This Month:Simeon Flick, Lindsay White, Jimmie Lunsford, Happy Ron, Justin James
and Jefferson Jay.. All Exceptional songwriters/performers:
Simeon Flick's Take on "How to Write A Song and Make It Your Own Style
Writing songs is the most intriguing, creatively fulfilling, and therapeutic thing I can imagine doing, ever. It combines my passions--music, the English language, and singing--into one cohesive art form. And it has saved me a fortune in counseling.
A song is defined in the intellectual property laws set forth by the Library of Congress as the combination of three essential elements: the music (as in the organized series of chord changes), the lyrics, and the vocal melody. I started trying to make music via the guitar when I was fourteen, and began writing my own music and lyrics shortly thereafter. And they were terrible, although complex in a way that was seemingly anomalous for someone that age.
During high school I played guitar in a band with my brother on bass, and I ended up writing all the lyrics and most of the music for the originals we did, which were basically bad Rush imitations. Songs about things a suburban middle class white boy didn't (and wasn't supposed to) understand, like being a drug-carrying fugitive, the five stages of sleep, etc. In retrospect, I'm grateful for how little these songs were played out live. Nevertheless, I realized early on that I had a potent imagination, an ambitious vocabulary, a penchant for musical complexity, and a sensitive, empathetic nature that allowed me to write convincingly from the vantage point of myriad life perspectives.
After high school I focused mainly on being a guitar player and the songwriter went way underground, penning his lugubriously folksy songs in private (I had some wild preconceptions about the kind of material a singer/songwriter was supposed to compose). I took a poetry class during my senior year in college, which galvanized the lyricist in me. From that point on I became obsessed with language and always made sure I had a dictionary on hand when I was writing. I've penned hundreds of handwritten letters (and eventually emails) to friends and family with the beneficial subtext of honing my writing chops while keeping in touch. Since being in San Diego I've done features, cover stories and CD reviews for the San Diego Troubadour, freelanced band bios and press, and published my own blog on Myspace as I have continued to refine my writing on behalf of all its avenues of expression.
After college I joined another band with the intent of finally seeing what kind of singing voice I had. That particular band was the crucible in which I cast aside all the lazy, well-weathered lyric clichés with which my mediocrity was making do, and found my own voice in every implication. It was also one of the only collaborative songwriting situations I've ever been a part of, as songwriting has always been a highly private and personal endeavor for me. What can I say--I'm a loner.
After that, and with the exception of one or two band projects, I basically set out on my own. I needed to bring my private songs into the public light.
In the early days of being a solo artist, when my singing was still a source of shame, I pushed my well-developed musicality and imaginative lyrical erudition to the forefront while my voice developed behind the scenes. I knew I would need to rely on my strengths to get me over until the deficiencies could be refined.
I concocted and adhered to the Bob Dylan principle, wherein how one sang could be thankfully overshadowed by the lyrics one was singing (meanwhile, I took voice lessons). Because of what I perceived as a limitation I decided early on that my songs would always have a purpose or point, or have an interesting twist, or have at least one of the elements attempt to be innovative, or D) all of the above where possible, to one degree or another.
My voice eventually caught up and took the pressure off the music and lyrics, which changed my writing process in that now my vocals were a strength I could genuinely bank on. You begin to feel the new impetus to write simpler stuff with a classic feel that showcases your vocal refinement and gives everything else a bit of a much-needed rest. Still, the drive to say something pertinent in my music and say it differently has stayed with me.
Like even the Beatles had to do, I eventually got my 100 bad songs out of the way. Actually, it was more like a few dozen tunes that I reworked multiple times; eventually I moved on from the majority of them. From this process I came up with the "No Song Left Behind" principle, this idea that a song could (and should) be given as much time and energy as needed to become the epitome--or the ideal form--of what it's supposed to be, even if it never saw the light of day live or on celluloid. I made a point to try and finish every song I started, even if it was terrible, just to get practice with revision and refinement. I also got comfortable with the idea of recycling riffs and lyrics.
I've penned ditties in as little time as three one-hour sessions. And I've written songs that took literally ten years to idealize and finish (I can't seem to resist revisiting and revising them). There's a couple that were revitalized by merely tweaking the title slightly, or changing only a word or two. Sometimes a composition is just waiting for you to have a necessary epiphany or life experience that will give you the right perspective to finish it the way it requires.
I think it's a shame that artists have to make do with increasingly less songwriting time in their hectic careers, and that many are ultimately removed from a normal life--which is the wellspring of good songwriting--by either the sheer amount of non-creative work they have to do, or the star-making machinery. I believe it's hard for the average Joe to relate to a famous artist because of how removed a rock star's reality is from most music fans... then again, a rock star is supposedly living the "dream" from the fans' points of view... it's a paradoxical conundrum.
