I’ve written a high-level post on common songwriting techniques for the writing portion of my site. Look here.
Sting (The Police)
June 11th, 2009 § 0
Sting — singer, songwriter, and bassist of The Police and solo musician — describes in detail his writing process for “Message in a Bottle.” This comes from a video interview in which Sting plays instruments to illustrate his points, so I highly recommend watching that instead of reading this!
Do you write when you’re on the road?
I’ve got lots of little boxes. I wrote “Message in a Bottle” on a bus on this [gestures to device], which is a tape recorder with a drum machine in. [presses play, and then plays "Message in a Bottle" riff on guitar along to a drum beat] …
So lets go in to “Message in a Bottle,” then. How did you write that?
Well, let’s go further back, even. I mean, as a songwriter, as a composer, you like the sound of certain chords, and I like the sound of, say, D-minor-9th. [plays chord on guitar] But I also like what follows it, which is A9. [plays chord[ And the combination is... [plays both in sequence] That’s good, I like that. Where do we take it from there? Go up to B, F#. [plays those two chords] And over two bars, you’ve got a sequence. And we start humming along. [plays chord sequence while humming melody]
So the music comes first, before any lyrics, then?
No, that’s not true. It comes from two different areas. You put your music hat on, and you sit and write a riff, and then you go away with your notepad and write lyrics to it. And sooner or later they meet. By using tape recorders, you can keep track of your ideas, because it’s all flying around your head.
So with “Message in a Bottle,” were all the bits there, did they all come at once, or did you have one bit–
No, it all happened very slowly. As I say, I had this sequence going. [plays chords again] By arpeggiating, you get the riff [plays chord sequence again with arpeggiation] So we stick it down– [reaches for drum machine]
So this is how you demoed it to the band?
I get home from the bus, and I stick Dennis the Drum Box on, because Stuart [drummer] is not always available. [turns on drum machine] … And then I put this riff down, just from memory. [plays riff to drum beat, messes up] Mistakes as well. Wind it back, turn Dennis off, leave it for a day. Go back to it, listen to it, play along with it, see what happens. Play some sort of harmony with it.
Before you even got to another part like a chorus or something?
Yeah. Well, I just muck around. [starts previous recording of drum machine and riff] Put a harmony on it, like… [plays harmony part on guitar along with recording] Thing is, most nights when you do it, it sounds awful. … In this case, it was good. So then you think, “Well, what should I do next?” Put Dennis back on. [starts drum machine] And think, “Right, that’s a good verse, let’s have some rock and roll in it.” [plays palm muted riff along to recording]
Would this be something you might come up with before an idea for a chorus?
Maybe. Maybe it’s in a pile of tapes … because it doesn’t fit in anywhere. And all the time, you’re sort of mumbling rubbish. And when you’ve got a sort of reasonable structure written, with a chorus, you go to the big pile of lyrics, which you write all the time. You can write them anywhere: you can write them at a bus stop, you can write them in the pub. And you just look through them, and you see “message in a bottle” … that’s an interesting title. Because I write from titles. I don’t write the first line of a song. It’s a mistake, because then you have to come up with the second one. If you write backwards from the chorus line, which is usually the hook, then you usually come up with it.
So I had this “message in a bottle.” What’s “message in a bottle” about? It’s usually about some guy with raggy trousers and a beard on a desert island.
So you’ve got the rough idea for the chorus there, and then the idea for the verse. So how, then, do you present it to the rest of the band?
Well, you join all the bits of tape together in a rough fashion. You know, with very rough parts. … Then [the other band members] learn it, and they adapt it and change it. It’s lucky to have brilliant musicians. [laughs] …
So you had four weeks in which to write most of the material for this album? Did you find it only came in the last week or something like that?
No, so I write in bits and bobs, you know — a bit here, a bit there. It is like a jigsaw puzzle. And the last few weeks [I put it all together]. …
One song I really like on the album is “Invisible Sun,” which I wrote on this thing here. [gestures to floor] This is like a foot piano, which I play on stage. [plays it with foot] That’s a bass sound. I’ve also got a synthesizer sound. [plays it with a new sound] So I was just sitting at home one night with E-flat on there, and I play this… [plays guitar along with foot piano tone]
Did Dennis [the drum machine] get involved?
Dennis was involved, like so. [turns on drum machine, and plays along with foot piano and guitar] …
When you do give the song to the band, do you go to rehearsal first, or do you go down straight into the recording studio?
In good time, we go to rehearsal. We go straight into the studio, and if it’s not happening within half an hour, we ditch it. … We’re very impatient, but I think that’s a good way. The pressure’s always on. It has to be good very soon, very quickly. If it’s not, out the window.
