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.
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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
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
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.
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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.
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‘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.
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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