I have allowed myself to be an appreciator of all kinds of music, and always paid attention to what music got me the most excited about living and about my own creativity. Eventually I figured out what my songwriting voice has (and doesn't have) in common with my influences, and I learned the general rules of songwriting. Once that happened I was able to start breaking the rules and attempt to be innovative.
In the beginning I would just write songs and I'd be stuck with whatever came out. I didn't really have much of an idea of what direction I wanted to go in terms of genre (I wanted to go in every direction, actually!), so I'd end up with stuff that was challenging but ultimately not up my stylistic alley, and didn't necessarily showcase my strengths or the optimal range and timbre of my voice, or my most accessible lyrics. I definitely didn't have the audience in mind, either.
In time I narrowed it down and started shaping the process towards what best suited me as an artist, compromising it with the kind of material I specifically wanted to do. I also began to notice that my tastes had fallen out of contemporary cultural accord; because of this I had to assume that they would probably never dovetail again, and I would have to try and be as timeless as possible in my songwriting and sound. At least that way my songs might stand a chance at a longer shelf life if they were ever embraced on a wider scale.
I've noticed that my voice feels very natural over R & B and soul songs (kind of like a cross between Sting and Stevie Wonder), and I've always liked alternative rock, so combining the two was a good fit for me. I discovered I had a big black woman inside of me that was dying to get out and wail like the girl who sang on the Stones' Gimme Shelter! I was also into nineties artists like Fugazi, Quicksand and Jeff Buckley, so I think the two sets of influences combined in a strange way. I ended up coining the term Alternative R & B to describe my music, kind of similar to how The Who called their sound Maximum R & B.
I've written songs in just about every way imaginable, but for the most part I tend to have more musical ideas than lyrical concepts so I usually start with a piece of music. Due to my classical guitar experience, I often write bass lines and secondary melodies into my progressions, and I've always favored idiosyncratic upper harmony chords and inversions. If you group these right you get a progression that actually hints at a melody you can sing. From that melody you start to hear phonetic sounds, then vowels and consonants rhythmically suggest themselves and eventually form words. Your subconscious can come in really handy here; I've found this to be a great method for bringing some really intriguing ideas and archetypes up to the surface, because letting the words form themselves is a very subliminal way of working that can dig deeply past rational thought into the collective unconscious.
In my striving to incorporate pop song structures into my songs I learned that the uniting theme of the song expressed in the chorus translates the grist of the verses (which tend to be more personal) into something more universal, a sweeping overall idea or theory or idealistic hypothesis anyone can relate to (that's why they call it the chorus--it literally means group singing). I began calling this the Petty principle, based on Tom Petty's tendency for hooky verses that often culminate in massive sing-along choruses (think Free Fallin').
A few years ago, and perhaps because of philosophies like the Petty principle, I had an epiphany; I noticed that all my grueling work spent writing verses tended to allude to an overall concept that usually became the song's title and ended up guiding any unfinished verses I had. I got wise by realizing that if I started with an all-encompassing concept, everything else would follow suit and I wouldn't have to struggle to write a song from just a single line or group of lines anymore.
Right around this time, either by coincidence or design, I started coming up short-handed on new music and yet I began having these grandiose ideas for songs that completely reversed my previous "music first" paradigm. Now the sweeping song title concepts I was coming up with were suggesting verse lines and rhythms and melodies, and even music. I started feeling like the idea man in me had begun to outshine and outpace the guitarist (I didn't mind, though, if it meant maintaining creative momentum).
The songs started writing themselves; once I had my central idea in place the process became virtually academic. This took a lot of the guesswork and struggle out of my paradigm, and eventually I got better at making the verses universal too. If you're lucky, you end up with something timeless.
There's essentially two modes in which songwriters seem to operate: you're either experiencing life--out gigging, recording, hustling or otherwise engaging the world--or you're privately processing those experiences into songs. Sometimes you burn out creatively and the ideas just aren't there... other times you get on a roll and it's easy.
I've had watersheds where I'm working on six or seven new songs at once. These batches are usually comprised of a few brand-new ideas mixed in with songs I started as far back as a few years prior but didn't finish, or salvaged the music or lyrics from and started over. Eventually these songs will be completed and maybe half of them will be tried out live. Of that group, probably a quarter of them will have any kind of success for me, whether they're just creatively fulfilling, or whether they can actually fill an aesthetic void in the set and increase my entertainment value to the audiences, or both. Maybe ten per cent or less of those will finally make it to an album...
