Total Guitar magazine – songwriting article (song form)
This article originally appeared in Total Guitar magazine issue 216, July 2011. Reproduced by permission. Words: Joe Bennett. Illustration: Christian Ward. Click the image to download a pdf of the article.
If you build it, they will come
Most songs consist of a small number of basic building blocks, and the order of these defines the form. Some of the blocks themselves will be familiar to any music fan – intro, verse, chorus, bridge and so on, and each has its own particular characteristics.To state the obvious, a verse has the same melody and different lyrics each time it repeats; a chorus usually has identical lyrics and melody each time you hear it. Intros and outros can have their own original music, but are often just an instrumental version of another section (ever noticed how the intro chords for lots of chart hits are the same as those for the chorus? This is a psychological trick played on the listener so that when the ‘real’ chorus arrives, we feel like we already know it).
Read more »
It’s the Christmas Wordle pop quiz!
On the questions sheet (click on the image on the right to download pdf) you will find the lyrics for 12 Christmas UK number 1 hits, displayed as a Wordle. I’m looking for artist, year and title. No Googling allowed! I’ll post the answers here soon.
Merry Christmas!
Process in songwriting – Total Guitar magazine
This article first appeared in Total Guitar magazine issue 215, June 2011. Words: Joe Bennett. Illustration: Christian Ward.
Six rules of (fingers and) thumb
Click picture to download pdf of article. Reproduced by permission.
There are no rules in songwriting. It’s your song, and you can do anything you like with it. But! There are principles that occur in a large number of successful songs, and many of the songwriters I teach find these ideas useful when writing new material. They are, in no particular order, Economy, Imagery, Prosody, Universality, Repetition and Originality.
Songs use word economy to communicate lyric ideas. The Beatles’ Yesterday tells an entire story of love, loss and regret in 84 words – and 125 seconds (and it holds the record for the most cover versions of any song in history). Many successful songs start with a killer first line that provides lots of information in a few words. When we hear “Stacey’s Mom has got it goin’ on” (Fountains of Wayne) we know (or guess) that the singer is an American teenager, that he is dating a girl called Stacey, that he’s in love with her mother, and that the mum knows nothing about it. Not bad in seven words.
Illustration - Christian Ward
Music fans listen with their imagination as well as their ears – and lyric imagery is one of the most useful tools we have in stimulating it. So if you say “I met a girl in a night club” you’re halfway to telling the story, but if you add detail you get “I met her in a club down in old Soho / where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola” (from the Kinks’ classic Lola – TG205). We see a picture in our minds when we hear this lyric. We also get an inkling of the narrator’s naivety – he’s never been to a bar and doesn’t know why the drinks taste funny.
You can write perfectly good lyrics without using imagery, but a few choice visuals can work wonders in helping fans to remember your song. And images can also be used as metaphor. In Biffy Clyro’s God & Satan, when Simon Neil sings “the see-saw snaps and splinters your hand”, he’s talking about life’s balance between good and evil, not about a children’s playground. But if he’d just sung “when your life doesn’t work out as you hoped” the lyric would have been much weaker.
Prosody is a catch-all term to describe music and lyric working together to give meaning for the listener. If your chorus says “I Predict A Riot” it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to accompany it with delicate open-tuned fingerstyle guitar and a tempo of 60 beats per minute – the feeling of the lyric doesn’t go with the music. Conversely, “You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips” (from You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling) is such a tender image that you won’t want amps up to 11 and a Screamo vocal.
Some songwriters believe that melody and lyric are even more closely related – that positive lyrics go with rising melodies and negative ones with descending melodies. There are plenty of classics that disprove this theory, of course, but again it’s surprising how often you find really successful songs following the ‘rule’. And while we’re at it, have you noticed that the chorus melody is almost always higher-pitched than the verse? It makes people want to join in and tells them that this is the ‘point’ of your lyric.
To state the obvious, successful song lyrics appeal to lots of people – this is often described as Universality. It’s no accident that more than 80% of the biggest hits of all time are about love and relationships, because it’s something that all humans relate to. But it’s not all hearts and flowers. Elbow’s One Day Like This suggests that if we can all just feel good about ourselves for one day, we’ll put up with the rest of life’s troubles (and the chorus opens with the wonderful image “throw those curtains wide”). And listen to Lennon’s Imagine – who wouldn’t agree that there should be more love in the world?