Do you have it live, or do you have a lot of overdubs and edits?
No, it usually has to work with the three musicians playing it and me singing, and that’s usually good enough.
Source: Jools Holland interview (thanks Songwriting Zen)
Porcupine Tree
June 1st, 2009 § 0
Steven Wilson, founder of progressive rock band Porcupine Tree and musician/producer extraordinaire, comments on using different writing approaches for different projects and channeling depression:
Provide some insight into your creative process.
I don’t really have one to be honest with you. People ask me “Do you write songs on piano or guitar? Do you start with lyrics or music?” The answer is all of the above. I have no rules. There’s a great deal of diversity in my different projects. … there’s a completely different artistic process going on behind each. Bass Communion is all about the manipulation of recordings of acoustic instruments in the computer. Porcupine Tree is closer to a traditional songwriting approach of sitting down at a piano or guitar with some lyrical themes to work with.
So, there’s no great pattern, except for the fact that in order to write music, I have to be depressed. I was never really aware of this until the last couple of years. I usually create music when I’m in a negative state of mind. It’s quite a painful process. I love recording, touring and promoting the records, but the art of writing music is very much a cathartic and painful one for me. People ask me to reconcile my personality, which is not melancholic or dark, with the music that very much represents those things. My explanation is that the music is where that side of me goes. The music is an exorcism of those elements within.
Source: Innerviews
Green Day
May 23rd, 2009 § 0
Billy Joe Armstrong, vocalist and guitarist of pop-punk band Green Day, comments on bringing ideas to the band and writing electric guitar parts on an acoustic:
You write all the songs together in the band. Do you start songs on your own and bring them in?
Yeah, sometimes. I’ll come up with the song with the chord changes and the lyrics, and then I bring them into practice, and then we sort of restructure them together. I like to come in with a tune. I’ll just play guitar and sing it for them, and then we start to learn it. And as soon as we start to learn it, we can make changes and come up with a different structure. Move the chorus around, make the verse a little longer. That kind of thing. I definitely like to think of it as a collaboration between the three of us.
Do you always change the songs?
Well, we have a lot of songs. There have been some that I have brought in and nothing really needs to be done. Sometimes I’ll suggest a part that needs to be worked with, and we’ll try some different things. And then they’ll write their bass-lines and drum parts around it.
…
These days do you write on electric guitar?
No, on acoustic. I have a Silverine Harmony. But it sounds good. I just have it around the house, so I’ve written most of the songs on it.
Do those songs then shift a lot when you bring them to the band, and play them on electric?
No, because I always have it in the back of my head about the dynamics of electric guitar and drums and bass. Between me and [bassist] Mike and [drummer] Tre, I always have that dynamic in my head - what am I going to bring to the table that they’re going to be able to play, and which will have our certain energy. I always keep our energy and our music in mind, sort of subconsciously. But I think that’s the beauty of this. That not only can I play these songs with a band at full volume, but also that I can play them on a cheap, acoustic guitar. And it can have the same kind of impact.
Source: Blue Railroad magazine
Brian Eno
May 17th, 2009 § 0
Brian Eno, man of many hats and the father of ambient music, comments on his use of “Oblique Strategies” cards to spur inspiration:
INTERVIEWER: I was in a studio once, and we found these cards … this was the most useful thing I’ve ever seen in the studio, and it’s called “Oblique Strategies” … the idea is that when you came to a dead end, you weren’t quite sure what the next thing you should do, you would open the box and pick out one of the cards and follow the strategy. And this is your invention, this whole thing.
So I’m just going to pick out the first card at random [from a deck of such cards] and see what it says:
“Listen to the quiet voice.”
… So is that one of your strategies, to sort of take things away?
ENO: Yeah, exactly. … I noticed when I first started working in studios, when you’re very in the middle of something, you forget the most obvious things. You come out of the studio and you think, “Why didn’t we remember to do this or that?” So these really are just ways of throwing you out of the frame, of breaking the context a little bit, so you’re not a band in a studio focused on one song, but you’re people who are alive and in the world and aware of a lot of other things as well. So it’s a way of breaking the tendency to get the screwdriver out. …
Did you use the cards when making your own record?
I don’t use them so much now because I’ve internalized them, so they’re sort of in my head all the time, really.
Source: Later with Jools Holland (thanks Songwriting Zen)
Björk
May 11th, 2009 § 0
Avant-garde singer-songwriter Björk comments on using her memory as an editor and gathering lyrical thoughts in diaries:
Take us behind the songwriting process: what comes first?