...which is another creative challenge for songwriters; it can be difficult to come up with a dozen songs that work well as a single unit. The album is the macro version of a song; each tune is a verse alluding to the rubric of an overall guiding theme represented by the album title. This puts the individual songs under additional scrutiny, because you'll have to learn to recognize when to pull one out that fits thematically but is substandard, or when to keep a good one in the lineup--despite thematic incongruousness--because it's gotten good feedback in the live milieu and will help sell the album. This process becomes even more difficult when you've got a surplus of stockpiled material just begging to be recorded (I presently have three different sets of material thematically grouped and ready to go).
Then you have to order the tracks in an optimal way, kind of how you would organize a well paced set list for a good live show. At least this is the way people used to think about albums... only in the vinyl era you had to come up with TWO programs, one for each side. I guess that's the paradoxical downside of the iPod era; we can download our favorite song from an album, but the single three-minute pop song sadly seems to have become the new limit of our attention span for one artist's music.
Once you put out a couple albums, you get the hang of grouping songs together in the most effective way, and you start to recognize archetypes in terms of which kinds of material work best for each part of the album. There's the lead off track, the opening salvo, which is almost always upbeat and grabs the listener's attention, setting the tone for the rest of the record. And then there's the last song, something classic that puts a bow on things and yet leaves 'em wanting more. These two spots are usually the easiest to fill; their functions are the most crucial and their criteria are specific and demanding. The farther away from these two poles you go, in towards the middle of the album where the "deep cuts" reside, the harder song selection and sequencing seems to become.
The end goal in all of this, of course, is to make the songs an enjoyable journey for whoever's listening.
Lindsay White's :
approach to writing a song.
I never just sit down with the intention of writing a song. Usually, an idea for a song starts brewing in my head when I feel strongly about something. Inspiration comes to me through basic personal experiences or current events, and also when I notice some object in the world that personifies my life at the moment: an old house, a tiny little bug crawling in my yard-anything at all.
Once I have an idea in my head of what I would like to express (consciously or subconsciously), a lyrical phrase starts rolling around my brain. I will try it out loud to different melodies in places I am alone, like the shower. Sometimes ideas go right down the drain with the soap, but other times they stick in my brain until I finally decide to build on them. This is when I start to decide the "character" my song will take. Based on the character, I'll start to structure more words around the original lyric. This either becomes the chorus or the first verse. At this point, mind you, I'm still kicking the song around in my head. I typically don't even pick up my guitar until a couple of days later. It's actually very rare that I write out any lyrics on paper until the song is already finished.
I'll give you an example of a song I wrote about seven years ago called "Strange Weather." I was just starting to get into a relationship that I wasn't sure would work. I was both happy and hesitant when it came to this guy. I was driving the long 4-hour journey from my college in Los Angeles to my hometown near Fresno. It was raining like CRAZY. I was so scared that I turned my radio all the way down just to concentrate on the road. This left just the noise of my windshield wipers going full speed. Before I knew it, a little lyric popped out of my mouth to the rhythm of the wipers: "I think it stopped raining, but I got myself I plan. Gonna keep the windshield wipers wiping, honey, just in case it rains again." Over and over, I hummed that lyric in time. Little by little, I added more and more lyrics, all the while keep with the theme of being timid about my relationship, and by the time I arrived at my parents' house, all I needed to do was put it to music. All these years later, I'm still writing songs as a part of my daily life.
"Strange Weather" Lyrics:
- I think it stopped raining, but I got myself a plan. Gonna keep the windshield wipers wiping, honey, just in case it rains again. The sky is clear now but I'm holding my umbrella...can't be too careful in this strange weather.
CHORUS: Strange Weather (3x)
- Used to be so foggy, now it's getting kind of steamy. I can almost see you, baby can you see me? Used to be so hazy, now it's getting so much better. Can't be too careful in this strange weather.
Repeat Chorus
- The sun is shining, should I take off my coat? I'm afraid if I do, I'll find out it was all a joke. Ooh, it's getting hot in here, but I won't take off my sweater. Can't be too careful in this strange weather.
Repeat Chorus
Outro: Tell me you love me again, oh that you need me again, that'll you'll never hurt me again, that you'll never leave me again (2x) I'll be under my umbrella, I'll be wearing my sweater, things are getting better, strange strange strange weather, strange strange strange weather...
Jimmie Lunsford's :
approach to writing a song.
Songwriting isn't necessarily simple. Yet songwriting is, simply, communication, expression, and like everyday life, communication and expression are for myriad reasons easier on some days than others. Even then, speaking as a songwriter, I may think I'm communicating quite well yet any given listener may think, "What?" A perspective which illustrates both the beauty and the paradox of songwriting.
I'll re-write a song over and over again to get it exactly the way I want, exactly where I am happy with it, and it still may miss the mark for a listener. But it's my baby. At whatever point I'm happy with it, that should be good enough, because just enunciating what's in my heart or my head is the catharsis I as a songwriter need; self-expression via songwriting is on some level a means of communication with myself, and songwriting, in its purest form, isn't about the listener, but the author. However, if listeners aren't receiving the message, if I'm not communicating with them and I mean to, then at some point I'll need to adjust my writing style or my perspective to connect with them. No different than a misunderstood comment in a conversation.