Repetition! What is it good for? Absolutely everything! Say it again. It might not seem terribly ‘clever’ to simply repeat the title in your chorus, but it’s amazing how well this simple device can work.
Perhaps the most difficult part of songwriting is achieving originality. As listeners, we need to hear that quirky extra ingredient – the sound, riff, melody, chord pattern or lyric we haven’t heard before. Over to you.
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AABA form – lecture with examples
I’ve updated the AABA form lecture to include YouTube clips and more detailed notes on the adaptations applied to the songs. This presentation should be useful to our MMus Songwriting students with whom we discussed these examples (and more) today at Corsham.
Here’s a link to the presentation.
Red phone box – paintwork
Another slideshow for fellow phone box geeks! Carl at redtelephonebox.com is now putting on the paint;
“I’ve degreased the whole of your K6 shell & applied etch primer to the bare ironwork & filler. Once it had flashed off I applied 2 direct coats of Post Office Red to the notorious & fiddly glazing bars & other intricate places I cannot get with a brush!”
Here’s a full slideshow of the current phase of Carl’s hard work.
Harmonic Rhythm in Songwriting
I originally wrote this article for Total Guitar magazine. It appears in issue TG214 (May 2011) and it is reproduced here by permission.
Download pdf - TG214-harmonic-rhythm
Put some rhythm in your rhythm
It could be said that songs (as distinct from recordings) consist of only three things – melody, lyric and chords. Today we’re going to focus on the use of guitar chord changes in the songwriting process, and how you can use them to make your songs communicate more powerfully.
When you’re adding chords to a new song, you get to decide on the chord root (C, G, Eb, F# or whatever), the chord type (major, minor, m7, 7flat9 etc) and when in the song each chord change should happen. The first two are pretty easy to explain and to use – every guitarist has a chord vocabulary, and if you want to use new and exotic chords, you can either consult a chord book or make up shapes by trial-and-error.
It’s the placement of each chord that sometimes takes a bit more work. Many new songwriters change the chords every bar, on the bar. They strum a chord for two or perhaps four beats, then move onto the next chord. Sometimes the whole song consists of the same four-chord loop over and over – well-trodden paths include Am-G-F-G, C-G-Am-F, Am-C-G-D or even the old 1950s staple C-Am-F-G. Using the same chord loop throughout is a perfectly good way of writing a song, and includes four-chord classics such as Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower, U2’s With Or Without You, Ben E King’s Stand By Me and Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, but it’s not the only option. The simplest change you can make is to vary the loops, using a different sequence for verse and chorus e.g. Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams uses (capo 1st fret) Em-G-D-A for the verse, then C-G-D-Em for the chorus.
Illustration - Christian Ward
And chords don’t always have to change on the barline – you can do it any beat of the bar. One method that songwriters use to spice up a sequence is to include an additional chord change on the half-bar i.e. beat 3 if you’re in 4/4 time. Say you’ve decided you’re going to write a 4/4 verse section that uses the chords of E, G, D and A. The most obvious starting point would be to strum each chord for a bar each, creating a four-bar loop that you’d then repeat. So let’s try a few variations. Strum the E for two bars, the G for one bar, then the D and A for two beats each. Not only is this less predictable, it’s more likely to encourage your brain to write a more interesting melody. Here’s another variation. Strum the E for three beats, then change to the G on the count of four and throughout the second bar (this is sometimes called a ‘push’ chord change). Then play the D chord from the start of bar 3, changing to the A only for the final two beats of bar 4.
The term we use to refer to how often the chords change is called ‘harmonic rhythm’, and it’s a very useful tool for the songwriter because it is one of the ways we control the listener’s sense of ‘pace’ and momentum in the song. To go back to Boulevard… as an example, both chord loops are played as half-bar changes, or two beats per chord. At the end of this chorus there’s a surprise for the audience as the song includes a B major chord for two whole bars – which adds to the drama of a melodic change combined with the emotionally powerful lyric “Til then I walk alone”.
