The Songwriting Process

Trent Reznor, the man behind industrial rock/metal outfit Nine Inch Nails, comments on writing inside versus outside the studio and coming up with rules to get the process moving:

“By the time I did [albums] Downward Spiral and The Fragile I had a studio to work in, so I would write in that environment,” he explains. “What I found was that songwriting and the arranging and production and the sound design process became the same thing. A song would start with a drum loop or a visual and eventually a song would emerge out of it and that was the song. This time I got back to starting with lyrics and words and really separating the process into songwriting and arranging and production. And when I came out here I just set up a piano, drum machine and computer to record vocals into.”

… This time [for album With Teeth] he forced himself to write two songs every 10 days, and he recorded them even more quickly. 

“If I come up with rules or limitations it focuses me in a direction,” he explains. “And those rules can change if you realize it’s a dumb idea. You start to mutate it to see what fits best. In this case one of the early concepts was I wanted it to sound played. Not like a garage band, necessarily, but with computers it’s easy to fix things and make everything perfect, and sometimes you can lose an element of humanity and imperfection. And the message emotionally was to be a bit frail and unsure of yourself, so we treated things as performances.” 

Source: MTVNews.com

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)

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

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, 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)

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, 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

David Gilmour, guitarist and singer of progressive rock band Pink Floyd and, later, solo musician, comments on his process of recording and collecting ideas:

Talking about the songwriting process, are you more 9 -5 these days or do you get inspiration at strange times?

I really am an inspiration person; I just wait to let inspiration strike. Obviously I have written a lot of songs with Pink Floyd and with other people and on my own, where I have set down to try and write a song and sometimes that works quite well. Mostly, I have to say, it is from flashes of inspiration, which is why having a little minidisc recorder is fantastic. It means that in the last ten years, since there have been things of this type available and small enough to carry everywhere and convenient enough to switch on, my output of stuff has grown massively because I don’t forget them.

Before, I’m sure I had as many moments but I just forgot them all! So, in the last twelve years since I actually made the last album I have gathered a 150 pieces of music on minidisc. So, they were the start points of the writing on this album.

Quite a few songs on the album came from those start points. Any other method I’ve used, I used to try and write things down, write the key it was in, the chord I was doing, the rhythm and tempo I was playing. You go back to that with a guitar and you read these notes and it makes no sense at all.

Myself and [producer] Phil Manzanera spent a long time sorting through the 150 pieces of music that 5 had, whittling them down and chucking other ones away. As soon as you get into that process that also fires you up and starts making those same creative processes work.

Source: Pulse & Spirit

Tom Petty comments on how he prefers to write music and lyrics:

Do you work on songs with your guitar, and work on music and words at the same time?

I try to, yeah. I work mostly with the guitar or piano. I’ve found, especially with this last album, that I really prefer getting the melody and music at the same time as hopefully a chunk of the words. I think this is better–mo’ better–for me than trying to marry the two together at different times. I think I was always happiest with the stuff that I wrote that came alive all in one try. But, you know, honestly, you do anything you can to make it work.

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

Bob Dylan rambles about changing keys while writing:

When you sit down to write a song, do you pick a key first that will fit the song? Or do you change keys while writing?

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe in the middle of the thing.

There are ways you can get out of whatever you’ve gotten into. You want to get out of it. It’s bad enough getting into it. But the thing to do as soon as you get into it is realize you must get out of it. And unless you get out of it quickly and effortlessly, there’s no use staying in it. It will just drag you down. You could be spending years writing the same song, telling the same story, doing the same thing.

So once you involve yourself in it, once you accidentally have slipped into it, the thing is to get out. So your primary impulse is only going to take you so far.

But then you might thing, well, you know, is this one of these things when it’s all just going to come? And then all of a sudden you start thinking. And when my mind starts thinking, What’s happening now? Oh, there’s a story here, and my mind starts to get into it, that’s trouble right away. That’s usually big trouble. And as far as never seeing this thing again.

There’s a bunch of ways you can get out of that. You can make yourself get out of it by changing key. That’s one way. Just take the whole thing and change key, keeping the same melody. And see if that brings you any place. More times than not, it will take you down the road. You don’t want to be on a collision course. But that will take you down the road. Somewhere.

And then if that fails, and that will run out, too, then you can always go back to where you were to start. It won’t work twice, it only works once. Then you go back to where you started. Yeah, because anything you do in A, it’s going to be a different song in G. While you’re writing it, anyway. There’s too many wide passing notes in G [on the guitar] not to influence your writing unless you’re playing barre chords.

Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo