The Songwriting Process

Singer Michael Stipe and bassist Mike Mills comment on R.E.M.’s songwriting process:

Do you always write songs with the four of you together?

MILLS: We put them together that way. Everybody sits at home and diddles around. Sometimes you’ll come up with little ideas and sometimes you’ll come up with a huge part of a song. And then you’ll take that into everyone else and piece it together until you get a song. Other times, things just come out of, literally, just the four of us sitting around and making noise. All of a sudden it will reemerge into a song. It’s really strange.

And do the lyrics come during this time of it?

STIPE: Yeah. There’s no real set way that it happens. Sometimes I have an idea for a melody or I’ve got this stuff written and I’m trying to find out what to do with it.

You write lyrics on your own and bring them to the band?

STIPE: Yeah, or I’m inspired by a song to write something. There’s no real method.

Do you listen to the music to suggest the words?

STIPE: Yeah, a lot. A lot of times the words can really change the music. We would have a song like “Shiny Happy People” that was originally like a stomp rock kind of song.

MILLS: When I first wrote it, it was a quiet little acoustic ditty. That’s the weirdest thing about it.

You wrote it on guitar?

MILLS: On acoustic guitar. It was finger-picked, quiet, four little chords. The chords that comprise the chorus now. It sounds nothing like the song. And that’s the way things go. When you start to get input from everyone, you start to use more instruments that you have at your disposal, and the songs evolve. They turn into final songs. Sometimes they still remain little acoustic numbers, but sometimes they become “Shiny Happy People.” There’s no way to tell.

Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo

Heidi Tveitan, head of darkly-atmospheric Star of Ash, comments on getting songs to work in their most basic form:

… all songs [on the album The Thread] were written on piano, and when I felt that it worked there, I took it further in the studio. It was important to me having the compositions work in their basic forms before I started layering, as it is so easy to get lost in the arrangements during the writing process. This way I was also more confident and had a clear vision on the songs’ expression before I brought in additional musicians. I also feel that this form of writing has allowed the material to be very melody-driven, and that is what Star of Ash is a lot about.

Source: ReGen Magazine