Changing the harmonic rhythm at the start of a chorus can help to show the listener that they’re hearing a new section; typical techniques include moving from half-bars to whole-bar changes, or from whole-bar changes to two-bar changes, or vice versa. Clapton’s Tears In Heaven uses half-bar changes (with occasional whole bars) in the verses, then switches to whole-bar changes throughout the chorus, supporting the change of mood provided by the self-reflective lyric “I must be strong…”. This ‘gear-shift’ effect can be equally effective at the start of bridge section or even a guitar solo.
Generally, the faster the harmonic rhythm, the more momentum the section will have. For example, the Rolling Stones use 2-bar changes (verse) followed by 1-bar changes (chorus) in Satisfaction, but take the exact opposite approach in Sympathy For The Devil.
Every song has its own signature harmonic rhythm, and controlling it in your songwriting can add a powerful weapon to your arsenal of techniques. Ready… aim… strum!
Kiosk restoration – door
The old teak door is now being restored. Carl’s commentary;
“I’ve now sprayed etch-primed the door & 2K (twin packed) the wooden teakwood outer frame in Post Office Red. This will seal the wood prior to rubbing gently down & repainting again – once hung!”
Click the images for slideshows.
After it’s dry, Carl hangs the door and adds an additional top coat to the roof.
“I’ve rehung the door on new hinges & re-aligned all ready for a final light sand before adding more colour! I’ve also masked off the outer roof dome ready for further primer & top coat…”
More phone box restoration
Carl at redtelephonebox.com is back on the case with my K6 (for those of you catching up on this extraordinarily geeky story, select the Red Telephone Box category, or go back to the original post for the history). Here’s a slideshow of the latest pics. Carl’s commentary is;
“I’ve sanded back the inner floor/sill & outer roof dome, de-greased & applied two coats of acid etch primer to the transport primer & cast iron with paint brush & mini roller. After a duration I carefully applied two generous coats of BS538 Post Office Red to both of these surfaces.”
Livin’ in a box – constraints of popular song form
Here are the slides from my research forum presentation at Bath Spa University, 6th October 2011.
AABA form
I’ll be lecturing tomorrow on our MMus Songwriting course at Corsham Court. The subject is AABA form in songwriting.
Here are the slides. In themselves they are pretty basic (and probably only of interest for the song titles) – the meat of the lecture is in the analysis of the songs.
Collaborative songwriting paper – in Spanish
For this post I have to thank the very marvellous Abner Perez. He has kindly volunteered to translate my recent academic paper (from the Art of Record Production conference) on collaborative songwriting into Spanish.
Download Spanish Translation (pdf)
Composición en colaboración – la ontología de la creatividad negociada en la práctica de producción de música poppular
Download English version (pdf)
Collaborative songwriting – the ontology of negotiated creativity in popular music studio practice
Here’s the abstract in Spanish.
Is There An Artificial God?
One of my favourite speeches from one of my favourite writers was, until recently, available online at http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/
For some reason when I tried to access it recently the link was down, so I quickly grabbed the below-pasted text from its cache. I don’t know who owns this text, if anyone (and will take it down if this post infringes anyone’s copyright) but have pasted it here to keep it alive online because it is one of the most moving – and intelligent – things I have ever read. It is a transcript of an address Adams gave in 1998, and appears in his final book The Salmon of Doubt (buy it here). Read more »
Collaborative Songwriting – academic paper
This is an academic paper on the subject of collaborative songwriting in the studio. It was presented at the 6th Art of Record Production conference in Dec 2010 and appears in the Journal of the Art of Record Production Conference Proceedings – ISSN 1754-9892. Please feel free to download/cite it as you think fit. The correct citation is;
Bennett, J., 2011. Collaborative songwriting – the ontology of negotiated creativity in popular music studio practice. In Journal of the Art of Record Production 2010. Leeds, UK: Art of Record Production.
In keeping with my view that academics should make their research as freely available as possible, you can download the whole paper here.
Live blogging Eurovision 2011
Blog complete – if you’re reading this there’s no need to hit ‘refresh’ now.