The melody, always. It’s all about singing the melodies live in my head. They go in circles. I guess I’m quite conservative and romantic about the power of melodies. I try not to record them on my Dictaphone when I first hear them. If I forget all about it and it pops up later on, then I know it’s good enough. I let my subconscious do the editing for me.
When do you start writing lyrics?
Well, my writing really differs. Sometimes a song is about a particular emotion, so I sit down and gather all my thoughts. Sometimes I have to write lots of thoughts down in a diary and edit them until I have the right words. Sometimes the words will come in one go. …
Do you ever get writer’s block?
Well, I do have a poet friend called Sjón who helps me sometimes. Usually I have one song that is the manifesto for the album—on Post it was Isobel, on Volta it’s Wanderlust. When I write these songs I usually fill two or three diaries with words. Sjón will then help me narrow it down to two verses and a chorus. In my head I know what these songs are about and I can write books of words on them, but I can’t put them into a song, so Sjón helps me.
Source: Q Magazine
Mozart
May 6th, 2009 § 0
Wikipedia describes Mozart’s use of sketches and the keyboard in his compositional process:
Mozart often wrote down sketches, ranging in size from small snippets to extensive drafts, for his compositions. … Ulrich Konrad, an expert on the sketches describes a well-worked-out system of sketching that Mozart used, based on examination of the surviving documents. Typically the most “primitive” sketches are in casual handwriting, and give just snippets of music. More advanced sketches cover the most salient musical lines (the melody line, and often the bass), leaving other lines to be filled in later. The so-called “draft score” was one in an advanced enough state for Mozart to consider it complete… However, the draft score did not include all of the notes: it remained to flesh out the internal voices, filling out the harmony. These were added to create the completed score, which appeared in a highly legible hand.
…
Mozart evidently needed a keyboard to work out his musical thoughts. … [He] had a prodigious ability to “compose on the spot”; that is, to improvise at the keyboard. This ability was apparent even in his childhood, as the Benedictine priest Placidus Scharl recalled: “Even in the sixth year of his age he would play the most difficult pieces for the pianoforte, of his own invention. He skimmed the octave which his short little fingers could not span, at fascinating speed and with wonderful accuracy. One had only to give him the first subject which came to mind for a fugue or an invention: he would develop it with strange variations and constantly changing passages as long as one wished; he would improvise fugally on a subject for hours, and this fantasia-playing was his greatest passion.”
Source: Wikipedia
Madonna
May 5th, 2009 § 0
Pop star Madonna comments on her back and forth with Prince while writing “Love Song”:
You and Prince wrote “Love Song” together, which is a wonderful song. Did you and he work together or did he give you a track?
No he didn’t give me a track. We sat down and just started fooling around. We had a lot of fun.
What happened is that he played drums and I played the synthesizer and we came up with the original melody line; I just, off the top of my head, started singing lyrics into the microphone. And then he overdubbed some guitar stuff and made a loop of it and sent it to me, and then I just started adding sections to it and singing parts of it. And then I sent it back to him, and he’d sing a part of it and add another instrument and send it back to me … it was like this sentence that turned into a paragraph that turned into a little miniseries.
Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo
The Beatles
May 5th, 2009 § 0
This page has a long list of Beatles songwriting quotes, mostly from John Lennon. Here are a few of my favorites:
I like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, [Paul McCartney and I] wrote that together and it’s a beautiful melody. We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher’s house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, ‘Oh you-u-u / got that something…’ And Paul hits this chord, and I turn to him and say, ‘That’s it!’ I said, ‘Do that again!’ In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that - both playing into each other’s noses.
…
Paul had a lot of training, could play a lot of instruments. He’d say, “Well, why don’t you change that there? You’ve done that note 50 times in the song.” You know, I’ll grab a note and ram it home. Then again, I’d be the one to figure out where to go with a song, a story that Paul would start. In a lot of the songs, my stuff is the “middle eight,” the bridge.
…
‘Rain’. That’s me again, with the first backwards tape on record anywhere. I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana… and, as I usually do, I listened to what I’d recorded that day. Somehow it got on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on. I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know… listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing backwards with the guitars going backwards. (sings) ‘Sharethsmnowthsmeanss!’ That one was the gift of God, of Ja actually, the god of marijuana, right? So Ja gave me that one.
…
I was lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play Beethoven’s - Moonlight Sonata, on the piano. Suddenly I said, ‘can you play those chords backwards’. She did, and I wrote ‘ Because ‘, around them. The lyrics are clear, no bullshit, no imagery, no obscure references.
