical aspects. Any long time reader of Songwright will know that I’m all for educated songwriters who understand the craft and know how to create well formed, interesting songs.
Where I disagree is with the apparent implication that songwriters should stick to the limits, confines and conventions of popular song forms and not try to push the boundaries and ‘think outside the box’.
Sorry Ben, that’s wrong. If you’re a songwriter, you’re a composer and if you’re not trying to do things that push the envelope, that do something new and fresh (Not necessarily revolutionary, just new, interesting, exciting) then what’s the point of writing your songs at all?
We are composers, we have a duty not to bore our listeners with conventional derivative songs. The only way to do that is to understand all the conventions and possibilities of the craft and to then try and move beyond them in a way that works.
On Sunday 18th July, I was guest speaker at the London Songwriters Meetup. I spoke about 10 Tips for songwriters, and shared some of my favourite tips with the lovely songwriters in attendance. I also heard some fantastic songs and had a really good time.
It’s more important to write lots of songs that it is to spend ages trying to make one perfect one.
You look at all the good songwriters and you realise they’ve written hundreds of songs. That’s how you get good at it. As Diane Warren,possibly the world’s most successful songwriter says: “My secret? I show up. That’s it.” Six days a week, she writes songs, and has been doing so for 30 years. Her very earliest songs? “They all sucked”. So write often, a song a week is a good start.
“Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, Robert Weisberg discusses statistical research into the proportion of masterpieces to minor works among great and not-so-great composers.
The researchers concluded that the rate of hits to misses was pretty constant between major and minor composers. The truly great composers produce more masterpieces than the others, mainly because they produced more work overall.”
This is a tip made by a lot of songwriters in 10 Tips for Songwriters, in different guises and the basic point is an obvious one.
If you’re going to be a songwriter, you need to write songs. We’re very good at distracting ourselves from that but actually one of the most important things to do is write songs. Lots of them.
2. ( From Gary Jugert) Know the difference between bourbon and whiskey - A songwriter needs the proper tools.
Constraints are your friend. If the tempo, or the key, or the genre, or the subject matter, or anything else are already decided before you start to write, you have much less messing about to do once you get started. It’s like the difference between trying to find a needle in a haystack and trying to find a needle in a field.
I think there’s a lot to be said for this – creativity thrives with limitations, it’s easier to be imaginitive when some choices have already been made. I’m in favour of limiting yourself in some way.
Now usually I write lyrics at the same time, or after I’ve written the music. So as a challenge to myself last week I wrote a set of lyrics before I had any inkling what the music was going to be and then had the challenge of composing the music to them.
Things to take away from this song – the structure of the song isn’t verse chorus verse chorus, I saw no point in coming back to the verse material later.
The chorus is a blatant steal from the Radiohead song ‘There there’
4. (From Gary Jugert again) Practice your offended face
Sooner or later somebody is going to call you a songwriter, and you’ll need to say, “I’m a composer,” with your offended face.
5. Constantly expand you pallette
Music theory is your friend. If you only use the same three chords then you are limiting yourself. As a guitar player, if you only use standard chord voicings, well to be frank stop it put some effort in. You should know at the very lest all the chords available to you in the major key – which if you include sevenths, sixths and their inversions is roughly 70 different chords.
I remember very distinctly however, a guitar lessons from my old guitar teacher where he showed us how to harmonise the major scale to see which seventh chords you get in that. And that was interesting, but nothing very new. But then he did the same with the harmonic minor scale – and this was the first time I’d ever considered that you could have a minor chord with a major seventh, and the first time I’d ever heard of an augmented chord.
This opened my eyes to all sorts of new harmonic ideas that I’d never used before. I’d heard them in music before but never realised what they were. Since then I’ve always tried to expand my pallette and learn new things, and I sincerely think you’re doing yourself an injustice as a songwriter if you don’t continously learn new things musically.
Here’s a song that uses some of those ideas:
Things to take away :- there’s a couple of different time signatures used rather than just one, and I use some of those harmonic minor scale chords as well.
6. (From Gary Jugert again) One word: Guitar – The other instruments are for losers.