- Iceland – Coming Home
- Estonia – Rockefeller Street
- Denmark – New Tomorrow
- Song 2
- Performance 7
- Song 5
- Performance 7
- Song 5
- Performance 8
- Song 8
- Performance 8
- Song 9
- Performance 8
- Song 7
- Performance 7
- Song 6
- Performance 6
- Song 7
- Performance 8
- Song 7
- Performance 7
- Song 5
- Performance 8
- Song 3
- Performance 6
- Song 6
- Performance 5
- Song 8
- Performance 5
- Song 8
- Performance 6
- Song 5
- Performance 8
- Song 6
- Performance 6
- Song 2
- Performance 4
- Song 8
- Performance 7
- Song 7
- Performance 6
- Song 7
- Performance 7
- Song 8
- Performance 5
- Song 7
- Performance 6
- Song 8
- Performance 7
20:18 Bosnia & Herzegovina – Love In Rewind
- Song 5
- Performance 6
20:15 Finland – Da Da Dam
It’s Aled Jones singing an eco anthem. The title hook is a bit throwaway and the lyric is very worthy – too much for my tastes but a new-ish angle for Eurovision I think. A fine vocal. Melody is a bit too static and the chorus rather unmemorable.
- Song 6
- Performance 8
How long, how long must we sing this song?
In my academic research I’ve been investigating the ‘constraints of song’ – that is, what defines a song, and what creative decisions are likely to make it more (or less) successful. The simplest of these is track duration, not least because it’s easily measurable.
I couldn’t find any statistical study of track length over time, so did a quick analysis myself, finding the top 10 best-selling singles of each decade 1960s-2000s (from everyhit.com) and comparing them to the track runtime from the relevant iTunes download. The full spreadsheet of my data can be found here (rough paste below).
Findings:
- The mean average length of track rose from 2:43 in the 1960s to 4:03 in the 1970s but then (from the 1970s) fluctuated by no more than 0:18 per decade, maintaining an average length of around 4:00 over 40 years.
- The median song length, from the 1970s, is even more conservative, with only 0:12 change (3:47 to 3:59) between the 1970s and 2000s.
Conclusions
- Best-selling hit songs were shorter in duration during the 1960s (although this may have been dramatically affected by some very short early Beatles’ singles, five of these appearing in the decade’s top 10, all with a duration of less than 2:30).
- The mean average duration of best-selling hit songs has not varied significantly by decade since the 1970s.
| Length | Mean | Median | St.Dev | |||
| 1960s | The Beatles | She Loves You | 02:22 | |||
| The Beatles | I Want To Hold Your Hand | 02:26 | ||||
| Ken Dodd | Tears | 02:52 | ||||
| The Beatles | Can’t Buy Me Love | 02:13 | ||||
| The Beatles | I Feel Fine | 02:20 | ||||
| Seekers | The Carnival Is Over | 03:09 | ||||
| The Beatles | Day Tripper / We Can Work It Out | 02:16 | ||||
| Englebert Humperdinck | Release Me | 03:18 | ||||
| Elvis Presley | It’s Now Or Never | 03:14 | ||||
| Tom Jones | Green Green Grass Of Home | 03:04 | ||||
| 02:43 | 02:39 | 00:26 | ||||
| 1970s | Wings | Mull Of Kintyre | 04:44 | |||
| Boney M | Rivers Of Babylon / Brown Girl In The Ring | 04:00 | ||||
| John Travolta & Olivia Newton John | You’re The One That I Want | 02:49 | ||||
| Boney M | Mary’s Boy Child – Oh My Lord | 04:31 | ||||
| John Travolta & Olivia Newton John | Summer Nights | 03:36 | ||||
| Village People | Y.M.C.A | 03:22 | ||||
| Queen | Bohemian Rhapsody | 05:55 | ||||
| Blondie | Heart Of Glass | 04:35 | ||||
| David Soul | Don’t Give Up On | 03:38 | ||||
| Slade | Merry Xmas Everybody | 03:26 | ||||
| 04:03 | 03:49 | 00:53 | ||||
| 1980s | Band Aid | Do They Know It’s Christmas | 03:41 | |||
| Frankie Goes To Hollywood | Relax | 03:53 | ||||
| Stevie Wonder | I Just Called To Say I Love You | 04:21 | ||||
| Fankie Goes To Hollywood | Two Tribes | 03:28 | ||||
| Human League | Don’t You Want Me | 03:56 | ||||
| Wham! | Last Christmas | 04:26 | ||||
| Culture Club | Karma Chameleon | 04:02 | ||||
| George Michael | Careless Whisper | 05:02 | ||||
