The Songwriting Process

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)

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