Paradoxically though, I don't have to adjust my writing or my perspective, and that's the beauty of songwriting. If nobody understands what I've written but I'm happy with it, mission accomplished. I'm saying exactly what I want to say in exactly the way I want to say it. Likewise, if I decide I'll throw it out there and someone, anyone, understands what I'm saying, mission still accomplished.
In the end, songwriting is a medium for expression, communication, and whether or not anyone else is listening or understanding, I'll be listening and I'll get it, I'll sing it and hear it and the clarity in it will for me be profound, and I'll be the better for it. Mission accomplished.
Happy Ron's :
sent this as his approach to writing a song
FROM THE NEXT HAPPYTIMES NEWSLETTER
www.myspace.com/happyron
THE SONGWRITING SECRETS OF THE BEATLES BY DOMINIC PEDLER
Four VERY Happy Faces (Out Of Four Possible)
This is the best book ever written on The Beatles - I've read dozens of them over thirty years and this is the best by far. It's an almost 800 page book that could be described as "Music Theory and The Beatles" as it doesn't go into lyric writing. Each chapter describes an aspect of music and then shows how The Beatles used it in their songs (as opposed to the song by song approach more commonly used, including in Alan W. Pollack's wonderful Notes On series, available for free on the internet.).
The first chapter is on the V chord. You would think that their wouldn't be much new to say about the V to I chord resolutions that are the backbone of most songs, you'd be wrong, he goes on for 20 pages about them. What is most exciting is how I can read this book and instantly get what he is teaching (without even having to listen to the CDs again) because of the vast databank of Beatles songs burned into my memory - to finally merge that databank with real music knowledge is just amazing.
I have a feeling I'll be studying this book for as long as I'm into music and would recommend it anyone regardless of musical skill level.
The biggest problem with the book is availability, it's out of print and hard to find even online. The author tells me he is (as of late 2008) trying to get it reprinted. I found some used copies at
www.amazon.co.uk and you can read excerpts here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=fts1uK4ceJ8C&dq=Songwriting+Secrets+of+the+Beatles&pg=PP1&ots=LQoOmuKQ0T&sig=O6FHA6AJ6Jqh66siudtfQDk5Mhg&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3DSongwriting%2BSecrets%2Bof%2Bthe%2BBeatles&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title#PPP1,M1
Justin James's :
approach to writing a song.
Greetings**
I often get asked in interviews "what inspires me" ? I hate that question...
Inspiration is over rated when it comes to songwriting. Inspiration is there no doubt, but for me it doesn't come from love or a sunset or some other cheesy thing people will say. It comes from hearing a cool chord progression or waking up w/ a melody in your head or collaborating w/ another talented songwriter. That's how I get inspired... I hear something and I run w/ it. To be a successful writer you need to be writing songs all the time. For example if you never go to the gym your body doesn't want to work out but if you start going all the time your body needs it. It is the same w/ the mind - If your always trying to be creative you will find that it is easier and easier. Your mind will start creating better melodies and songs will flow.
Just remember the average listener does not need something to tricky and crazy... It took me a while to realize this... don't try and impress the other musicians- they don't buy your music- write simple hooks and focus on melodies. That's what will create success**
In a nutshell being a successful songwriter is about hard work but at the end of the day its hella better then working 9-5***
aloha JJ
Jefferson Jay's :
approach to writing a song.
I believe there is no wrong way to write a song. You can build on a chord progression, some lyrics, a hook, a riff, or even a title. A song is anything you call a song. If you record TV static, name it TV Static and out it at number 3 on your new CD, nobody would question that you have a song called TV Static. Everything beyond that is really a matter of taste.
There are certain ingredients that comprise most songs; rhythm, melody, and lyrics. The problem many beginning songwriters have is finishing songs. Making a decision on how your song goes and then sticking to it is the way to get songs done. Some people just can't bring themselves to decide. You can always revise it later. It is your song, but deciding how it goes for starters is a crucial step that befuddles many new songwriters.
Another common pitfall for new songwriters is the tendency to be overly self-critical, especially during the creative process. I tell my songwriting students (I have taught the subject at San Diego State University and other places) that doing that is unfair to the song and the songwriter. Songwriters write songs, I say. Critics decide if they are good are not. We are too close emotionally to our songs to judge them. We must resist these urges. Songwriting is personal. There are no wrong answers, just opportunities and venues to creatively explore. Have fun!
Jefferson Jay
Sweet Information Records
www.jeffersonjay.com
(619) ACE-ROCK
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