| Jennifer Rush | The Power Of Love | 04:27 | ||||
| Dexy’s Midnight Runners | Come On Eileen | 03:24 | ||||
| 04:04 | 03:59 | 00:30 | ||||
| 1990s | Elton John | Candle in the Wind 1997 | 04:10 | |||
| Robson & Jerome | Unchained Melody | 03:19 | ||||
| Wet Wet Wet | Love Is All Around | 03:57 | ||||
| Aqua | Barbie Girl | 03:15 | ||||
| Cher | Believe | 04:01 | ||||
| Bryan Adams | (Everything I Do) I Do It For You | 06:33 | ||||
| Various Artists | Perfect Day | 03:45 | ||||
| Britney Spears | Baby One More Time | 03:30 | ||||
| Puff Daddy & Faith Evans | I’ll Be Missing You | 04:24 | ||||
| Whitney Houston | I Will Always Love You | 04:23 | ||||
| 04:07 | 03:59 | 00:56 | ||||
| 2000s | Will Young | Evergreen / Anything Is Possible | 04:11 | |||
| Gareth Gates | Unchained Melody | 03:54 | ||||
| Tony Christie featuring Peter Kay | (Is This The Way To) Amirillo | 03:12 | ||||
| Shaggy featuring Ricardo ‘Rikrok’ Ducent | It Wasn’t Me | 03:47 | ||||
| Alexandra Burke | Hallelujah | 03:36 | ||||
| Band Aid 20 | Do They Know It’s Christmas? | 05:06 | ||||
| Kyle Minogue | Can’t Get You Out Of My Head | 03:52 | ||||
| Hear’Say | Pure And Simple | 03:48 | ||||
| Shayne Ward | That’s My Goal | 03:38 | ||||
| Bob The Builder | Can We Fix It? | 03:09 | ||||
| 03:49 | 03:47 | 00:32 |
Britney – copying is not plagiarism?
It’s impossible to own the copyright on a lyric concept. An immeasurable number of songs have been written about the songwriter’s favourite subject – romantic love – so it’s to be expected that from time to time lyrics feature similar ideas or even specific phrases. So when a well-known play on words appears in a song title – and in the main chorus hook – and then someone copies the lyric almost verbatim, there’s a dilemma for the listener, and perhaps for the songwriter.
Today’s example is Britney Spears’ song ‘Hold It Against Me‘, as contrasted with the Bellamy Brothers’ 1979 hit ‘If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body (Would You Hold It Against Me)’. It is doubtful here whether a copyright has been infringed (as the lyrics are referencing a cheesy chat-up line which pre-dates both works) but I think you’ll agree that anyone familiar with the Bellamy Bros’ song would recognise it in the Britney one. This just goes to show that the ‘philosophical’ definition of musical plagiarism is not always the same as the legal one…
War Canoe is something to be scared of…
Speaks for itself, this one.
Here’s the 2010 Danny Baker interview when Rolf revealed that they had settled out of court after commissioning a musicologist’s report;
Me and Nutella…
Here’s an advert soundalike track. They’ve even copied the Cuíca drum. Not a single note or chord is the same as Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard, of course. But the arrangement and production clearly references the Paul Simon original – and the casual listener is left in no doubt of the source. This is the challenge of soundalike works in music publishing – technically copyright can subsist in any part of a musical work, but it tends to be interpreted (in law and in the making of the work) as only being based around musical notes i.e. if it can’t be notated, it isn’t copyright.
Of course, it is impossible to own the copyright in a musical technique, whether it be strummed semiquavers on an acoustic guitar or a Cuica ‘laughing’ drum. But if the combination of musical decisions in the original work is unique (strummed 16 acoustic, Cuica drum coming in a few bars later, fingerboard muting over a 3-chord/2-bar loop, all at the unusually fast tempo of 210BPM), it’s fair to say that the soundalike track is referencing a specific work rather than just a musical style. And if this is the case, it’s presumably been done so that the casual listener will ‘recognise’ the original; thus, the copyist is benefiting (in this case commercially) from the endeavours of the original artist – without licensing the track or asking permission.