Source: John Lennon: In My Life
Nick Lowe
May 4th, 2009 § 0
Nick Lowe, rock musician and producer, comments on aping the style of his heroes as a young songwriter:
… I hadn’t been writing songs very long and, like everybody else who starts out doing anything creative, you start off plundering your heroes’ style and catalogue. When you’ve exhausted that, you move on to somebody else and do the same thing with them, and the day comes when you’re rewriting your latest hero’s works, and you put in a little bit of the first guy’s thing that you ripped off, a middle eight, or a bridge, and as it goes on you include more and more of these bits and pieces that you’ve ripped off, until, suddenly, you haven’t ripped them off at all. They’ve actually become your style. And then all you need is a good idea. And then you really are in business. I remember having this idea—“What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding”—and almost falling over in astonishment that I hadn’t heard this before, that it really was an original notion.
Source: Vanity Fair
Paul Simon
May 4th, 2009 § 0
Paul Simon, folk singer-songwriter and partner of Art Garfunkel in Simon and Garfunkel, comments on how he likes to start a song:
“You Can Call Me Al” seems like the perfect example of that combination of the colloquial with enriched language. The chorus is extremely conversational, set against enriched lines like “angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity…”
Right. The song starts out very ordinary, almost like a joke. Like the structure of a joke cliche: “There’s a rabbi, a minister and a priest”; “Two Jews walk into a bar”; “A man walks down the street.” That’s what I was doing there.
Because how you begin a song is one of the hardest things. The first line of a song is very hard. I always have this image in my mind of a road that goes like this [motions with hands to signify a road that gets wider as it opens out] so that the implication is that the directions are pointing outward. It’s like a baseball diamond; there’s more and more space out here. As opposed to like this. [Motions an inverted road getting thinner.] Because if it’s like this, at this point in the song, you’re out of options.
So you want to have that first line that has a lot of options, to get you going. And the other things that I try to remember, especially if a song is long, you have plenty of time. You don’t have to kill them, you don’t have to grab them by the throat with the first line.
In fact, you have to wait for the audience–they’re going to sit down, get settled in their seat … their concentration is not even there. You have to be a good host to people’s attention span. They’re not going to come in there and work real hard right away. Too many things are coming: the music is coming, the rhythm is coming, all kinds of information that the brain is sorting out.
So give them easy words and easy thoughts, and let it move along, and let the mind get into the groove of it. Especially if it’s a rhythm tune. And at a certain point, when the brain is loping along easily, then you come up with the first kind of thought or image that’s different. Because it’s entertaining at that point. Otherwise people haven’t settled in yet.
Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo
Leonard Cohen
May 4th, 2009 § 0
Leonard Cohen, singer-songwriter and poet, comments on hard work and keeping notebooks of ideas:
Do you mean that you’re trying to reach something that is outside your immediate realm of thought?
My immediate realm of thought is bureaucratic and like a traffic jam. My ordinary state of mind is very much like the waiting room at the DMV. Or, as I put it in a quatrain, “The voices in my head, they don’t care what I do, they just want to argue the matter through and through.”
So to penetrate this chattering and this meaningless debate that is occupying most of my attention, I have to come up with something that really speaks to my deepest interest. Otherwise I nod off in some way or another. So to find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat.
But why shouldn’t my work be hard? Almost everybody’s work is hard. One is distracted by this notion that there is such a thing as inspiration, that it comes fast and easy. And some people are graced by that style. I’m not. So I have to work as hard as any stiff, to come up with the payload. …
What does that work consist of?
Just versions. I will drag you upstairs after the vacuuming stops and I will show you version after version after version of some of the tunes on this new album.
You do have whole notebooks of songs?
Whole notebooks. I’m very happy to be able to speak this way to fellow craftsmen. Some people may find it encouraging to see how slow and dismal and painstaking is the process.
For instance, a song like “Closing Time” began as a song in 3/4 time with a really strong, nostalgic, melancholy country feel. Entirely different words. … And I recorded the song and I sang it. And I choked over it. Even though another singer could have done it perfectly well. It’s a perfectly reasonable song. And a good one, I might say. A respectable song. But I choked over it. There wasn’t anything that really addressed my attention. The finishing of it was agreeable because it’s always an agreeable feeling. But when I tried to sing it I realized it came from my boredom and not from my attention. It came from my desire to finish the song and not from the urgency to locate a construction that would engross me.
So I went to work again. Then I filled another notebook from beginning to end with the lyric, or the attempts at the lyric, which eventually made it onto the album. So most of [my songs] have a dismal history, like the one I’ve just accounted.
Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo