Metallica

May 4th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Wikipedia describes how Metallica’s hit “Enter Sandman” emerged from a single guitar riff:

Metallica’s songwriting method involved lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Jason Newsted submitting tapes of song ideas and concepts to rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, who then used the material in conjunction with their own ideas to write songs in Ulrich’s house in Berkeley, California. “Enter Sandman” evolved from a guitar riff that Hammett wrote. Originally, the riff was just two bars in length, but Ulrich suggested that the first bar should be played three times. The song was quickly finished, but Hetfield did not come up with vocal melodies and lyrics for a long time. The song, in fact, was among the album’s last to have lyrics, and the lyrics featured in the song are not the original; Hetfield felt that “Enter Sandman” sounded “catchy and kind of commercial” and so to contradict the sound, he wrote lyrics about “destroy[ing] the perfect family; a huge horrible secret in a family” that included references to crib death.

…

Lars Ulrich described “Enter Sandman” as a “one-riff song”, in which all of its sections derive from the main riff that Kirk Hammett wrote.

Source: Wikipedia

Leonard Cohen

May 4th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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

David Gilmour (Pink Floyd)

May 4th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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

Opeth

May 1st, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Mikael Åkerfeldt, head of diverse progressive metal band Opeth, comments on his process of demoing songs:

I do have an input into pretty much everything because I demo the songs back home; I have a simple Pro Tools rig set up at my house. So I demo all the songs and I finish all the songs and actually have them sequenced in the same order as I want it to be on the album. So we’re listening to the album before we record it really, if you know what I mean.

I record it with like a drum machine and it sounds good but obviously it’s a drum machine. I’m very interested in drums; as far as I’m concerned drumming in Opeth is one of the most important parts; if the drums are nailed, I can just listen to the drum tracks and I know it’s gonna be a good song if you know what I mean. …

… the way I see it, writing songs and arranging [songs] as I do in my home, the way I do it they are so done by the time we enter the studio, that it’s a pre-production that I’ve been so involved in. I think writing songs and having your finger in every pie when it comes to the songwriting, you become a producer if you know what I mean. But when it comes to how to achieve the sounds that we’re looking for, I don’t know shit! I just basically tell our engineer, “We want good guitar sounds” and he’s like, “OK.” We fool around with a few amps and I tell him that’s good-sounding or sometimes I say, “That doesn’t sound good” and he says, “Well, it will sound good later.” So, I really don’t have much of a say when I’m working with engineers. But in the end, I’m always happy.

Source: UltimateGuitar.com

Tom Petty

May 1st, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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.

Source: Songwriters on Songwriting, Paul Zollo

Dark Tranquillity

May 1st, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Niklas Sundin, guitarist of melodic death metal band Dark Tranquillity, comments on using old material:

Can you describe how the song “Nothing To No One” evolved in the songwriting process?

That was the last song written for the album. Normally we take our time with the songwriting. But just before we enter the studio, we work with the song really hard. I think a lot of the riffs on that song actually had been floating around for a while, some of them were actually a year or so. We had a chance to use them in lots of songs before. The first riff was written during the Character [album] period.

It’s kind of good working the way we do because we always have a backlog of tons and tons of different riffs. You write something that everyone agrees is good, but it might not be possible to finish it at that time. Then a few years later it might be perfect for something that’s around then. With that song, it gave us a chance to get some more of the old material that we had written. I think that melodic middle and ending part, it was a bit new and written by [guitarist] Martin right before we entered the studio. It’s a mix between new and old, I guess!

You mentioned the band has a backlog of material. Do you usually have those ideas recorded as demos?

They’re just MP3 files. It’s all the separate riffs we write, then we’ll email the song parts. We have probably more than 5,000. Some of them are total crap, of course! But it’s always good to have as much material as possible. On occasion, something that’s weird or really strange actually might work out. We tend to really come up with tons and tons of ideas.

Source: UltimateGuitar.com

R.E.M.

May 1st, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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

Star of Ash

May 1st, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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

Bob Dylan

April 30th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

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

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