Disclaimer – I make these observations only as an interested academic and musician. There is, as far as I know, no copyright infringement case associated with these works, and if there is I am unconnected with it. But if anyone connected with the publishing of ‘Julio’ is reading this, I hope you go after them!
Art of Record Production – final session
I’ve just presented my own paper – seemed to go OK. I’ll post more about this later in the PhD section, but for now here’s the abstract;
Joe Bennett – Bath Spa University
Collaborative songwriting – the ontology of negotiated creativity in popular music studio practice
The relationship between songwriting practice and song product is an under-explored one in popular musicology, still less so in a studio-based environment. Our research sources are accordingly limited, drawing mainly on first-hand retrospective interviews with artist-songwriters, who may have an incentive for self-mythologising, or at least romanticising their songwriting methods to preserve fan perceptions of authenticity. There are no available real-time observations of the collaborative processes involved in creating popular song, despite the huge economic and artistic successes of songwriting partnerships throughout the history of our field. Sloboda (1985) identifies the reluctance displayed by composers of any sort to participate in detailed analysis of their processes; these difficulties are exacerbated further by some songwriters’ apparently-deliberate mystification of their craft. Attempts to analyse processes of musical composition generally have generally focused on single-composer models (Nash 1955); even studies relating to collaboration remain concerned with instrumental art music (Hayden & Windsor 2007)or educational-based observation subjects (Burnard & Younker 2002).
This paper will build on the single-songwriter research of McIntyre (2009) and the theoretical definitions of creativity provided by Csikszentmihalyi (1996). It will explore, through analysis of ‘hits’ and examples of emerging practitioner-based research, the inferences that can be made by comparing historical and current songwriting practice with the finished product, and will attempt to identify commonly-used collaborative models, including artist with ‘ghost-writer’, artist with artist, band-based ensembles, ‘factories’ e.g. Brill Building and Stock/Aitken/Waterman’s Hit Factory, and collaborative distance-writing. Established and emerging musical practices will be identified and analysed, including top-line writing, ‘Nashville’ co-writes, loop-based improvisation, lyric-first and music-first approaches, together with a discussion of the effect of the presence (or absence) of studio technologies as mediator of the songwriting process.
Burnard, P. & Younker, B.A., 2002. Mapping Pathways: fostering creativity in composition. Music Education Research, 4(2), 245-261.Csikszentmihalyi, M., 1996. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: HarperCollins.
Hayden, S. & Windsor, L., 2007. COLLABORATION AND THE COMPOSER: CASE STUDIES FROM THE END OF THE 2OTH CENTURY. Tempo, 61(240), 28.
Mcintyre, P., 2009. ‘I’m Looking Through You’: An Historical Case Study of Systemic Creativity in the Partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In Collaborations: Creative Partnerships in Music. The Performance and Social Aesthetics Research Unit (PASA), Monash Conference Centre, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Nash, D., 1955. Challenge and Response in the American Composer’s Career. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 14(1), 116-122.
Sloboda, J., 1985. The musical mind : the cognitive psychology of music, Oxford [Oxfordshire] ;New York: Clarendon Press ;;Oxford University Press.
10:30
The next presentation is by Maria Hanacek. This one is particularly fascinating for me because she is working on the analysis of ‘songwriters in the studio’ videos, and the notions of mediatised and mediated authenticity relating to songwriters.
Maria Hanacek – Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Songwriting in the Studio or: The Idea of What Went into its Making
This year’s conference is concerned with change and continuity in the art of record production – I will argue that it is the rather old-fashioned idea of “songwriting” that creates coherence within the changing world of music production, and that this idea is indeed more important than ever for the success of large-scale commercial productions.
Thinking of record production as an art form or of the studio as a musical instrument already indicates that our models of thinking about music production stay pretty much the same, all debates about technological change or innovation aside. The idea of “songwriting” as a modern form of composition also correlates with a traditional notion of music as artistic self-expression, which still provides the conceptual framework for most records, and it is important to notice that apparent tensions between technology and artistry, between commerciality and authenticity result from this theoretical framework, not from the actual process of music production. In such instances we are ultimately dealing with the question what musicianship means in the age of studio production.