7. Songwriting is not lyric writing
Lyrics are important but they are only one element of a song. Sometimes when I say this, people reply ‘of course, there’s music too’ but there’s more to it than that. A song is not a 50/50 spilt between words and music. Your melody, your use of rhythm, groove and tempo, your choice of chord and scale, the instruments and timbre you use, each of these elements has equal importance to you lyrics.
There are writers out there who claim to write about songwriting, but only talk about lyric. There are songwriters who could talk at length about poetic meter but couldn’t tell you what the dominant chord in D major is.
One of the main reasons I started www.songwright.co.uk was my frustration at the lack of songwriting blogs that addressed songwriting, rather than just lyric writing. Melodies matter, interesting music matters. In fact interesting music is far more important. Lyrics are very often hard to make out at first listen, and even when they can be made out they don’t do much to express the meaning of a song.
What?
Yes, your lyrics are not even the primary conveyors of meaning in your song. Just as tone of voice can dictate whether speech is sarcastic or genuine, you choice of musical ideas will colour what your lyrics mean.
Which brings us to tip 8
8. Consider the meaning of your chord progressions
And while you’re at it, the meaning of the scale you’re using, the meaning of the structure you’ve chosen.
For me every chord you play is layered with meaning depending on context and relationship to what’s around it.
I could go on at length about the meaning of the various modes, but I won’t bore you with that. Instead I’ll make the simple point that this chord progression – V to I – which has been the basis of Western music for a couple of centuries now is hard to justify. Using it makes you sound corny as far as I’m concerned.
You might disagree with that example but the basis of that point is simply this:- everything you use, melody chords, everything means something, and they the listener uses your music also means something and if your song is to be successful you need to consider what those meanings are because they say more to the listener than your words do.
The Lydian mode for me has connotations of dreaminess, happiness but with an edge of strangeness. I made use of it in ‘Something’s Bound to Happen’
9. Steal Ideas
There’s a quote : ‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal’. I’ve heard that attributed to aristotle, D H Lawrence, John Lennon and Igor Stravinsky. And it’s true. I don’t mean plagiarise, I don’t mean steal music, I mean steal ideas. This way of phrasing a melody, that way of changing key, these chords, that rhythm.
I do this all the time, as I mentioned with the Radiohead song I’ve stolen from.
My last example, to illustrate my stealing an idea is from a song Called ‘Where Once They Had Hearts’. The idea I stole is from two sources – one snippet I’d read about Coltrane’s Giant Steps and two the middle eight chord progression from a song by heavy metal band symphony x – the idea of using chords a major third apart in a cycle.
The other idea I stole was from David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ – the idea of composing a tongue in cheek musical style ballad.
I’m an atheist, I admit it. I used to say I was an agnostic, but as I’ve gotten older and read more and thought more about religion, I’ve decided that every one is humankind’s creation. I’m cool with my beliefs, but I wonder if society really is, especially among those who, like myself, think of themselves as artists.
My uncertainty stems from the countless interviews I have read with songwriters, most of whom claim that their songs do not come from within, but rather from without, either as gifts of god or as creations of a force greater than humankind, creations that can only be gathered by those who pay attention. I disagree with these conceits, and let me tell you why:…
Earlier today I was twittering a few random thoughts on future blog posts. I floated the idea of writing ‘The Songwriting Crimes of Bob Dylan’, and ‘The Songwriting Crimes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’.
A couple of twitterers (tweeters? Tweetmates? Twitees?) raised an interesting opinion or two
Marie Tueje said (I’ve paraphrased and edited a few tweets, purely to make it scan):
Surely the major crime of SAW was being too successful?
Their writing is formulaic, sure. Subjectively, a lot of it is bad, in the sense that I personally do not like it…but objectively I think it’s difficult to argue that they wrote bad songs…
Despite this I do believe that one must be able to say ‘x is bad’ and that there be a barometer below which there is bad music
I agree with @MarieTueje on this, unless you’re talking about Richard Clayderman, in which case ERASE HIM FROM TIME!
I’m not sure I agree – the idea of a work of art being objectively good is difficult to sustain. For that to be true all good art would translate across barriers of time and culture, which it clearly doesn’t.
Something can be good within a context – Bob Dylan is good to by the standards that Bob Dylan fans consider relevant, but I could (and at some point will) give what I regard as objective reasons to see him as a talentless no-hoper who got lucky.
Objectively good music? I don’t think such a thing exists. What do you think?