Authorship and intentionality are still such important concepts because it is the idea of what went into its making that gives meaning to a recording. The way popular music history works, songs need a history and an origin. According to this logic studio stories become part of a band’s or artist’s biography and discography, they contribute to the idea of an artist’s oeuvre that crystallises into a series of records. This idea is also replicated by “best of” albums, box sets and reissues – in short, the marketing of records always relied on the star persona for coherence and to personalize its products.
I will use the DVD ‘U2 and 3 Songs, A Documentary’ to illustrate this point. This “documentary” provides a retrospective on the songwriting process of the album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, for which the band and producer Steve Lillywhite received six Grammies in 2005. The affiliated Vertigo tour made the band the top grossing act that year according to Billboard – the eight concerts held in New York’s Madison Square garden alone sold 149,000 tickets. Although the purpose of promotional touring is to “authenticate” and personalize recorded performances in some way, attending one of these large-scale concerts wasn’t much of an “unmediated” or “live” experience of these songs and their authors.
This video, though, which came with several editions of the CD, tells us about human beings writing songs, about the development of creative ideas within a studio environment. It foregrounds the “raw material” of this record, whether by presenting a basic chord progression a song developed from or via an acoustic performance with slightly mistuned guitars. And this – in itself highly mediated – display of theunproduced or preproduced puts our picture of music making back in place.
Songwriting In The Studio
Songwriting In The Studio panel
For the final part of day 2 of the ARP conference there’s a session called Songwriting In The Studio. The panel consists of Richard Formby; Phil Harding; James Kenosha, Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and Marco Pasquariello.
Paul is up first and he plays us some of his film score music consisting almost entirely of programmed samples. He discusses why he took a ‘cover version’ approach rather than sampling original recordings, and the various copyright, aesthetic and technical parameters that led him through those creative decisions.
Like most of the panel, Phil (who as you’ll see from his biog worked extensively with Stock, Aitken and Waterman) sees little distinction between songwriting and production (in that songs are written in the studio), but he also interestingly describes producers as a ‘service industry’. He tells us of SAW’s shameless theft of titles (which of course is not illegal in any way!), in this case from the US hot 100 charts of the 1980s. If you’re interested to find out more I can recommend Phil’s book about the PWL days, available here in its new edition. Phil gives us a fascinating insight into the way SAW built tracks by analysing existing songs’ structure/form and other musical characteristics and then applying them to new works – a ‘hit factory’ in the literal sense! Phil plays us a song called I Need You by 90s pop band Deuce.
Phil tells us that the first melodic line of the chorus was shamelessly stolen from Cecilia by Paul Simon (he only infringes two notes actually so I’m not sure it’s theft in any legally meaningful sense – although when you know this is the source it’s very clear which part is the ‘tribute’). But like many of the papers at this conference connected with mashups/co-writes/sampling etc, it raises lots of interesting questions about ownership, creativity and originality that are simultaneously philosophical, legal and artistic.
17:22
Marco Pasquariello is talking about the Blue Roses track Doubtful Comforts, together with some lovely anecdotes about lo-fi recording, including grinding up 1/4 inch tape in the garden and buying an afternoon of time in a music shop in order to record all the pianos. He makes some equally interesting points about the deliberate constraints of some projects (for example, using eBows as the main instrumental pitch source).
17:30
Richard Formby starts with a ‘process piece’ called Tuning up for Piano which he created by running a recording several times while a piano tuner was working, then putting all the takes together as a multi-track – resulting in a very charming piece of chance-music. He admits to stealing small fragments of drums from bands in his studio (sometimes he tells them, sometimes not!) for use in his own music. There follows a discussion about out-takes (inevitably the Troggs tape is mentioned).
In the Q&A session, Paul makes the interesting point about the rebirth of the single; “since downloading [...] very few people seem to like whole albums any more”. We also get briefly into the debate of ‘what is a song’ and whose creative contributions constitute ‘songwriting’.
